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X-Files 2: Chris Carter And Frank Spotnitz
Want You To Believe
(Except For The Stuff On The Internet)
By Rich Drees
Right at the start, X-Files film producer Frank Spotnitz
warns us not to believe anything we may read about the upcoming film
based on the popular 1990s television series..
“All I can tell you is, is that there’s a lot of information on the
internet and there’s a lot of speculation that stuff is planted or
is leaked,” he states. “For our purposes all that speculation is
perfect because we don’t want anybody to trust anything they read on
the internet. We don’t want the surprise spoiled. I would say,
‘Trust no one.’”
An interesting and ironic position, if partially tongue-in-cheek,
considering that the film's subtitle- I Want To Believe.
Although the film’s late July release is still a few months away,
Spotnitz and X-Files creator Chris Carter are at the New York
Comic Con to promote the film. While they may be coy about the
details of the film’s storyline, the pair were ready to talk to
journalists about why they decided to return to the franchise’s
world of covert alien invasion, government conspiracies and things
that just flat out defy rational explanation.
“The reason we’re doing this is because of the hardcore fans,”
states Carter. “One of the other reasons we’re doing this movie is
that we want to introduce [The X-Files franchise] to a whole
new audience, including kids who may have been too young when the
show first came out sixteen years ago.”
But how to make the television series’ nine year’s worth of evolving
modern mythology of conspiracy theories “user friendly” to a new
audience? Acknowledge that it is there, but don’t make knowledge of
it a factor in understanding the film’s plot.
“The hardcore fans are important to us and they’re going to be the
first ones in line for the movie, so we wanted to honor their
devotion to the show and be true to the characters,” states Spotnitz.
“Even if it’s not a ‘mythology’ movie, Mulder and Scully are front
and center. Their characters have been through a lot. They’re a
little older and we’re a little older and we could connect pretty
deeply to them in the end and what they’ve been through.”
Carter concurs.
“I think what we’re doing is what we actually planned to do even
before the TV series ended, which was to take the opportunity to
take what we did well, which is to tell a standalone story,” he
explains. “Also, a dozen years of passed, which allows us to not
have to reconnect to a mythology which was complex. It gave instant
access to the movie to a whole new audience. It’s funny, because I
thought up a lot of those ideas and they’ve disappeared from my
head. I’ve sometimes had to refresh my memory. I didn’t want make
people to go through that trouble.”
Carter also is quick to point out that just because the film is not
going to address any of the plot threads left dangling when the show
went off the air in 2002, the series main characters, Fox Mulder and
Dana Scully, have continued to grow in the intervening years.
“It’s an extension,” he elaborates. “These characters have lives
beyond the end of the TV series and this is were we imagine they
are.”
“This is one of the nice dividends in how long its taken us to do
this, as its given us a lot more to explore and dramatize than we
would have if we had done this immediately after the show ended,”
Spotnitz adds.
X-Files
fans come in two varieties- the ones who are intrigued by the show’s
mysteries and conspiracies and those who are fascinated by the
relationship between its two leads, Mulder and Scully. One could say
that the Spotnitz and Carter definitely fall into that later camp.
“For me, ‘The truth is out there,’ is more about connecting to
another person than the cosmic truth of aliens and things,” admits
Spotnitz. “That’s the joy of doing The X-Files in that it’s
fun and scary and entertaining viscerally, but then it’s also about
big ideas because you’re dealing with two smart characters who
differ intellectually in their approach to their investigations.” |
