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DuchovnyNet is a fan run website and is not affiliated with Mr. Duchovny in any way. "The X-Files" TM and © (or copyright) Fox and its related entities. STALKERATZZI
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Entertainment
Weekly
Playing With Fire
June 12, 1998
By Ken Tucker
Now that The X-Files is a major motion
picture, will questions about the cover-ups, conspiracies, and
Cancer Man finally be answered? Will Mulder and Scully finally kiss?
And will anyone besides the show's viewers care? The truth is in
here.
It's the last week of shooting THE X-FILES: FIGHT
THE FUTURE, and the soundstage stinks. It absolutely reeks, right
around the chair of Rob Bownan, director of the $60 million-plus
feature film based on the Fox TV series. Bowman, 38, who has also
directed 25 episodes of the most popular
alien-abduction/government-conspiracy/ delayed-sexual-gratification
drama in TV history, is battling a bad combination of exhaustion and
the flu. He's wheezing, hacking, and coughing so much, his phlegm
could be used to construct a classically disgusting new X-Files
enemy for FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully
(Gillian Anderson). Having gone the usual orange-
juice-and-enchilada route for the past few days, Bowman has now
asked an assistant to bring him some sort of health-foody,
homeopathic medicine; when he snaps open a capsule of a vile liquid
that looks like glutinous tobacco juice, it emits a smell worse than
an average episode of Suddenly Susan.
"Ewww,jeez!"
says Duchovny from a few feet away, pulling a sleeve of his
shapeless black FBI overcoat over his nose. Duchovny is preparing to
do another take of a scene in which he must lean over a over deep
hole in some artificial snow to try to rescue his
acting-like-she's-freezing costar. In fact, however, it is a rather
hot day in August on the Twentieth Century Fox lot, and so the
pungent odor of Bowman's medicine quickly permeates the warm air.
"Sorry, sorry," croaks Bowman. "Let's just do this and
ignore me, okay?" Everyone assumes their places. Bowman peers into
the camera viewfinder, framing the shot; Duchovny-as-Mulder gets on
his stomach and reaches down into the snow hole; Anderson in turn
reaches up, her face immediately assuming Scully's typical
in-jeopardy expression: helplessly beseeching yet thoroughly annoyed
that she needs help. "I've got you!" says Mulder, although he most
certainly does not. They stretch their hands toward each other,
their fingers almost touching in a sort of arctic reproduction of
the Sistine Chapel ceiling and then...
"Cut! That's all I
want," says Bowman. "Anyone want another one?"
"Mmmm, maybe
just one more?" says a voice from the shadows. It's Chris Carter,
God of The X-Files--creator, writer, executive producer, and at 41,
bearer of a head of curly silver surfer's hair no mere mortal could
possess. God wants another take. One senses a score of groans being
suppressed all over the stinking set. The players reassume their
places. "I've got you!' says Mulder again. The shot is shot. Bowman
sneezes. Carter smiles. Everyone files out blinking into the bright
Los Angeles sunshine, where a lunch truck that serves only
fancy-schmancy iced-mocha-coffee drinks is waiting to stoke cast and
crew with chilled caffeine.
Yesterday, JAMES CAMERON and
Leonardo DiCaprio visited the set to say hello," says Duchovny.
"This soundstage is where they filmed a big chunk of Titanic;
Cameron calculated that where our snow hole is, there was probably a
flooded stateroom a few months ago." Did Cameron have any words of
wisdom for the X-Files project? "He said, good luck, and that he bet
he made Kate Winslet scream a lot more in his film than Gillian does
in this one." Gillian Anderson giggles when she's told of Cameron's
remark "He's right," she says happily "Scully may get in a lot of
bad fixes in this movie, but she doesn't lose it if anything, it's
Fox who goes a little wilder, gets more scared, in this movie."
Not that she's going to reveal anything of what the film's
about, of course. The secrecy surrounding Fight the Future is its
chief selling point, in the same way that the series has climbed the
ratings ladder by diving ever deeper into a murky government
cover-up of an alien occupation of America . Carter addresses the
subject in only the biggest, most grandly obfuscatory terms: "I
can't tell you the plot, I just can't-that's my hole card, that
element of surprise. But it incorporates all of the elements of the
mythology [the TV show's periodic story lines dealing with the
alien/government hugger-mugger] to date. I want the opportunity to
give big answers to the big questions that I've been posing for the
past four or five years. This is a chance to explode the show in a
way that when the pieces land, it'll reenergize the show for year
six."
And besides, as Duchovny puts it with his
Princeton-honed wiseass bluntness: "If we ever revealed the secrets
behind all this, the show would be unmasked as the ridiculous little
hoax that it is."
This ridiculous little hoax, a perennial
top 20 TV hit, is 20th Century Fox's chief weapon in the summer box
office war of action-adventure films. Deep Impact and Godzilla had
huge openings but mediocre reviews and word of mouth; their
resonance-free successes suggest the public may be thing of loud,
massive. but hollow summer movies. This could make a well received
Fight the Future--a loud, massive movie of ideas; F/X with an IQ--a
satisfying triumph for its studio.
Bill Mechanic, chairman
and CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment, is literally banking on having
the TV show's 20 million weekly fans line up for the movie during
its June 19 opening weekend, and, if there is a God besides Carter,
to return multiple times to mull over the movie's finer points. The
trick will be to get non-Files fans to come see it, too.
"I
didn't watch the show regularly," says Mechanic. "And once we
started shooting, I studiously stopped watching any episodes at all.
I wanted it so when I looked at this movie, I would be coming to it
cold, without any fan knowledge. If I could understand it and follow
it, anyone could. And that's what happened; this is not a cult,
exclusionary movie."
Both Carter's camp and the Fox movie
folk now say everything is ducky between them, but it was widely
rumored that the studio was worried when Carter announced that the
TV show's May 17 season ender would be a cliff-hanger that led into
the movie. A month would have passed from the series' finale to the
movie's opening date; what if the plot were unclear or too dense to
grab summer ticket buyers who wandered into the multiplex fur the
air-conditioning and a thrill ride?
From what ENTERTAINMENT
WEEKLY has learned, it's likely that Carter and Bowman have done the
job in a way that, as Carter puts it, "will bring new people into
our ongoing story but won't offend the hard-core viewer." X-Files
coproducer Frank Spotnitz, who cooked up the Fight the Future plot
with Carter over eight days in Hawaii a year and a half ago, says
the film is "an adventure story with political under currents, more
like "The Parallax View"-the 1974 Warren Beatty-Alan J. Pakula
conspiracy thriller-than "a monster episode of X-Files." Hmmm--would
maybe Fox rather a monster-style X-Files than a movie that summons
up comparisons to a 23-vear-old Beatty flick? Mechanic laughs.
"Listen: This is a good, scary movie. Besides, we just put out
Bulworth--you think I want Warren Beatty calling me if I knock a
Parallax View comparison"
The future that Mulder and Scully
must fight starts in the distant past-about 35,000 B.C. That's where
we'll get our first glimpse of a creature filled with a substance
familiar to X-Files devotees-an oily-black blood. This is the very
first invader, one who'll spawn what Carter calls in a spoken-word
bonus cut on the Fight the Future soundtrack album "a population of
alien hybrids who would hide in plain sight."
Getting out
the truth about the alien colonists causes lots of trouble for
Mulder and Scully, as well as guest stars including Lucas Black (the
Skinny Blade kid, who stumbles upon the prehistoric, oily ET), Martin
Landau (as a fresh variation on an X-Files standby--an info-leaking
deep throat), and Blythe Danner, as a tough FBI interrogator. Carter
says Danner's character "represents what Agent Scully might have
become had she not been recruited for the X-Files assignment. I hope
people will pick up on this." (Apparently Anderson herself did not
pick up on this. Told of Carter's remarks, she seems genuinely
baffled. "Really? Chris said that? Now I'm gonna have to go back and
reread the script.")
Plenty of stuff will happen to keep Internet
fans buzzing. In fact, we think a buzzing bee will
interrupt a long-awaited Mulder-Scully smooch. We think Mulder,
while in a hospital gown, will moon movie audiences. We think
Scully will utter the F-word and that Mulder says the S-word. We
think the aliens have three fingers, and Duchovny said for a fact
that the one time both he and Anderson were just sick of the whole
damn thing was the day "we were out in a field, really exhausted,
and Gillian got hit in the eye with a sharp cornstalk," so either
there are scenes set on a farm or Fight the Future is really just a
big-screen remake of Hee Haw.
A visit the L.A. movie set
enables a desperately curious reporter to walk along a long row of
vertical, milky-green tubes-"cryopods," Carter calls them--filled
with milky green, half-human, half-alien beings. "You're standing in
one spoke of a spacecraft," says Carter, "and that's all I'm going
to tell you." It is very dark; negotiating the spoke is like walking
along a narrow balance beam, and the stage crew setting up the shot
looks big, mean, and out of sorts, so no tough follow-up questions
are asked. Sue me.
Another professionally curious visitor to
the set is parent company News Corp, president Peter Chernin. He
places the equivalent of a freshly iced trout in one's palm as a
handshake, smiles blankly (is there a trace of black oil behind his
eyeballs?), and takes Carter aside. A few minutes later, Carter
returns, folds his arms, looks out at the set, and says quietly out
of the side of his mouth, "He'll grin and joke with me now but then
he might go back to his office and start yelling about something
we're doing here--it's all part of the game."
And Carter, by
now knows how to play the game. "You get a lot of people who can
muck it up and not maliciously," he says. "There are simply a lot of
people in Hollywood who create value in their position by being
destroyers. That is, they become part of a project by threatening
it--by being the guy who acts like he's going to be the voice of
reason, or the voice of power or the voice of veto, and who ends up
draining the originality and creativity out of the process of making
a movie or a TV show. There are too many of those people out here.
"That, if anything, is what's made me, in some people's
minds, 'a control freak.' I'm known as a difficult person, because
I'm always pushing to make it good, and the truth is, [the studio
is] always pushing to make it cheap. I prefer to think of it as just
wanting to keep the destroyers at bay."
If The X-Files is a
world Carter has created for himself that just happens to have also
attracted the obsessions of millions of others, the show is
something less urgent for the actors who've been made stars by it.
Duchovny likes to downplay the glamour of it all-"It's pretty
workaday, people don't seem to realize: You get up, you take a
shower, you read the paper, you play Mulder." And while the TV
series will move production from Vancouver to Los Angeles next
season, in large part due to Duchovny's oft-stated desire to be
geographically closer to his wife, Tea Leoni, he doesn't seem
especially psyched about plumbing new depths in Fox Mulder.
"I would've liked this past season to be the last," he says
flatly. He's sitting in his trailer on the Fight the Future set,
dressed in T-shirt and shorts. His Nike-sandaled feet rest on copies
of Yoga Journal and the Don DeLillo novel Underworld on a coffee
table. Ask about the possibility that this movie could turn into a
franchise a la Star Trek, and he's even more blunt: "I'd much rather
be involved in a franchise movie series than do the goddamn TV show
every week."
Duchovny is mildly chastened by the box office
failure of last year's Timothy Hutton-with-peroxide thriller Playing
God- "lt was shot in five weeks, and from the response it got, it
apparently looked it"-but he's still actively pursuing a non- Files
him career. "I'm talking to Oliver Stone about doing his NFL movie,
but it shoots in October, so that would call far some tricky
scheduling around the series.
Anderson is eager to see the
response she gets from her upcoming feature The Mighty, in which she
has a small but reportedly meaty role as a working-class alcoholic.
"For me, it's time to level the playing field," she says, "to prove
that a TV actress can do good film work. I was told that one major
player in The Mighty said before I was cast that she'd never work
with a TV actress, so I know that prejudice still exists." Anderson
won't say who the female acting snob was. The film stars Sharon
Stone.
If the actors don't look upon the movie as too much
of a technical stretch, the main man behind the camera does.
Bowman's primary challenge is to expand The X-Files for the big
screen, mounting elaborate action sequences while also finding a way
to introduce faces familiar to fans---such as William B. Davis'
ever-ominous Cigarette Smoking Man, a key link in the
government-alien collaboration--to X-innocent movie-goers. "It all
has to do with building atmosphere," says Bowman "People who wander
in with buckets of popcorn may not know how long and hard Mulder and
Scully have fought Cigarette Smoking Man, but if I do my job right,
they'll know that this butt-puffing little bastard is an enemy to
fear the moment he appears on screen."
Bowman, like the
actors, is looking beyond The X-Files he'll be aboard for the next
TV season, but he's also fielding offers for other features. You get
the feeling that despite the hard work of everyone involved, the
Files remain central only to Carter's creative life. His way of
fighting the future has always been to play out a chancy paradox:
Carter is a maker of hugely popular entertainment, yet all of his
crucial influences derive from cult or obscure sources. He was a
surfer the '70s when surfing wasn't cool, editor of a surfing
magazine when being an editor--well, was being an editor ever cool,
unless you're talking Cary Grant in His Girl Friday? Carter did his
TV apprenticeship on shows like the hideous '87-'88 Joseph Bologna
sitcom Rays to Riches. And he took much of the original inspiration
for The X-Files from Kolchak: The Night Stalker, a mid-'70s TV flop
now better known as a Carter icon than for its own highly uneven if
instructively seedy charms.
When it is pointed out that
what's great about the TV X-Files is that it is an exact example of
what the film critic and painter Manny Farber has called "termite
art"-"art that always goes forward eating its own boundaries,
[leaving] nothing in its path other than the signs of eager,
industrious, unkempt activity"--Carter's normal murmur rises with
excitement. "Farber is one of my favorite writers and artists!
People could do a lot worse than looking for the roots of the
X-Files sensibility in his work."
And when it is then
suggested that the pitfall of an X-Files feature film is that it
will inflate to the size of what Farber derisively called "white
elephant art,' full of "recognizable details and smarmy
compassion...[and] fear of the potential rudeness, and
outrageousness of a film," Carter grows quiet. "Yes," he says
finally. "But even if that happens, I should least make sure the
elephant steps an the right people."
THE END |
Transcript appears courtesy of Entertainment Weekly, copyright ©
All Rights Reserved
Transcript here courtesy of GAWS.
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