Inside an old ice-skating rink at the Pacific National Exhibition Centre in Vancouver, Canada, several rooms have a familiar feel.
There's a fish tank in which a diver figurine has gone to the bottom. A wall is covered with newspaper clippings about the paranormal. There are sunflower seeds in a bowl, a basketball and a number of pencils protruding from the false ceiling.
But the give-away is the poster of a spacecraft hovering over an out-of-focus rural landscape. Underneath are the words: "I want to believe."
This is where Fox Mulder lives, six years after he and partner Dana Scully were declared fugitives by the FBI and went on the run in the final episode of The X-Files.

The various items around his new house, meant to be somewhere in rural Virginia, are visual cues to draw the TV show's fans back into the mythology surrounding The X-Files, although, this time, they will be watching on the big screen. The second movie spawned by the series, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, will be released worldwide in July, with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson back in their pivotal roles and series creator Chris Carter directing.

A half-hour drive from the Pacific National Exhibition Centre is Riverview, formerly an institution for the mentally ill but now a location for many episodes of The X-Files and movies such as the Friday the 13th franchise.

For The X-Files: I Want to Believe, six different sets have been built inside, including two hospitals and an FBI office and conference room. It is there that Duchovny, Anderson, Carter and writer-producer Frank Spotnitz, who also worked on most of the TV series, are developing a scene set in a hospital corridor.

Comedian Billy Connolly is waiting in the wings for a rare, dramatic turn written specifically for him. He plays "a very creepy character", according to Spotnitz.

"As producers, as showmen, we just feel it's more fun for the audience not to know," Spotnitz says.
"We've had a lot of paparazzi and a lot of stuff circulating on the internet, but as much of it is bogus as true and no one really knows which bits are true and what's not."

That is, he admits, due partly to the producers posting some of the misleading information, but he won't be specific. Connolly is just as helpful, but funnier, on questions regarding plot or character detail.
"When you hear I'm in it, you don't know what I'm doing, whether I'm from space or a loony, or whether I die," he says.
"I'm always dying. I died in a Muppets movie once. It's in my contract -- I have to die."

Gillian Anderson was 24 when The X-Files started on TV in 1993. She appeared in 196 of the 202 episodes and doesn't look much different now as she approaches 40.
Duchovny, 47, won a Golden Globe Award this year for his role as writer Hank Moody in the controversial TV series Californication. He has starred in a number of smaller movies and occasionally played supporting roles in films including last year's Things We Lost in the Fire, starring Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro. He appeared in 173 episodes of The X-Files.
CARTER is a former journalist who, at 55, still loves to surf and climb mountains. Today he is accompanied everywhere by a black poodle named Larry.

Carter had ideas for another X-Files movie only months after the series finished in 2002, but there was another "legal issue", this time between him and Fox, and the project went cold until the end of 2006 or early last year.
"I really have to say Fox pushed the button for me when they said, 'Now or never'," he says.
Now it is "the most natural thing in the world, yet dreamlike," to be back on a set with his X-Files stars and many of the crew who worked around them in Vancouver, where most seasons of the show were shot.

"There's a familiarity I have with both of them that makes it easy," Carter says.

"But there's the burden of doing great work, so there have been long days. We haven't had a chance to relax, which I'd say is reminiscent of the TV series."

Of course, Carter is tight-lipped about the script, which has been kept under extraordinary security.

"It's true to where we imagined the characters would be roughly six years after the last time we saw them, which was sort of riding off into the sunset."

Duchovny started shooting the movie's action sequences two weeks before Anderson arrived on set.

"We were running around doing crazy stuff and it didn't really feel like The X-Files to me so much, but then when I started to work with Gillian it sunk in," he says.

Anderson says: "We'd seen each other in between and we did a week of rehearsals in LA before David started, so we got an opportunity to gauge where we were at. Fortunately, that dynamic was still alive, so that when we started shooting again, it showed up when we showed up."

Duchovny laughs and says: "We couldn't keep our hands off each other."