Rozhovory s Chrisom Carterom o epizódach prvej série

In The Beginning...

CHRIS CARTER: First and foremost, what I wanted to do was scare people's pants off. I said I wanted to do something as scary as a show that was on when I was a kid, which was Kolchak, The Night Stalker. It was a series that I loved, I could have watched it every night of the week. And so I came up with The X-Files, Mulder, Scully, and the FBI, as a way to explore paranormal phenomena.

I never wanted to make the FBI the bad guy. I always saw the characters at the FBI as being not the ultimate bad guys but the middle men. The people above them, represented by the Cigarette-Smoking Man, were the people who were pulling the strings, the puppeteers, if you will.

The Mulder-Scully idea was always in my mind, and I wanted to flip the gender types, the stereotypes that we have. I wanted Mulder, the male, to be the believer, the intuitor, and I wanted Scully to be the skeptic, the one which is usually the traditional male role.

Personal Magnetism

David Duchovny was an early favorite, and he was a pretty easy person to cast. He fit the character that I had written very well, and played it with a real... uh... he underplayed it is what he did, and I think that was what won him the part. Also, he has a tremendous amount of personal magnetism and sex appeal.

Gillian Anderson was a little more difficult, actually, a lot more difficult. She didn't have the obvious qualities that network executives have come to associate with hit shows. But she was a terrific actress, and she came in and read the part with a seriousness and intensity that I knew the Scully character had to have, and I knew as soon as she read it that she was the right person for the part.

11:21

The X-Files is filled with all sorts of inside details, all sorts of things. One of them has become quite well-known now which is the clock reading 11:21, which is my wife's birthday, November 21st. So you'll see those numbers and they will... are meaningful.

Characters' names, as well, they come from, in my scripts, I know they come from old high school friends, predominantly. Fox Mulder, I grew up with a kid named Fox, I always liked the name, and it seemed to go with Mulder, which is my mother's maiden name. Scully's name came from my childhood, where the Voice of God, when you grew up in Los Angeles, is Vin Scully, the guy who announces for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and every night I'd go to sleep with his voice in my head.

Hiding Things In Shadow

The man who shot the pilot for the show, Tom Del Ruth, moved on. He established a nice look which I think has been really refined and changed and made very beautiful by John Bartley who's been on the show since episode one past the pilot and has given us a nice dark subtle look. He makes Scully look beautiful without making her look too glamorous which I never wanted, I wanted the show to look very real. He really helps us to scare you by hiding things in shadow, half-lighting things. He's given the show just a wonderful look, and he's been honored for it, too -- he was just nominated for an ASC award, and he's been nominated for ASC awards in the past on this show.

"THE PILOT"

We had a very difficult scene in the pilot, which was the vortex scene, the scene where the kids were abducted in the forest, and I think that the invasion of Normandy was probably a little simpler because we needed to use real leaves whipping around in a whirlwind, and we needed to use digital leaves, and we needed a special lighting effect, a lighting rig that actually took something like eight hours to construct.

Piping That Blood In

Yeah. The nosebleed scene... it seems easy to create a nosebleed. You, you know, you cut to the reactions of the characters and cut back to your character and you put a little blood on her nose. Well, this nosebleed scene needed to actually happen on camera, and you can't just put something in someone's nose and wait for it to explode, or set it off with remote control. You've got to pipe that blood in to get a good supply in there. And so we had to run a tube down the actresses' forehead and then beside her nose and then shoot her in a semi-profile shot so that it looked like a real nosebleed. Well, in the test, the blood actually came out in her hair instead of in her nose because it exploded in the tube. I thought we were... we were goners. But it turned out that the effect worked perfectly and that nosebleed scene ends up being a very believable and effective and scary moment in the pilot. I think it's pretty cool moviemaking.

"DEEP THROAT"

The character Deep Throat, of course, came from the famous or infamous Watergate figure who may or may not have existed. And so I felt we needed a connection, somebody who would come from this mysterious, shadowy government, works in some layer or level of government we have no idea exists. He would come to Mulder and Scully and lead them carefully, selectively, without giving them too much, make them work for the answers but help them when they had reached a dead end or help them when they had made a wrong turn. And I thought Deep Throat was the perfect name for him.

I love when we get to the end of the episode, and Mulder, who has seen so much but has learned so little, has had his memory erased, is running around the track, and he sees this figure, which we have established earlier on as Deep Throat, come walking across this field, and it's shot with long lenses and it feels very... it feels very heavy and important. And he says to Agent Mulder that the forces that he is searching for, that he is dealing with, have been around for a long, long time. It is, in fact, a reason for Mulder to carry on, it sets the quest in motion if it already isn't. So I think that really put the series in play with that scene and I like it very much.

"SQUEEZE"

I wanted to give them a roller-coaster ride, one that they couldn't get off for an hour, and I think that we've succeeded in doing that, first and foremost. It's become a lot of other things, but I think it is a scary show - that's what's most important about it and that's why I think it's a universal or I should say international phenomenon now. The X-Files has really caught on because people around the world like to be scared.

When I created The X-Files, I knew that I wanted to depart as quickly as possible from the UFO and extra-terrestrial storyline because I knew that the stories couldn't sustain themselves, or the series couldn't sustain itself just by telling that kind of story.

The conception of "Squeeze", the monster, who was a guy who could squeeze through the tiniest of places, really was the idea of Jim Wong and Glen Morgan who had come on to the show. And I think that they not only wrote a wonderful character in Mr. Tooms but they cast a great actor in Doug Hutchison to play the part. He's as scary as the part was written.

Squeezing down the chimney...

I was actually on the set during the filming of that scene when Eugene Victor Tooms slides down that chimney. We hired a contortionist, a man who could actually squeeze into very tiny places to do the actual squeeze down the chimney, and then the shot you see where you are looking upwards and Eugene is reaching down and his hand stretches, is the magic of the art director, whose name was Michael Nemirski, and the man who did the effect, whose name was Mat Beck, who's done three years of The X-Files and done a wonderful job for us. They had him reach down over and over, and then with a computer-generated imager they were able to take his fingers and elongate them, and the added sound effect, I think, really completes the scare.

Harvesting liver...

The idea for the liver-eating and for the nest and for the bile really came from... Jim and Glen wanted the character to harvest the livers of people and do it on a schedule so that, in fact, if we didn't catch this character, he would disappear again and go into hibernation. The bile I think was a suggestion of mine, and it gave us that classic line from Mulder...
("Is there any way I can get it off my fingers quickly without betraying my cool exterior?")

"TOOMS"

As the season was coming to an end, winding down to an end, we thought how would we like to scare people again in the same way, and we thought why not just bring that character back, this wonderful, weird character that Doug Hutchison plays, of Eugene Victor Tooms.

Skinner...

It was an opportunity to introduce the character of Walter Skinner, who became Mulder and Scully's superior now, who has become a very important part of the show, one of the regular cast members now, who plays an important part of the telling of the mythology episodes.

You can't kill the Devil...

The Cigarette-Smoking Man, who has now become known as the Cancer Man as an alternate name, he was never supposed to speak. In fact, we cast an actor who we never imagined would be speaking even though he's quite a competent actor. He was supposed to be more mysterious and dark and a little bit more forbidding because he didn't speak. And he is a complete self-interest, he is the person who we trust least on The X-Files, he is the devil, if you will. Some people ask whether he'll ever die on the show and my answer always is, you can't kill the devil.

Tooms' hideaway...

Doug Hutchison, the actor, who is an interesting character himself, decided he wanted to actually shoot the whole thing naked, was naked on the set. It caused a little bit of discomfort which was good. I think it actually added to the scene. I think David was very nervous about being in a little tiny confined space with a naked man, to be honest. And I think it made the scare, the creep, all that more real, certainly for David, and for the audience in turn.

"CONDUIT"

I'm always struggling with my own faith, and I think that Mulder is, too. I think that he does believe in these things, but I don't think he believes in them wholeheartedly, I think that he, too, has a modicum of scepticism, he won't just believe in anything. And so it's his need and desire to believe, his need to see that object in the sky, to have his beliefs tested. And I think that we all want that, I think we all want to be driving through the desert at night and see something in the sky that we can't explain because it, in fact, is... it's tantamount to a religious experience, and I think that's really what Mulder's about.

After Much Searching

Mark Snow came after much searching through composers, interviewing, listening to tapes. And he was recommended to me by Bob Goodwin, who's the co-executive producer on the show, a person he had worked with before, they were actually personal friends. Mark happens to live very close to me which helps because I'm very hands-on with the music, I like to listen to the music before it ever goes on to the picture, and make little notes, and see how the music is going to augment or supplement or make better the story we're trying to tell, and Mark, he's got such a natural hand at this, a natural facility for it, that I spend so little time now actually trying to guide him or direct him. I go over there just to listen to the beautiful music he puts in the show.

"Conduit" came out as a result of a kind of a kernel of an idea that I had, that Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, who were writing as partners, expanded on. We had come up with this idea of this boy writing down the digits one and zero, which are the digits in all digital information. He was getting them through the television inexplicably. And so I think it was Alex, I remember, saying, what if all of these things added up to a giant puzzle, a mosaic, that in fact drew a picture of the sister that was missing.

A State of Weightlessness

I think one of the most successful parts for me is the realization by Scully at the end that Mulder, in fact, may not be a crackpot, that, in fact, the science that she so depends on points to an abduction, that the girl's physiology, body chemistry at the end of the show says that she may have been in a state of weightlessness, so I think that was interesting. It really helped to define something that was very important to the show, too, which is her point of view. I always felt the stories were told, the show was from Scully's point of view. She was the one we would cut to, her reaction to what Mulder was saying, she was the one who would pull Mulder back, insist 'Look at what you're doing, look what you're saying, you are equating this with your sister.' It was, I think, for us a very defining kind of episode in terms of how to tell these stories using the characters that we'd put in motion.

Emotional Resolutions

That was an interesting episode because the ending, Act 4, was actually not part of the original story. It ended much less concrete, so we added more explanation at the end. I think it's a very successful episode on a number of levels but I think it also helped us to sort of define how X-Files stories should be told in the future, with some resolution, at least emotional resolution, which put Mulder in the church at the end of the episode, very upset about his lost sister as a result of his investigation of this case, which had very similar aspects.

"FALLEN ANGEL"

We've always pushed the limits on this show, and if you look at the wonderful images we've created, they have always come to us with much difficulty. Anytime you want to do a special visual effect on a television budget or schedule, you are pushing the limits of what you are capable of for all the various restrictions. It's been a beautiful show in terms of its effects because they've been believable, they've been minimal, they haven't been overblown and supervised and coordinated by the illustrious Mat Beck who has been our special effects producer from the beginning. He comes in and he's got a very, very strong personality, but he knows how to make something good, he's got very good taste. So he is, I think, a secret weapon on this show, as is Graeme Murray, the production designer who has done the lion's share of work on the show. These people really help to give it the cinematic look that I think it has and I think that makes it different than anything else on television.

I think in the "Fallen Angel" episode, Max Fenig represented a kind of kook that we all believe is out there, saying 'Look up in the sky, it's up there, it's out there.' And Mulder and Scully run into him and treat him as such, but I think that it's a journey for Mulder and Scully to see, and for the audience to see, that these people who are crying wolf might be doing it for a reason. So I think that was an interesting look into that kind of character out there and the fact that they may be credible and may be seeing and knowing things that we don't. So Max Fenig actually became a very popular character who was abducted at the end of the episode, may actually return some day.