It could be a case for Mulder and Scully: a woman is given a heart transplant - and falls for the man whose dead wife the heart originally belonged to!

After the success of The X Files movie, can David Duchovny follow it up with another big screen hit? by John Millar

Her heart will go on

[color photos: DD&MD dancing beside BH&JB; full page color photo of DD &MD; DD in Kalifornia; DD in Playing God; DD, DAG and kids in RTM; BH & JB; DD & MD]

David Duchovny smiles as he explains how he's managed to get bruised and battered while filming the romantic comedy, Return to Me.

It's a break in the shoot and, sitting near a school playground in Chicago, the actor is carrying the 'scars' of battle: there's a faint scar near his eye and a scratch along his nose. Neither was caused by an accident on set, however. A grinning Duchovny admits the fault was entirely his.

"I walked into a wall last weekend," he explains. "I'm staying in a hotel here in Chicago and in the middle of the night I got up to use the bathroom and didn't know where I was, walked into a wall and laid open my eye. This weekend I was playing basketball and somebody scratched my nose. So I'm giving the make-up guys some work to do."

When Film Review suggests that the producers of Return to Me might prefer him giving basketball a miss until filming ends, Duchovny smiles that wry smile again and nods.

"I'm sure they would suggest that to me, but it's just a pick-up game. And you can get hurt crossing the road or getting up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom."

In Return to Me, the X Files star is Bob Rueland, an architectural engineer, whose marriage to zoologist Elizabeth (Joely Richardson) ends in tragedy when she dies.

Later, a friend persuades him to start socializing and it's on a night out that he accidentally finds a chance to rediscover happiness when he meets Grace (Minnie Driver), a girl with a heart condition who is given a new lease on life after receiving a heart transplant. The organ donor, of course, has been Bob's late wife, but he's unaware, at first, of this connection or that he was fated to meet, and fall, for this woman.

"One of the interesting things about this movie is that the audience is way ahead of the characters," says Duchovny. "The audience knows from the beginning that Minnie has my wife's heart, and the characters don't know till the end."

It makes Return to Me sound old-fashioned, which is precisely the quality that attracted Duchovny.

"It felt like it was from another time, innocent and inevitable in some way, and simple. I just thought it was a really simple story that had this force to it. I read the script and I just wanted to do it."

Duchovny also saw an ideal opportunity to make an intelligent, heart-warming film that might appeal to the entire family.

"I've approached the film as though it was a modern fairytale. I wanted every scene to be understandable to children. Even though it's not a kids' movie, it's just that the kind of acting and the kind of scenes that they are. They are not broad, but they are simplistic in a beautiful way, and I wanted kids to understand the movie, even though it's for adults."

Another deciding factor was that old friend actress Bonnie Hunt, whom Duchovny met on the canine comedy Beethoven, co-wrote Return to Me, and was making her directorial debut with the film.

"I wanted to be involved in her first picture. I trusted that Bonnie would do a good job," he says.

Duchovny has achieved international fame in the TV series The X Files and a hit big-screen version of the ET-detecting adventures of agents Mulder and Scully. But he's also starred alongside Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis in Kalifornia, and the quirky box-office failures, Playing God and The Rapture.

His film choices don't reveal any pattern and he laughs on the suggestion that he's interested in scripts that offer roles that are very different from his X Files character.

"People are going to see Mulder in whatever I do because of the physical resemblance," says Duchovny. "Unless I take a balloon filled with helium everywhere with me I'm going to sound somewhat similar and look very similar, so that's just something that people are going to do anyway."

"There is obviously no rhyme or reason to the way I decide which roles to take. I really don't have a plan.

"I've been wrong, I've been right. Actually, at the point I was doing Beethoven with Bonnie I was doing two movies at the same time."

One was Ruby, which starred Danny Aiello as Jack Ruby, the man who shot JFK's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald and the other was Beethoven.

"I had small parts in both. I thought, 'OK, I'll take Beethoven, this embarrassing dog movie not this prestigious project about Jack Ruby and the Kennedy assassination.' And it turned out that Ruby was a dismally-received failure and Beethoven was actually a sweet movie. So I have no idea. I don't trust that my judgement will come through in terms of box office success or anything like that. I can only trust what I like and that's what I try to do."

Directing is something that Duchovny wants to try. He's already had a taste of that when he helmed episodes of The X Files but is aware that a film project would mean even greater demands on him.

"The great thing about directing for television is that it takes, maybe, two months, from start to finish," he says. "The difficult thing about directing a movie is that two years would be the minimum. If I was going to tackle directing a film, I'd have to be sure, even more sure than as an actor, of the material. But I know enough of what I'm doing that if I got a great director of photography and great people around me, that I could direct a film. I loved directing The X Files and I love writing. I guess because I act so much that I feel more proud of the writing and directing than I do of acting. It's just so different, it worked out, so it was a wonderful experience."

And with that, it's time for David Duchovny to return in front of the cameras...