Excerpts from Empire Magazine, September, 1998
The Unstoppable X Machine
by Simon Braund
Photographs by Mark Anderson
Alien abduction. Killer viruses. Mutants. Murder and madness. Welcome
to paranoia central. Simon Braund meets David Duchovny and asks just what
the hell is going on with The X-Files?
The New York-born Duchovny came to The X-Files after a string of small
but significant roles in films such as The Rapture, Kalifornia and Julia
Has Two Lovers. He was also memorable as a cameraman Rollie Totheroh in Sir
Richard Attenborough's Chaplin, as Charles Grodin's arch nemesis in the
inexplicably popular slobbery-dog flick Beethoven and as transvestite detective
Dennis/Denise Bryson in David Lynch's Twin Peaks. He is delighted when informed
that his performance in Zalman King's softcore vat of ordure The Red Shoe
Diaries is just as famous here as it is in the States.
"Great, let's talk about that and not The X-Files then," he says gleefully.
Enjoying a semi-flourishing film career, Duchovny wasn't planning to do any
television until his English manager urged him to read the script for an
intriguing new pilot.
"I was afraid of getting involved with a show that would run for a long time,"
he explains. "Actually, it was more the fear of getting involved in a BAD
show that ran for a long time. But I thought the script was good and I liked
the character. I didn't think it would become a series because it was about
aliens which I thought was kind of a silly topic. People might be interested
but I didn't see how you could elaborate on it. I thought: four or five episodes
and you either catch the alien or you don't. If you don't people will get
bored. If you do, that's the end of it. I thought I was being very clever.
I thought I could do a part that I wanted to do, make a little money and
get out."
However, to paraphrase a famous jock poet, the best laid plans of mice and
men go wobbly when viewing figures head for the stratosphere and you become
not only the anti-hero idol of millions but also the latest person to don
the "thinking woman's crumpet" yellow jersey.
"What I liked about Mulder," says Duchovny, "is that I'd just done three
parts that had to do with some odd sexuality, and here was a character who
had no sexuality, or at least no superficial sexuality. To me what Freud
said about all energy being sexual is the same as Indian chakra, which is
about sexual energy starting at the base of the spine and moving up into
different cerebral and emotional realms. I thought, okay, here's a chance
to develop that energy, which I'm already comfortable with, bring it up the
spine and create a character whose energy is channeled into some quest other
than the physical. That's why I wanted to do the role. I didn't go, 'Finally,
a script about aliens!'"
Apparently Duchovny's moulding of Mulder went a little further than simply
stoking up his chakra and pointing it in the right direction.
"Chris Carter had this image of Mulder looking like Vitas Gerulaitis. I didn't
think that was quite right," he says, with exquisite dryness. "I made a decision
based on all that silly mystical stuff about chakra, and I also decided that
he was not going to be Dr. Who. I told myself that he was not going to be
a mad scientist. He has to be reliable, even though he's insane. I knew he
was crazy, but he had to appear sane.
"I mean," he says, warming to his topic, "on paper the things that we're
doing are absolutely ridiculous. They're just silly. When I first did interviews
for the show and I had to explain to people what it was about, I'd be in
the middle of it and suddenly think to myself, this is the most ridiculous
stuff I've ever said in my life. I had to say to people, 'Look, trust me,
it's really good. It sounds terrible, but it isn't.'"
In fact, the X-Files is very far from terrible. It is, arguably, the best
non-comedy series to have emerged from the patchy quagmire of American TV
since Laura Palmer was zipped into a body bag. And Duchovny has a pretty
firm idea of where its appeal lies.
"It's not camp," he says, "and that is one way we could have gone with it.
I'm not a science fiction fan so I may be wrong, but it seems to me there
are two types of sci-fi. There's the campy Dr. Who style, and then there's
the kind of soap opera style, like Star Trek. Star Trek is very parabolic,
you know that Spock represents the mind and that Kirk represents the heart.
It's like reading a medieval morality play. We try to ground things in reality,
not in parable and not in camp. I think we're unique in that we're trying
to do a drama about extraordinary things yet trying to minimise them in order
to make them real."
In one instance [in the movie], a dispirited Mulder pours his hear out to
an incredulous bartender. It's an inebriated and not entirely comfortable
précis of a character that Duchovny has honed to perfection over the
last five years.
"I think that was the greatest challenge of the movie," he says. "How do
you introduce a character who people already know and love? But the scene
in the bar is nowhere near as bad as Scully's speech. Scully's is basically,
'Mulder, I've been with you for five years and I gave up a career in medicine...'
It's horrible. Luckily with mine I was drunk so I could give you all the
self-pity and the self-explanation and the self-absorption that are the necessity
of back-story speeches. To me the scene works because I'm playing off Glenne
Headly, the bartender, who is standing in for the audience members who know
nothing and you see how ridiculous this man really is. That to me is very
clever."
And, to be fair, if you're familiar with the series, it makes you appreciate
just how common this type of speech is in other movies.
"Yeah, I know," agrees Duchovny. "It's kind of unfair to single out our movie.
It's too easy because you're waiting for it to happen, you're sitting there
going, 'Well, how are they going to explain this....'
"In the opening scene (where Mulder and Scully, back on the beat after the
closing of the X-Files, are searching for a hidden bomb in the Dallas Federal
Building), you've got Scully being hyper-rational and Mulder going 'I'm all
for womens' intuition' and everybody gets the idea. After five years you
can rely on a lot of goodwill from the audience about what their relationship
is. The gestures between us become less and less because the audience supplies
the rest. It's really become a relationship of glances. In the movie, because
the audience doesn't necessarily have that goodwill, it's got to be more
verbal. It's got to be, 'We've been working together for five years and I
trust you and blah, blah, blah'. It's just one of the necessary evils. But
also one of the interesting challenges, to try to make that as full as the
more subtle types of communication."
Another challenge for Duchovny was adapting to the grindingly slow pace of
moviemaking after the frenetic shooting schedule of the TV series.
"Doing a movie you have a lot more time, which is usually a good thing because
you're creating a character and you want as much time as you can get. In
TV-land we do about seven or eight pages of script a day. In movieland we
do a page and a half, sometimes less. The pace is six times as slow. I didn't
need all that time because I wasn't discovering a new character, so it was
very hard for me to keep focused. It's also an action movie so there was
a lot of set-up, a lot of lighting and a lot of special effects - a lot of
alien business. That takes an incredibly long time to do, much more than
you'd ever think. We spent three days just doing the exit from the building
before the explosion at the opening scene, which is maybe half a page of
script. For an actor, that's boring. It just meant I ran into a cab, drove
a hundred yards, got out of the cab and said, 'Next time you're buying.'
And that took three days. It can drive you crazy. TV, I guess, is more athletic.
You're out there hitting the ball every day, you're playing a match every
day. A movie is more like playing three matches in three months. I had maybe
five days doing what I'd consider heavy scenes - the meat, the fun part of
acting. And I had five weeks of running around pointing my flashlight."
Thankfully, all this has paid off handsomely and the movie itself is
predominantly free of bullshit parts. What is perhaps most gratifying is
how a $60 million budget has allowed Bowman to put things on the screen that
the TV show is only ever able to hint at.
"For a viewer, I think you get the best of both worlds," says Duchovny. "We
deliver the humanity and the relationships between the characters and the
mission they're on. But beyond that, we show so much more of the hardware.
On TV our aliens are children in rubber suits standing behind a screen. We
can't show them because they look like children in rubber suits..."
While we're on the subject of aliens...
"What, do I believe in them," he asks this with the amused resignation of
a man who could have retired to Bermuda by now had he been given a dollar
bill for every time this question was asked.
"It seems likely to me that there would be something out there," he says
deliberately. "There's probably some planet out there somewhere where they
have a television show called The Z-Files, and right now some interviewer
is asking this hideously ugly actor, 'So, do you believe in humans?'"
