It was January 2007, and I was about to give up hope.It was six ears since 20th Century Fox called, asking if we were interested in doing another X-Files feature film. Five years since the television series went off the air. And four years since creator Chris Carter and I labored over the story for the new movie and pitched it to the studio.That was back in 2003. Since then, I had negotiated a deal to cowrite and coproduced the movie, and waited for David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson to close their deals—only to have the whole process derailed when Chris and the studio got into a legal ... [Continua a leggere]

Fans have really been waiting for this movie. Are you surprised that they’re still interested?Yes… I think the reason we made the movie was because we felt that enthusiasm from the fan base. That being said, I think for this movie to be as successful as Fox would like, we needed to make it a movie that would appeal beyond our fan base, to a broader base, and even to a group of people who didn’t what The X-Files before. I would talk with college juniors, sophomores, freshmen—they were too young to see the show when it was on the air. It started 15 years ago. So, yeah, w ... [Continua a leggere]

The van ride to the Vancouver set of “The X-Files: I Want to Believe” feels a lot like what approaching Area 51 must feel like. A mystery awaits, although you’re not at all sure what kind of clues you’ll actually find.The production assistant behind the wheel is perfectly friendly, talking about the weather (cold), the city (growing), and the best place for Chinese food (pretty much anywhere). But when the conversation takes a turn into X-Files territory, he quickly tucks today’s production schedule into his jacket and offers up more news about the weather.Back du ... [Continua a leggere]

So it’s with trepidation that I wait for him to turn up. I entertain myself by wondering if he’ll be an older-looking Fox Mulder, the clean-cut FBI agent with boyish good looks he played in the hit TV series The X-Files for nine years, or the dishevelled, complex, jaded writer Hank Moody; his character in his current hit TV series Californication. When he finally arrives - 20 minutes late - Duchovny looks like a regular kind of guy; he oozes "casual" in his grey, long-sleeved T-shirt, blue jeans and combed-back hair. I soon discover he has the same dry, laconic sense of ... [Continua a leggere]

Deep in the bowels of a disused mental institution, a cadre of nuns shuffles down the corridor. This crumbling Victorian edifice on the outskirts of Vancouver - atmospherically chilled and, at 3am, Exorcist-eerie - has been dressed as the Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Hospital, a key night-shoot location for the film The X-Files: I Want to Believe. “They’re not real nuns. I hope not,” quips David Duchovny, who is reprising his role as the FBI agent Fox Mulder. The wry grin says it all. Recently, before being pressed back into service in this new, feature-length spin-o ... [Continua a leggere]

CHRIS CARTER is not the sort of guy you'd expect to produce shadowy stories about government conspiracies and alien invasions. Even as he's hard at work finishing "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" -- a new feature film based on the landmark science-fiction franchise he masterminded in the 1990s -- he's the embodiment of a relaxed California surfer, thoughtful and easygoing rather than tense and paranoid. The deadline to deliver his cut of the film to the studio is looming, but inside a cozy Malibu residence, he's calm and deliberate, watching scenes with a critical eye and decisively di ... [Continua a leggere]

When it comes to sci-fi fandom, Star Trek may have first dibs on the world’s most obsessive devotees, but X-Files fanatics aren’t too far behind. Conventions, fan-written fiction, internet forums: you name it, the “X-Philes” were into it. But don’t think this cult-status series, which ran for 10 years between 1992 and 2002, was only for spotty sci-fi geeks and bookish nerds. Cool rock stars loved it too. Self-confessed X-Phile, The Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, penned the theme song for the first X-Files feature film Fight the Future; in 1998, Welsh indie ba ... [Continua a leggere]

Surprise! David Duchovny is returning as Agent Fox Mulder in The X-Files: I Want to Believe, the second film spin-off of the FBI-meets-aliens TV hit. Maddeningly, that “no, duh!” information seems to be the only tidbit the deadpan 47-year-old—or anyone else—will reveal about the movie, whose “secret” has somehow yet to surface on the Internet. Duchovny, a native New Yorker who is married to actor Téa Leoni, is less tight-lipped about his Golden Globe–garnering role as a horndog novelist on Showtime’s Californication (which he also exe ... [Continua a leggere]

The truth? It'll be out there in theaters when The X-Files: I Want to Believe opens July 25. But thanks to Frank Spotnitz, the franchise's coproducer and cowriter, it'll also be available in comic-book form two days earlier, when DC's The X-Files #0 hits stores. While the film takes place after the TV series' end, Spotnitz's title (illustrated by Iron Man: Hypervelocity's Brian Denham) is fully ensconced in buzzy season 5, with Special Agent Dana Scully's cancer in attack mode, and her FBI partner, Fox Mulder, initially on the lam, probing Scully's illness as well as surreptitious al ... [Continua a leggere]

After six years of silence, Mulder and Scully are back – and, as a result, I got the chance to discuss their new cinematic outing with writers Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz. A thoughtful, friendly pair – and if you squinted a bit and tilted your head to one side, they could almost be surf-bronzed, Californian versions of our own Bob Rickard and Paul Sieveking… FT: What was the impetus to get away from extraterrestrials for the new film? Frank Spotnitz: We knew from the beginning that we wanted to do a movie like most of the episodes of the show, which had nothing t ... [Continua a leggere]

On The X-Files, whenever FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder wanted to talk to his secret informant, he had to use a couple strips of tape to make the mysterious man’s namesake letter, X, in the window of his apartment and hope for a prompt response. It is not that hard to get a hold of X-Files creator Chris Carter—a couple calls to the appropriate publicists will do the trick. But it is hard—downright impossible, in fact—to get the writer/director/producer to reveal the super-secret plot of this summer’s The X Files: I Want to Believe, which will reunite the embattled- ... [Continua a leggere]

CC: The motivation really was the hardcore, die hard fans, who are saying, “when are you doing the movie? When are you doing the movie?” We've carrying these drumbeats out there. We felt it, and people have taken out ads, billboards, and we felt it on the internet. HBO: According to the film’s stars, it was a teary reunion with Chris.DD: When we started reading Mulder and Scully, we looked over. He’s got these bright blue eyes and they just started tearing up.GA: Yeah.DD: I think we were both embarrassed.GA: No, we weren’t.HBO: David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson ... [Continua a leggere]

DD: This movie deals with both spirituality in a specific religion, and you know the paranormal, so all those things come into play. And it’s debatable, you can debate it all. I think you know you go into this movie, you can come out of the movie talking all that kind stuff, and it’s always the same with The X-Files.*clip from movie*GA: After such a long period of a time, we come at it in that way. It would be kind strange of us to dive back into the mythology.DD: Mostly because we’ve forgotten it.GA: Yeah. At this time and place, and also people have gotten older, and there& ... [Continua a leggere]

CC: The show has been off the air for six years, but we actually think that has whetted appetites for the movie. So hopefully there will be word-of-mouth, hopefully people will know this franchise, The X-Files, hopefully they’ll come because it’s good story telling and it’s a big summer movie.GA: It was more exhausting the first time around we fitted it between the hiatuses of the series.DD: That was not good for anyone.GA: That was horrendous, this was pleasurable.DD: We went out, publicizing the movie, told people they didn’t have to have knowledge of the show, and th ... [Continua a leggere]

Gillian Anderson will star in and produce a biopic of Martha Gellhorn, a trailblazing female war correspondent who covered conflicts from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and weathered strife in personal relationships that included a failed marriage to Ernest Hemingway. Anderson's company, Fiddlehead Prods., has acquired "Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life," a 2004 biography by Caroline Moorehead. British playwright and screenwriter Sharman Macdonald is penning the feature adaptation.Anderson, who opens July 25 in 20th Century Fox film "The X-Files: I Want to Believe," will play Gellhorn.Debor ... [Continua a leggere]