Q: This spring you're starring in a movie called The Joneses, in which you play the "father" of a cool but fake family that a corporation assembles to coax their neighbors into buying stuff. I suppose a lot of celebrities do the same thing. A: Yeah, sure. I haven't sold that much. But the culture that's embracing Twilight and Paranormal Activity and District 9 and 2012—you could kind of say that The X-Files sold that. Q: You helped release a media virus. A: Exactly. And now it's reinfected people. I guess it went dormant for a while. Q: You passed through a period of genuine pop-cu ... [Continua a leggere]

David Duchovny doesn't look much better than his costar, and not only because of the bullet wound Fox Mulder has taken just below the hairline. It's Day 54 of the shoot, a Friday in late August, and all during this difficult summer the cast has raced to finish the film in time to start the fifth season of the series. The film--which will be released on June 19, as a bridge to a sixth season starting in the fall--is set partly in the Antarctic, so the crew has built a fake snowscape inside a Hollywood soundstage. Their fabrication appears so genuine, you might almost believe the c ... [Continua a leggere]

Gillian Anderson looks like hell. She's as pale as a mime-school applicant, her delft-blue eyes are underlined with dark blurs, her red hair is as filthy as a mud puddle. She looks like someone you'd see being shoved into a van on Cops. Anderson has to look like this, though, because Dana Scully has just seen as alien.“I've been through some . . . stuff, “ Anderson tells me hesitantly from inside a big parka, and that's the whole of her explanation. “Stuff “ is one of the euphemisms used on the Hollywood set of the X-Files movie, a secretive site of controlled in ... [Continua a leggere]

I’m warned about Chris Carter by Duchovny, who knows a lot about misleading exteriors. Inside Carter’s office on the Fox lot, not far away from the [movie] set, the creator of The X-Files seems calmly immune to the rigors of filmmaking. He is a handsome man, graying and shaggy-haired, sitting in an elegantly appointed, shuttered office, bowls of candy and fruit on various dark wood desks, a turquoise surfboard in a corner, an episode mapped out in index cards on a bulletin board. It could be the office of any other successful executive, except for a copy of ... [Continua a leggere]

Chris Carter is picking a murder weapon. He knows a lot about death and its tools, like how Glock handguns are growing more popular with detectives, or how it can be hard to tear off pieces of duct tape when you are trying to suffocate a victim quickly. But when he selects a weapon, he puts all that information aside for one consideration: how it looks. He doesn’t bother to handle the axes or the scythe, doesn’t test their weight, or experiment with how they feel in his right hand. He makes his choices quickly, collecting a pile of hand axes and a gun for good measu ... [Continua a leggere]