Evolutionary Man
Starlog Magazine August 2001

Before The X-Files put David Duchovny on the map and made him a household science fiction name, the actor had a working relationship with writer-producer-director Ivan Reitman - sort of. Duchovny had a supporting role as the bad guy in the family comedy Beethoven, which Reitman - who tapped Duchovny to star in this summer's Evolution - produced.

"I don't think Ivan had anything to do with my casting in Beethoven," Duchovny notes. "As a matter of fact, what I remember about Beethoven was that I was cast by the original director, who was fired a week into shooting. I hadn't worked yet, but they just kept me on because I had already been cast. I ended up working with the director who didn't hire me [Brian Levant], but I didn't meet Ivan at the time. All I remember was that Bonnie Hunt [later to direct and co-star with him in Return to Me] and I did some improvising in Beethoven and word came down from Ivan that we were to stop that.

"Even though some of the stuff was pretty good, I guess we were wasting film. I've since run into Ivan every now and then. I like his style of movie and I appreciate the genre he created with Ghostbusters. I was just looking for something that was as far away from The X-Files as I could get. Even though the subject matter of Evolution has to do with aliens, the tone and the kind of movie it is are as far away from The X-Files as I could find. And to work with Ivan in a genre he created, I thought I could learn something and could do something I hadn't done before."

Origins of Evolution

Evolution casts Duchovny as Dr. Ira Kane, an ex-government scientist who now teaches at a community college in Glen Canyon, Arizona. His best pal is Harry Block (Orlando Jones of The Replacements and the upcoming Time Machine remake), a geology professor and coach of the women's volleyball team. Both men are seeking a one-way ticket out of Glen Canyon, and that arrives in the form of a meteor that crashes not far from the college. Alien life -rapidly evolving alien life - is attached to the meteor, making it the discovery of the New Millennium and a dire threat to all mankind. The government soon finds out about the meteor and the aliens and, in the person of General Woodman (Ted Levine, Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs), assumes control of the situation, forcing Ira and Harry to ally with doofus would-be fireman Wayne (American Pie's Seann William Scott) and klutzy government epidemiologist Allison (Hannibal's Julianne Moore) in order to save the day.

Much like Ghostbusters, Evolution mixes action and the occasional scare with state-of-the-art special FX, funky creatures (via Phil Tippett), Dan Aykroyd (in a cameo role as the Governor of Arizona) and plenty of yuks. "I don't think many people attempt to make these kinds of movies because they're a difficult target to hit," Duchovny says. "There was that Tim Allen movie a few years ago, Galaxy Quest, which was a sleeper. That worked. Other than that, Men in Black and Ghostbusters, I can't think of SF movies that are also funny in a satirical kind of a way. In this day and age, where a movie like Evolution costs a lot of money because of the special effects, people are scared to go into it. Ivan is the master of it, though, and he decided to do another one."

Evolution depends heavily on the chemistry between Duchovny and Jones, who hit it off immediately and simply tried to translate their off-screen camaraderie to the characters' on-screen relationship. "One of the things I like best about the movie is the easy, non-racial rapport that he and I have as buddies," Duchovny explains. "It's not a Nick Nolte-Eddie Murphy thing. We're already friends, and one happens to be white and the other black. I haven't seen that kind of relationship in many movies."

The former X-Files star also speaks highly of his other co-stars. "Seann is just a great kid. I love him as a person. He's extremely funny. He was like the little brother I never had. I hadn't seen American Pie, though I may have told him I did. He has a good sense of comedy. He plays dumb really well, which is not that easy to do. And Julianne is obviously a great actress. She was game to do what it took to make this film work. She just attacked this film like she would any other. Like me, she was looking to do something different."

X-Files fans chuckle when, in the film, Ira mentions to Harry that he **knows** the government. It sounds like a tip of the hat to Fox Mulder and the TV series. That, however, couldn't be further from the truth. "I **never** thought about Mulder during the making of this film," Duchovny insists. "I don't even associate Mulder with aliens. Honestly, I don't walk around thinking about Mulder or aliens. I just think about my work as an actor. Doing this movie, I never thought, 'Does this sound like Mulder?' and I'm glad I didn't, because it would have been hell.

"When they came back from a test screening of Evolution, Ivan called me and he was kind of pissed off. He said, 'They laughed at that line when you say you know the government.' Ivan's perception is that 'They're not supposed to laugh. They're only going to laugh when I think it's cool to laugh.' It's not a funny line by itself. I went to a screening the other night and they laughed again. We'll take laughs wherever we can get them, but I don't like that kind of humor, where actors make references to other roles. I don't like breaking down the fourth wall. That's cheap. The government line in this movie happened inadvertently."

Thoughts of Resolution

Looking at the final product, Duchovny likes Evolution, and he likes it for several reasons. "What I set out to do works for me," he says. "It's different from what I've done before. I was too self-obsessed the first time I saw the film. I watched what I did, which is what you do the first time around. The second time I laughed the whole way through, and not necessarily at myself. I thought Orlando and Seann were really funny. I loved Julianne. And I thought Ivan did a great job of balancing the real and the funny and not letting one undercut the other."

It has often been said of The X-Files that because of its high budget, first-rate FX and general atmosphere, the show is as filmic as any feature. Duchovny concurs. Likewise, there's little difference between taking direction from Reitman or such frequent X-Files helmers as Rob Bowman, Kim Manners or Chris Carter. "A director is a director," he stresses. "Ivan has his own particular language that he works in. Over the years on the show, I definitely developed a shorthand with Kim and Rob. The thing about TV is that an actor owns the character. By the time I worked with Rob, it was the end of the first year of the show. By the time I worked with Kim, it was the end of the second year. And by the time I worked with Chris, it was the third year. At that point, I was telling them about the character. So TV is different. By the time you work with the director, you already own your character. You're like the proprietor of it.

"On Evolution, with Ivan, we were creating a new character. When I did the pilot of The X Files with Bob Mandel, that was where the hard work in creating the character was done. Mandel was hired to do that. He had done films and directed F/X. So working with Ivan, I had that nervousness and tension of creating something from scratch [all over again], knowing that - unlike on a TV show, where you can always come back next week and take another shot - there's only one of these. There's only one chance to make it something that I and other people will enjoy."

Duchovny enjoyed and appreciated his eight years on The X-Files as well, but they're now over and done with for him. Just as Essence and Existence, the two-part season finale aired, Fox announced that the show would return for a ninth season and would do so without Duchovny. "I had told Chris all year that I was 99 percent sure I *wasn't* coming back," the actor says. "And I only said 99 percent because I don't say never anymore. I could have said 99.999 percent. But I was sure. It was time to move on. Creatively, I had done all I could do as an actor on the show. That was it for me.

"I'm not very open to doing [guest shots next season]. Mulder is the conscience of the show. It's his quest. For him to start coming back as a peripheral character doesn't really make sense to me. I don't think it would be right for my conception of the character - to pop up as Obi-Wan Kenobi every once in a while. To play him just as a cameo, that would feel kind of false to me."

Duchovny's last scene - Mulder and Scully (Gillian Anderson) kissing passionately on the lips as she cradled her baby, William - certainly begged for more. But there will be no more when season nine kicks off this fall. Carter and company will need to figure out how to make Mulder disappear yet again, this time at an unresolved critical juncture in the relationship betwen Mulder and Scully. Duchovny wishes them luck, especially since he wasn't entirely satisfied with the way Mulder's final moments were handled.

"We were doing the last two episodes and I felt it wasn't the resolution of my character," recalls the actor, who understandably thinks the writers didn't make maximum use of his presence in the 11 eighth season episodes in which Mulder appeared. "We were resolving things that had nothing to do with Mulder. I felt like there was a lost opportunity. The last two episodes *could* have been a real sendoff for Mulder. We knew we were going to shoot the last scene, but we didn't know what the last scene was. They have this idea over at The X-Files that stuff is going to get stolen and put on the Internet. They want to be secretive about it. And that pisses me off, because I'm an actor and I would like to have the scene more than two hours before I have to play it. I don't care if somebody gets it on the Internet. I would rather it be a good scene.

"So, it was a big mystery. This guy shows up with a briefcase and handcuffs. 'The scene's in there,' he tells me. I ask, 'Can we see the scene?' And he says, 'No, it's not ready.' Two hours before we shot the scene, we finally get it. And it was a nice scene with the baby. I think it was written that Scully gives Mulder a kiss on the forehead. Kim Manners was there [directing], and I was so confused at that point that I didn't trust my feelings about it because I had so many personal feelings. It was eight years of my life. I didn't know what would be an appropriate ending. I didn't know. And when Kim and I read it as we were about to shoot it, he said, 'We've done that 100 times, the whole hand holding and the kiss on the forehead. Let's do a *real* kiss.' I was like, 'Yeah, that feels right.' At least we were giving *something* at the end."

Ideas of Revolution

The big question left looming as the season finale faded to black, though, was : Is Mulder the baby's father?

"I guess so," Duchovny replies. "I honestly can't tell you if he is or not because I don't know."

The answer to that and many other questions may have to wait for another X-Files feature. And, yes, Duchovny *is* willing to play Mulder again on the big screen. "If they wrote a good X-Files script, I would look at it," he says. "I would love to do another X-Files movie."

There are other X-Files issues worth briefly addressing, among them sharing scenes with Robert Patrick; his last day on the set; bidding farewell to Carter, who was a close friend until a series of financial and legal sticky wickets got in the way; and his cameo as Mulder in the Lone Gunmen episode All About Yves.

Duchovny more than willingly touches on all of those matters. "Robert and I had a good time working together," he notes. "He's a really nice guy and a good actor. It was different because the center of the show had been a male-female relationship, Mulder and Scully, for so many years. And in some of my scenes with Robert, especially the ones in Vienen, there was a different kind of energy - a buddy energy. It made me regret that we hadn't done it earlier. Maybe we should have brought Skinner [Mitch Pileggi] into the mix a little more fully so you could have had Mulder and Skinner or Mulder and Doggett going off and doing the buddy thing, then coming back and have Mulder and Scully or Scully and Doggett or Scully and Skinner. It would have made for a less claustrophobic feel for the actors. Then again, you don't fix it if it's working.

"The last day was very emotional. My very last day was running shots and little bits of action that we had to do for the last few episodes. I was with Mitch. Chris came down to the set. Chris and I spoke. We had to work together. All that other stuff, in the end, really is business. What we do on The X-Files is business, and yet it's a creative process. If Chris and I aren't speaking, that's a big deficit, a big gap. We had to be adults. We're paid to do a job. And that means speaking to each other.

"But the second-to-last-day, when I shot my last scene with Gillian, was very emotional and very sad," Duchovny says "I really **hadn't** pondered the weight of eight years coming to a close until I was in the middle of the scene and realized that this would be the last time I was going to do Mulder and Scully on the show. It was sad and very heavy, but not depressing. It was an acknowledgement of a lot of time, effort and love.

"As for The Lone Gunmen, I did that as a favor for [writer-producer] Vince Gilligan and the guys," he continues. "The show was on the bubble, as they say, and they thought a guest appearance by Mulder might give the show a boost at a point where a decision was being made to renew it or not. It was a nice little bit, just one scene, and it only took a day to do . I guess it didn't help, though."

Asked if there's any aspect of Fox Mulder that he never got to explore, Duchovny pauses. After a moment, he mentions that the issue of Mulder's disappearance was never dealt with on an emotional level. "Here's a guy who was abducted, we think," he notes. "At least that's what **I** think, and I'm playing the guy. And nobody seemed interested in that when he came back. It was, 'Oh boy, you look bad,' and then, 'Here's another case. Want to take a look at this?' What I would have enjoyed playing as an actor was working through the difficulties that being abducted might have created inside the character. I don't think that's an opportunity we'll take in the movies, though. It would just be reworking something from the past that not everybody would be aware of."

What the future holds for Duchovny remains as blurry and mysterious as Mulder's future. He has already filmed a cameo, in which he's "physically unrecognizable," for the upcoming Ben Stiller comedy feature Zoolander and is spending as much time as possible with his wife, actress Tea Leoni, and their daughter Madelaine. Other than that… "I don't know where I go from here," David Duchovny concludes. "I'm writing a movie script. I'm looking at things to see if anything that interests me is within my grasp. I'm just kind of decompressing. It has been a fast and full eight years. Now I've got to take stock and decide what I **want** to do, instead of thinking about what I **have** to do."

Article courtesy of Starlog Magazine and transcribed my Alfornos.