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Transcript of the DVD Audio Commentary by Chris Carter and Kim Manners for the episode 'Apocrypha'
Transcribed by: CarterPhile & Libby Edited by: X_Follower CHRIS CARTER: I'm Chris Carter, Creator and Executive Producer of The X-Files. KIM MANNERS: Kim Manners, Producer and Director of The X-Files. [Navy Hospital, Pearl Harbor, 1953. A badly burned man in a hospital bed is talking to three young men.] CHRIS CARTER: This is the episode 'Apocrypha', the second of two parts after 'Piper Maru' from the third season. KIM MANNERS: This was my first mythology show, and I was rather nervous about it because it was a big learning experience for me. I'd done a lot of stand-alone episodes, 4, 5, 6, 7, but this was the first time I was picking up a story mid-stream and responsible for not only telling a story correctly, but knowing that it was open-ended, that it was going to go further, and it was a big learning experience for me because I understood the nuances of the mythology for the first time. [The injured man speaks about what happened in the submarine.] CHRIS CARTER: I remember this is where the mythology really began to take advantage of historical events and written history. I think that began to some extent at the end of Season 2, then through Season 3 where ... this is where we started playing with not just the Axis powers but with a sort of more specific and finer pieces of history, including parts of World War II, and with Scully's father's involvement in that, and ultimately with Mulder's father's involvement in World War II. [Flashback to the events in the submarine.] CHRIS CARTER: It's nice to see this black-and-white footage. It's something we hadn't had a real chance to do, to do any kind of real flashback. [Johansen has locked the captain and other sailors in a room.] CHRIS CARTER: I don't think before this we'd really had a chance to shoot black-and-white - I don't know, did you shoot black-and-white for this, Kim, or ...? KIM MANNERS: No, this was Rob Bowman, shot this for the first episode. CHRIS CARTER: That's right. KIM MANNERS: For part one of this two-parter. CHRIS CARTER: But we hadn't had a chance to flash back in time much before this and the use of black-and-white was very effective in telling the story, particularly with the black oil. [An oily film shows in the captain's eyes. He is knocked down by one of the sailors and the oil exits him and moves into a drain in the floor.] CHRIS CARTER: That's a Mat Beck effect which was very difficult because he had to put a digital black oil on a curved surface [...] the eyes and make it seem believable, and I think that was a real challenge for him. I think they shot that a number of times before they actually got it right. And then getting the consistency of this oil right was also difficult and originally we had wanted it to travel in such a fashion that it looked like it had sentience but Mat, and I think everyone else, decided in the end that it was better to just let it run down the drain. [The burned man says the oil caused the radiation burns. He asks the men to make sure the truth gets out.] CHRIS CARTER: Here's another example of how we're taking history and using characters, in this case Mulder's father and the Cigarette-Smoking Man, and placing them in history at certain times and bringing the X-Files mythology forward with these characters. This is 1953 that this man is lying here in bed. [Two of the young men are Bill Mulder and the Cigarette-Smoking Man.] CHRIS CARTER: I remember trying to cast the actor to play young Peter Donat, and this guy coming in and looking exactly like what we thought he would look like as a young man, I think actually even like his pictures, so that was fortunate, but I still wonder if the audience was able to make the leap between a young Mr. Mulder who they'd seen actually not many times, particularly because he had died some episodes previously, if they had actually made the connection, but I think with the Cigarette-Smoking Man and the lighting of the cigarette that they made an immediate connection to who it was they were seeing, you know, about 30 some odd years previously. [Scully goes to the hospital where Skinner has been taken and meets two other agents.] CHRIS CARTER: I remember looking at the location list for this episode and the one that led into it, 'Piper Maru', and thinking how ambitious we had all tried to be with giving this a movie scope and the number of locations, I think, was more than ambitious, it was probably a little foolish to try to do so much but Bob Goodwin, I think, by this point had become a kind of a catcher. We would pitch up our scripts to him and he would catch them and figure out a way to get them done and this was one of those that was hugely, not just ambitious, but costly and difficult to get finished because it took place in so many different places, had so many actors, had such big scope and production value, and I think that not only did Bob, was he up to the test, but I think Kim, because this was his first mythology episode, I think he wanted to give it his all and didn't know what he was getting himself into. (Kim laughs) [Scully meets Skinner as he's wheeled out of surgery. Skinner tells her that he's seen the man who shot him before.] KIM MANNERS: For instance, that was an actual emergency room and we only had so many hours to shoot in there, and as I recall my stomach was turning to try to get the work get done because they said if anybody came in, it was actually a gunshot victim or something, they'd shut us down. So I was quite nervous shooting that sequence. Fortunately it was a quiet night in Vancouver and we got our sequence shot. CHRIS CARTER: Luckily there aren't many gunshot wounds in Vancouver. [Airport. Mulder and Krycek get into a car. Krycek gives Mulder the key to a locker.] KIM MANNERS: That's right. This location right here is the back lot of the North Shore Studios up in Vancouver. That's actually, I believe, the construction mill there. Lariat rent-a-car. CHRIS CARTER: I think it's actually been the rent-a-car place on a number of different episodes, shot from a couple of different angles. But Lariat has more business on The X-Files than any other rental agency. Mulder and Scully are very loyal to Lariat. [Skinner's hospital room. Scully insists on guards being posted outside Skinner's room.] CHRIS CARTER: I think you can really date the show back through Gillian Anderson's hairstyles. They've been so different over the years and when you look at her now, actually, I think in a way her hairstyle has come back around to kind of what it is here except for a little curl, under-curl there, but length and everything else through Season 8 which is when we're speaking here, it's actually surprising to see how little she's changed. [Mulder and Krycek are in the car, being followed.] KIM MANNERS: This was probably my fifth or sixth episode that I directed. This was in the middle of the third season, I believe. I remember shooting this sequence, it was freezing cold, and we're out on an Insert Car. [...] very difficult to light this scene because we had to drive so many blocks and we didn't want to see that car behind us, but we did want to see it, which was very difficult. [The headlights of the car behind them are turned on, and Mulder and Krycek's car is forced off the road.] CHRIS CARTER: That's often asked of X-Files directors: to see something, but not see it, and this is once again, I think, a television sequence that is, in the course of a show like this, [...] one little sequence, yet it was very, very difficult to pull off physically and logistically, particularly with big stunts like that with the barrels and now you're going to see a huge light effect. Once again, I think it's the producers writing these stories and maybe being a little bit naive about what is actually accomplishable in a television schedule and the people like Kim and Bob Goodwin and the entire Vancouver crew always instead of saying 'no', they always said 'we'll find a way'. [Krycek has been taken out of the car by one of the men when suddenly there's a bright light.] KIM MANNERS: That lighting effect right there took forever to light. We shot this all in one night and we literally never stopped running. As a matter of fact, if I recall, I don't think we ever broke for dinner this night, I think everybody just walked with a meal in their hands in order to get the work done. [Pendrell's lab. He tells her what forensic results have been found but she points out that they will have to find the man before they can get a match. Pendrell suggests running the indicators against all suspects arrested in the area in the last couple of years. That gives Scully an idea.] CHRIS CARTER: This is not the introduction of Agent Pendrell but it's the first time Scully has spent any time with him and he would become a sort of beloved character on the show who met an untimely end and drew a lot of criticism from the fans when we offed him because he was Scully's sort of a little bit lovelorn associate and had a sort of a little bit of a comedic quality that he added to the show. He provided information for us, is what he did really, he was a way to keep the story moving and a familiar face to come back to. [A badly burned man. A doctor and the Cigarette-Smoking Man talk.] KIM MANNERS: That was actually a stunt man lying there in that makeup. That's Ernie - I can't remember Ernie's last name, but he was quite a sport. He was in that makeup for hours. CHRIS CARTER: And the Cigarette-Smoking Man lights up in a, you know, whatever this is, ICU ward. Sort of perfectly indicative of his character's cold-heartedness. His final line is, if it isn't cold-hearted enough, his final line is basically 'kill these men, they're going to die anyway'. [Doctor: But, sir, these men aren't dead yet. CSM: Isn't that the prognosis?] CHRIS CARTER: It's interesting to see the Cigarette-Smoking Man and the role he's taken on here in Season 3 when he only spoke for the first time about a year previously, some twenty-two or three episodes previously he only spoke for the first time, and here he is all of a sudden taking on a huge amount of weight of the arc and mythology of the show, which was fortunate for us because he was like the devil, he became very important to the sort of underlying evil of the conspiracy and a person we'd go back to again and again. [Mulder's hospital room. Mulder and Scully talk.] KIM MANNERS: We prepped these shows in eight days and in Vancouver we shot them in eight days with main unit and then we'd go 3, 4, 5 days with second unit. The Vancouver shows had a lot more production than we've been able to accomplish here in Los Angeles. We did a lot of very big things. In a scene coming up here, you'll see we did a huge CGI shot, a huge crane lash-up and ... and just some big things. CHRIS CARTER: I really believe that there will never ever be another show like The X-Files on TV in terms of its production value and ambition because, first of all, I think it's just going to be too expensive. I think that also by being in Vancouver we were able to do things budgetarily and I have to say there was a crew up there that was game for anything and it was really a coincidence of those events, financial and personnel, coming together that really gave us the scope and storytelling ability to create this wonderful mythology, and I just can't imagine that anyone would be able to get the funds or the freedom that we were given by Fox, by Charlie Goldstein who was the head of production at Fox, and be able to do some of the things we did and pull off some of the amazing work. [The Syndicate's meeting room. The First Elder informs them of the salvage vessel's crew dying of radiation burns, and that it had been working the area where the UFO had been recovered. He says he has asked their Washington associate (CSM) to come and explain what he has been doing.] KIM MANNERS: This was my first Syndicate scene, obviously, being my first mythology show, and I borrowed from Rob Bowman here on hiding the Syndicate fathers back in the shadows as shadowy figures, a lot of smoke in the room and a lot of backlight. And I must credit Rob for a scene like that because he was the one that I'd think set the style in the Syndicate office, and so I borrowed from that, and not only in this episode but in subsequent episodes. We always shot the Syndicate office kind in the same style, with the guys in the background, a lot of smoke, and I think Robbie set that pace. [Skinner's hospital room. Scully tells him that he was shot by the same man who shot her sister.] CHRIS CARTER: We use so many hospitals in The X-Files and Vancouver just happened to be one of those cities that had ... it seemed like it always had a vacant hospital or a hospital that would let you come in. We were, I think, allowed into working hospitals on an amazing sort of frequent basis and it was really important to, I think, the success of the show because so much of it revolved around, you know, victims and/or trauma, even, you know, involving Mulder and Scully as it does in this episode. So we never, to my knowledge, we really never created hospital sets on-stage, there may have been a time where we'd create a hospital room, but we always had a good supply of hospitals waiting. [Skinner says that the man who shot him had been with Krycek when they attacked Skinner several months ago. He warns Scully that she can't afford to get angry.] CHRIS CARTER: The character of Skinner, he's always had to walk the line between his loyalty to Mulder and Scully and to the X-Files, and also to the FBI, and this is a situation where his loyalty actually sort of earns him a near-fatal gunshot wound. Skinner's character proved very important to these mythology episodes just because of that role he played, because his loyalties were mixed and strained, and he was always the go-to guy when it came to Mulder and Scully going out on the lam against the wishes of the FBI and Skinner being able to cover for them, reining them in or suffer the consequences. [Scully writes an addendum to the case file. She is petitioning the Bureau to devote resources to the search for Krycek.] KIM MANNERS: These glasses look so dated to me now, but they were so good for a director when we did shots like this on the computer because we could always pick up the reflection in those big lenses really well. She doesn't have lenses like that any more. [X-Files office. Scully enters the office and finds that Mulder has acquired the diver's suit. He has had the oil analyzed. He puts forward the idea that it is a medium used by an alien creature to jump into people's bodies.] KIM MANNERS: This was a real thing to figure out. This thing, they brought it into Mulder's office and it was so big I had no idea where to put the camera, so I had to hoist it clear up in the air and shoot down on him here just to get a tie-up. I was flabbergasted when I saw the size of that suit. CHRIS CARTER: That suit was actually manufactured just about a block away from the X-Files, and when I heard that they had it and that it was available to us, Dave Gauthier, our physical effects man, came to me and told me about this suit, [...] figure out a way to use it, so this was a case where we had a resource and used it to develop a story. That suit is a one-atmosphere suit, which means no matter what depth you go to, you are still at basically the same atmosphere that you are at on this surface. We shot some of it in the previous episode in a tank about a block away from the X-Files as well, so we made use, as we often did, of just about everything that we, you know, possibly could in and around Vancouver. CHRIS CARTER: You would think that Mulder's face would be a lot more scarred up with all the beatings he's taken over the years with all the little nicks and scratches and cuts, near-misses. [Capitol Ice. The Lone Gunmen skate around, on the lookout. When given the all-clear, Frohike goes to the lockers with a key.] CHRIS CARTER: And then the famous ice-rink scene here that the Lone Gunmen had to practice because as Americans we just considered it to be natural that all Canadians know how to ice skate. (laughs) KIM MANNERS: (laughs) None of the Gunmen knew how to ice skate. CHRIS CARTER: Yeah, exactly. Only one of the Gunmen, which is Bruce, who actually had been a skater as a kid but he hadn't skated for years, but Langly and Frohike, neither of those guys had had skates on, I think, since they were kids. KIM MANNERS: We had to put the camera on a sled and literally push the camera around the ice with the actors. It was quite a scene. And myself, I have never been on ice skates so I was in my tennis shoes slipping and falling down, all the Canadians were laughing at me. CHRIS CARTER: In the script Tom Braidwood was supposed to ... in the character of Frohike, ogle a few more women while skating on the ice, and I think that it was too tall an order to get Tom to skate and ogle at the same time, so we saved that little moment for this scene at the lockers. [Frohike opens the locker, takes out the envelope and the three Gunmen go back to Mulder. The envelope contains an empty tape box.] CHRIS CARTER: Vancouver's great, and Kim knows as well as anyone, he spent so many days out in the elements. It's great because it gives you free atmosphere. No matter what the weather's like, it's always interesting, whether it be rain, cold, you know, moisture in the air, it gives it a kind of claustrophobic quality, and you didn't know how much you'd miss it until you come to a place like Los Angeles where you get very little atmosphere and have to create it if you want it. I know that for me, directing in Los Angeles, we spend a lot more time smoking things up ... KIM MANNERS: Absolutely. CHRIS CARTER: ... than we would ever do in Vancouver, and I don't know if we've created much rain here, I don't think that we have in LA, but that's something, of course, that Vancouver gives you gratis. [Krycek bursts into CSM's room, where he's relaxing with a drink and watching an old movie on TV. He points his gun at CSM, but Cardinal intervenes. Krycek's eyes show the oily film, to which CSM does not react.] KIM MANNERS: We've done so many productions up there. We'd gather a crowd especially if David or Gillian or Nick Lea or Mitch was working, but other than that they kind of go about their business and you can actually photograph them going about their life in the background, you know, they'd ... very few gawkers really. [The Syndicate's room. CSM has arrived and tells them he has had the UFO moved for security reasons.] CHRIS CARTER: These Syndicate scenes are interesting to me now to look back at because they really set up the sort of ultimate Syndicate scene which would be in the X-Files movie which came after Season 5 but had to be actually considered and thought about, conceived, not long after this scene when Frank Spotnitz and I were coming up with the story. All the same players are in that X-Files movie scene, including the Elder who was killed shortly thereafter in the mythology arc. [CSM says that if it was his man, Cardinal, who shot Skinner, then he was acting on his own.] CHRIS CARTER: I don't know if people know that William Davis actually doesn't smoke in real life. He smokes clove cigarettes on the show and hates to do so, actually has someone else light the cigarettes for him, I believe, so it doesn't come naturally to him, and to have a character named the Cigarette-Smoking Man who doesn't smoke, I think, is funny little bit of trivia [...]. KIM MANNERS: He initially had people lighting his cigarettes for him and then, I think it was the beginning of the sixth season here in Los Angeles, he insisted that we build a machine for him, and we had a little battery-operated machine that they'd plug the cigarettes in and go (makes a machine-like noise), and that was Bill's cigarettes being lit for him by a machine so that no other human lips actually touched the cigarette. CHRIS CARTER: I can't say I blame him. KIM MANNERS: Yeah. CHRIS CARTER: John Neville was such a ... important sort of counterpoint to the Syndicate because he was an honest man with integrity; in fact, his character could always be counted on to tell Mulder and Scully the truth up the point where he felt comfortable doing so, so he was really the direct opposite person to the Cigarette-Smoking Man who was venal and could never be trusted. [The Lone Gunmen's place. Frohike examines the envelope from the locker and ascertains that there is an impression of some writing on it. Mulder uses a pencil to reveal a phone number.] CHRIS CARTER: This scene is funny because it makes use of character and of budget constraints. We have the Lone Gunmen talk about a very sophisticated device that the FBI could use to find this piece of evidence while Mulder is just running a pencil over the top of it, so it was at the same time ... as we were poking fun at those characters and talking about crime-fighting technology, we had Mulder push the story forward by finding the evidence with simply a, you know, a lead pencil. [Mulder has dialed the number and gets through to the Syndicate's meeting room. The Well-Manicured Man takes the phone and arranges a meeting.] CHRIS CARTER: This is one of those scenes where Mulder and the Well-Manicured Man actually have a kind of meeting of the minds and agree to meet. Ultimately, the Well-Manicured Man will divulge a tremendous amount of information, he rather forthcoming to Mulder, and I think that was really the necessary addition to this group so they didn't just seem all underhanded and evil, he was really the conscience of the group and gave them some dimension. [Pendrell's lab. Agent Fuller tells Scully they have discovered the name of the shooter: Cardinal.] CHRIS CARTER: This actor's name is Kevin McNulty and I'm sure you've directed him in about a hundred different episodes of television in Vancouver. KIM MANNERS: Yup, I sure have. CHRIS CARTER: He's one of the best character actors in Vancouver and I know he's been on The X-Files a number of times. [However, they have been unable to find any further information about Cardinal and he has probably left the country.] CHRIS CARTER: For production reasons, you often have to split the characters of Mulder and Scully up just to get the work done, and this is a scene where I can see that we did that so that David could be off filming second unit somewhere or Scully could, you know, have some time off when David was working. It was really a trick just to create, you know, what we call a board ... to get the work done using actors who were running back and forth, shuttling between several different units at once. [The Well-Manicured Man and Mulder meet in Central Park.] CHRIS CARTER: This is Vancouver looking a lot like Central Park. KIM MANNERS: Looking a lot like Central Park because there was a whole lot of directions I couldn't point the camera. This was in Stanley Park right off downtown Vancouver and just behind us here in this angle is the entire Vancouver skyline which looks nothing like New York City, so it was rather tricky to shoot. Again, I can see the breath, it was freezing cold this night. CHRIS CARTER: This must have been about ... what month we were filming this, Kim? KIM MANNERS: I believe this was the middle of the third season, so it must have been January or February, somewhere in there. [WMM tells Mulder that a UFO was shot down in World War II and that salvage attempts resulted in men dying.] CHRIS CARTER: Now, this was the third set of mythology episodes we had done. We would end up doing, I think, seven mythology episodes of 24 episodes this season, and this is really where we, I think, found our pace and for the seasons after this, I think, we would end up doing really about that amount because it felt like the right balance. KIM MANNERS: Well, isn't this actually the resurfacing of the black oil? This really got the ball rolling on the entire mythology, the entire alien being of the black oil, didn't it, Chris? CHRIS CARTER: This is really the introduction of the black oil and its body-jumping capabilities, and that would form so much of the mythology, so much that it became the important part or the glue, if you will, of the X-Files movie which was the kind of culmination of so much of the mythology. [Mulder tells the WMM that Krycek has the tape and he has been selling secrets from it. Mulder realizes that WMM doesn't know where Krycek is.] CHRIS CARTER: John Neville would ultimately die, or we would assume he died, in the X-Files movie and he really did die for his sin of not being quite evil enough and I think that is evident here in this scene where he is forthcoming with Mulder, but just forthcoming enough that it sends actually Mulder off on a path which will save the life of Skinner as it puts the life of Scully in jeopardy. KIM MANNERS: I always had the feeling from the Well-Manicured Man as a director that the things that he gave Mulder he gave him for a reason and that he'd only give him just enough in trade, almost, if he ever needed to come back to Mulder to call in a favor that he felt he could. CHRIS CARTER: Right. He always felt to me like he believed in the conspiracy and the good of the conspiracy, but he did not necessarily like the men that he'd become involved with. [Skinner's empty hospital room. A nurse tells Scully he's being moved to another hospital. Scully runs off to the ambulance.] CHRIS CARTER: This is a delicate scene to shoot because when Scully gets into the van, she travels with Skinner and realizes when she comes to a stop that the sloshing in the IV bag is not just for the fact that they have stopped, but that there is actually someone who has boarded the vehicle, who has jumped on to the vehicle. [Scully tells Skinner she just wants to make sure he arrives safely. The ambulance drives off. Vehicle exhaust fumes are clearly seen.] CHRIS CARTER: All this atmosphere is ... KIM MANNERS: ... is real. CHRIS CARTER: Yes. [The ambulance stops at a red light. Scully realizes something's wrong as the vehicle is still rocking. Scully opens the door and outside is Cardinal. He fires, but misses. He then takes off. Scully chases after him.] KIM MANNERS: This is my first scene that I shot with Gillian Anderson where I knew this lady had tremendous talent. When she tackles this guy in this alley and gets him down and starts screaming about: 'did you shoot my sister, did you kill my sister', I saw a side of this lady's performance that absolutely blew my mind. CHRIS CARTER: What part of town were you filming this in, Kim? KIM MANNERS: This was near Gastown. CHRIS CARTER: Uh-huh. [Scully runs through traffic after Cardinal who gets hit by a car.] CHRIS CARTER: And you had the entire control of the street here? KIM MANNERS: Right. CHRIS CARTER: These are all our cars? KIM MANNERS: Yup. We had everything locked up. I mean, this is an alley right off of Robson. [Cardinal runs into an alleyway and falls.] CHRIS CARTER: This character took a lot of abuse. He doled out a lot of abuse in the series, but he also took a lot of abuse. [Scully shouts at Cardinal.] CHRIS CARTER: He was the man who was sitting in the car with Krycek in another episode, who left Krycek and went into a store, knowing full well there was a bomb in the car that would have ended Krycek's life if he hadn't figured it out. He had a long arc in the show and was a kind of all-purpose assassin. I believe his name is Lenno Britos. [Police officers arrive and arrest Cardinal.] CHRIS CARTER: This, of course, is an important scene, a big scene for Scully emotionally because she knows the man she's looking at is the man who killed her sister, and it's what takes us through the act break, that emotion. [Mulder is in his rental car. The phone rings. Scully tells him that Cardinal has been arrested and that he has told her that Krycek is heading towards an abandoned missile site in North Dakota. Mulder tells her that's where the salvaged UFO is.] CHRIS CARTER: I had a woman, she was actually a judge, she was marrying two people recently and I had attended the wedding and she came up to me, knowing who I was, and said: 'I was just in this building here and I couldn't get cell phone reception, how is it that Mulder and Scully can get cell phone reception, you know, when they're, you know, two miles underground?' And it's true, I don't think you could have done a show like The X-Files without cell phones and so it was timely that we did it in the 90s when cell phone technology was, you know, familiar to everyone, but she's right that Mulder and Scully always seem to get perfect reception, of course until the time when we don't want them to. [Mulder and Scully drive up to the abandoned missile site.] KIM MANNERS: This shot that you just saw took forever to shoot because the wind was blowing and it was a lock-off of a crane, and the grips worked for hours trying to get it locked off and they thought they'd succeeded and the wind would come up and move the crane a little bit, and it had to be perfectly still so that we could do the artwork of all the missile silos there in the background. CHRIS CARTER: Didn't you scout this location before there was snow on the ground? KIM MANNERS: Absolutely. CHRIS CARTER: We didn't know that there would be snow on the ground and here we are shooting North Dakota and, you know, we get this little gift of a few inches of snow, so it was, like, once again free production value, and I can't tell you how many times that happened on The X-Files, where we'd shoot Florida and we'd get seven days of sunshine like Kim got on an episode like 'Humbug', we would get perfect Florida skies even though it would be, you know, almost freezing, but Mother Nature just cooperated way too many times for it to be just a coincidence. [Mulder and Scully go into a silo.] KIM MANNERS: This sequence right here, this entire set is only two corridors with a small intersection and we were able to figure out enough camera angles to make this thing look like it went on, a labyrinth of hallways, and like it went on forever. CHRIS CARTER: I look at these shots and I know how much all of us as directors owe to Kim Manners because he's able to make the most of a camera position; we'd watch the transfers and watch the way he moves actors and the way he blocks actors and I know all of us are always studying how he does it because Kim not only does it well, he's able to get so much work done in the little amount of time that we have, so I know we always go to school on his episodes. KIM MANNERS: That silo shot you just saw was a set that was about 18 feet high and we shot it at the top, I think we had a 9.8 mm lens, and then Mat Beck, if I'm not mistaken, was our visual effects supervisor at the time, and he made that thing look like it was ten stories tall. All of those lights that you saw there, that's all CGI, he did a magnificent job. [Armed men arrive and chase Mulder and Scully through the structure.] CHRIS CARTER: There's another shot where you would never imagine that's two hallways. That's Graeme Murray, our amazing production designer, who I called the other day. We're here in Season 8 and I just called him out of the blue because, looking at old episodes, I'm just constantly reminded what kind of look that he gave the show for so little money and so little time, and that was not just him, but his entire crew up in Vancouver who, including Robbie Maier, his head of construction, who worked round the clock, building these amazing sets for us. [Mulder and Scully have been captured and taken back out of the structure. CSM tells them that neither Krycek nor the UFO are in the structure. When Scully says they saw bodies with radiation burns, CSM tells her they saw nothing.] KIM MANNERS: That was a hand-held sequence right there. [...] was the first hand-held sequence I think I shot on The X-Files. CHRIS CARTER: We wouldn't let Kim do hand-held for the longest time. (Kim laughs) Now it's become, I think, a staple of the show, but it's a good way to get work done quickly and give the show a lot of energy, certainly with scenes like that. KIM MANNERS: And a certain tension, too. [CSM walks down the dimly lit corridor to room 1013.] CHRIS CARTER: This is John Bartley shooting, too. This is his third and final year on The X-Files, but he really established a wonderful look for the show that even still, I think, is emulated and copied, and set the standard for what X-Files episodes should look like. Seeing enough, but keeping everything in a kind of shadowy, mysterious light. KIM MANNERS: For instance, this shot right here is a great example of this, we're just following the texture of this set piece which is supposed to be a spaceship, and if it wasn't lit like this, it would have looked just like what it was, a set piece. But his lighting was just magic, I mean, look at the texture and layers that he's achieved here. And as you can see, we were just following a plywood ship there. [Inside the room, Krycek is kneeling on top of the UFO, being in agony when the oil exits his body.] CHRIS CARTER: And that is Nick Lea doing his own stunt, as it were, wearing a mask and having to ... what would that be called ... excrete this substance out of this mask, and the funny thing is that when it was first filmed, it was lit too dark and Nick had to come in and do it again when we could have used any actor, any stunt actor, to do it, Nick agreed to come in and do this again while we dialed up the lights a little bit. [The X-Files office. Mulder and Skinner talk.] CHRIS CARTER: This is Fox Mulder and Walter Skinner calling each other in the morning and saying: 'Which tie are you wearing?' (chuckling) [The ties are similar in color, but have different designs.] KIM MANNERS: This was a scene that I, if I'm not mistaken, I reshot. This was part of my learning process about what The X-Files is all about, what these characters were all about. I had originally shot this and had the character of Skinner come down and be rather friendly with Mulder, and Chris saw it and thought they were too buddy-buddy, that we had to keep it on a business level at all times. If I'm not mistaken, I reshot this for you, didn't I? CHRIS CARTER: I don't remember, actually, but it sounds like something I would be concerned about. KIM MANNERS: Yeah. [The cemetery where Melissa Scully is buried. Scully puts some flowers on her grave.] KIM MANNERS: Again, this is Stanley Park. This park really played for a lot of different locations on The X-Files. CHRIS CARTER: Yeah. We had to create so many different cemeteries. Certainly, whenever you dug a grave or exhumed a body or exhumed a coffin, you had to create this cemetery in a place that wasn't a cemetery because you can't really dig in cemeteries. The funny thing about digging any hole in Vancouver is that you dig down a foot or two and you hit water, so oftentimes, I think, floating coffins became a problem and, uh, a problem to solve. [Mulder arrives. He is also carrying flowers.] CHRIS CARTER: This is the scene where the whole idea that really informed the episode, which was that we bury the dead alive, in other words, they speak to us and they create what we consider to be conscience, comes back and is sounded again by Scully and understood now by Mulder through Scully's feelings about her dead sister and about what it means to her that it's not enough that someone is punished, someone dies, that there's, uh, these kinds of acts of justice, that you can never replace these people. [Scully says that she thought she would find some closure when the man who killed Melissa was brought to justice, but that no punishment would be enough. Mulder tells her that Cardinal was found dead in his cell and it was made to look like a suicide.] CHRIS CARTER: You look at Mulder and Scully in this two-shot in this scene where they're speaking to each other in the cemetery here and you go right back to the pilot and there was ... here's this similar staging. It really is the basis of the show, Mulder and Scully speaking to each other about personal matters. This was the basis of a romance of sorts, you know, let alone the sexual tension, it was two people trying to understand each other's lives and passions and feelings, and it goes right back to the pilot, that initial sense of protection Mulder had for Scully and, ultimately, that Scully would have for Mulder. [Scully says she thinks the dead are speaking, demanding justice. Meanwhile, Krycek is locked in the silo.] KIM MANNERS: I think we left Nick Lea locked in this silo for how long, Chris? About a season and a half? CHRIS CARTER: Yeah. I think Nick Lea after this scene was not seen again for quite a long time, and it's a particularly beautiful shot there, Kim. KIM MANNERS: Thank you. Was it not 'Tunguska' that he first reappeared after this? CHRIS CARTER: I think you're right. KIM MANNERS: Yeah. [Executive Producer: Chris Carter] CHRIS CARTER: I made this. (Kim chuckles) [The End] |