Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Chris Carter, X Files

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Chris Carter is a television writer, producer, and director best known as the creator of science fiction series The X-Files. He began his screenwriting career at Walt Disney Studios in 1985 before moving to Twentieth Century Fox Television. There, he developed The X-Files, which ran for 11 seasons and earned him multiple Golden Globe Awards, Emmy Award nominations, and a Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting. Carter has created additional series through his production company, Ten Thirteen Productions, including Millennium, Harsh Realm, The Lone Gunmen, as well as two film adaptations of The X-Files.  ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www.athleticnicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Tetragrammaton. I was an art major originally, but I was putting myself through college making pottery. I went to Long Beach State University, which was the clay school. That was where anyone who wanted to develop their skills, there were two doctors of ceramics teaching there, and it ran its course. Even though there's really interesting stuff like industrial design, things that I'm really interested in, I decided after two years of that, that it wasn't the direction I needed to be in.

I walked literally down the hill to the journalism department, walked into a teacher's office and says, how do I become a journalism major? He said, do this, do this, do this. I graduated with a degree in journalism, and because I was a surfer, I did my internship at Surfing Magazine, which was at Stan Clemente.

It was perfect. They were going from a bimonthly to a monthly. I fit right in, I made myself indispensable. They hired me and I ended up working at the magazine on-site for five years. Wow. But during that period, there was a guy working as a writer and he was a surfer, but he was also a screenwriter.

I got to be friendly and he invited me on a river rafting trip, and there was a pre-rafting party. And at that party was a woman named Dory. And Dory struck me. She made an impression on me, even though I was there with my girlfriend. A year later, I'm going through a terrible breakup, and Dory's going through a divorce. And I say to my friend, Mark, I say, terrible breakup and Dory's going through a divorce. And I say to my friend Mark, I say, do you think Dory would ever date me?

And she finally relented and that is 43 years ago. Congratulations. Meant to be, clearly. And that's a long way of telling you that Dory was a screenwriter then and encouraged me to write a script. I did and it got shown around town and got me meetings and all this, you know, I was in the hunt.

I wrote a second script, Jeff Katzenberg at Disney, I read it, one day I was a surfer, the next day I was a Hollywood screenwriter with an office and a secretary in the animation building at Disney. It was amazing. Amazing. Yeah, so it happened really fast.

What was that script that he liked about? You know, I would call it in the vein, it's really not in my wheelhouse, but in the vein of kind of Ghostbusters. It was kind of a big, rollicking kind of comedy. And he liked it, it was called Bad O. I wouldn't show it to anyone now. But the original script that I wrote which was much closer to my heart was called National Pastime. I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles called Bellflower. It was about three kids in a city like I grew up in who don't know that they have ways

to get out of the draft or going to war. And national pastime being the obvious metaphor for that. That was really the script that got me in the door. And then the second script got me a three picture deal. That's unbelievable. Out of the box. Out of the box. That was for writing movies. I met with Brian Grazer, did a script for him.

I had an office in the animation building at Disney, and producers would come by and they'd knock on the door and say, ''Hey, are you interested in doing TV?'' I never said no. I said, ''Yes, I'll do it.'' You're a surfer. I'm a kid from Bellflower and a surfer and people are knocking on my door, Disney saying,

you want to work for us. So I said yes to everything. And so I did some Disney Sunday movies because they had revived that. It was something that was part of my childhood, the Disney Sunday movie. So I did a couple of those things. I did one with my wife and I did a pilot at Disney for NBC.

During the filming of that pilot, I realized I couldn't just be a writer if I wanted to protect my work. I needed to be a producer. The pilot didn't get picked up at NBC, but I made an impression and I said to them, look, I'd like to work as a producer if you can give me a job. And they said, great, today,

I'll offer you three different jobs. The first job was on Miami Vice, and Miami Vice, hit. The second job was on, I think it was called Vegas. It was also another Michael Mann show, you know, something of a hit. And then the third choice was a show called Rags to Riches, which is about five little dancing girls

and a kind of daddy Warbucks character played by Joe Bologna. We'll put you on that show immediately. So I looked at all my options and Miami Vice was shot and produced in Miami, but the writers and the writing producers were in Los Angeles. The same thing with Vegas. It was shot in Vegas, but the writing producers were in the studio a lot.

But Rags of Riches was shot in Culver City and I would be right there working with the team. I seized that opportunity. To be more hands-on. I wanted to learn how to produce, not how to write and then have somebody else produce my work. Not hand it off. Yes, I wanted to be a real producer.

It was five dancing girls, so I got to work with choreographers, I got to work with the composers, I got to work with costume, I got to work with choreographers, I got to work with the composers, I got to work with costume, I got to work with everyone, production designer, and it was fantastic. How old were you at the time? Probably early 30s, but it was great.

I took that job and I stayed at NBC a little longer, but then I got hired by a guy named Peter Roth to write pilots for 20th Century Fox. How new was Fox at that time? This is the Fox network. The Fox network had just married with children. It was kind of establishing itself as the something more than a Johnny come lately. So it was kind of a heady time there with lots of energy.

Just years old, would you say? Several years old? I'd say probably three, possibly four. That's a brand new network. Basically brand new. Yeah. Even though I was hired by the 20th Century Fox studio, not by the network.

So the idea was that I would create for not just Fox, but I could create for all the other networks as well. But of course, Fox was the big push. So I came up with this idea which became the X-Files, and we literally walked upstairs to the network, to sell it to the network. I pitched my heart out, Bob Greenblatt, the guy I pitched to,

who went off into his own stellar career. He wrote a chapter about that in his memoir. And it was funny, he said, I remember you asked for water, because, you know, I was nervous, I was full of nervous energy. So anyway, they didn't buy it in the room. So we went back to the drawing board, and it just so happened I knew a psychologist who knew about a study called a Roper survey about the number of Americans who believed in the alien abduction phenomenon. And even though I had pitched it as such,

that I brought in hard evidence of it, or something of evidence, I think put them over the top in the second pitch. Because at first it sounded too way out for them, but you showed them this is something people are actually interested in. Yes, so it's nothing else like it on TV. But I wrote them an 18-page single-spaced outline. I involved them every step of the way

in the process. They ordered the pilot. We were going to make it in Los Angeles, and we started to go through those motions. And there's a big portion of the script that takes place in the forest. And there aren't good forests, really, in what they call the zone for shooting in LA. So the suggestion was we go to Vancouver and as it worked out, I had been to Vancouver in 1986. My wife did a Disney Sunday movie with her partner and I got to visit and I saw these amazing forests. You know, it was like meant to be.

So we moved the production up to Vancouver. It was during pilot season, so that means everyone is shooting pilots up there, and we're the last people to arrive. And so we get the last people to be hired. You know, it was the everyone was taken. But Undaunted, we put together a crew up there, brought some people from Los Angeles,

produced this pilot, and I got a call very early on. They still didn't know what it was. And I got a call very early on. There's a scene where Mulder and Scully are in his hotel room, and she's got something on her back, and he wants to see what it is, and she kind of bears her skin to him. And I got a call, angry call from a studio executive

that there wasn't enough sexual tension in that scene. And it's like, they still don't get what he, exactly. They still don't get what the show is. They still think it's, you know, I would call it formulaic television. Yeah. So I calmed them down and we went and we finished the pilot and that's a story in itself. We came back, edited Temp Score, got it to the studio, then to the network, and they

had a screening of it. And the story that I was told, I wasn't at the screening, was that Rupert Murdoch was in the room. And so they screened the pilot and of course, you know, lights come up and it finishes. And everyone of course is looking to Rupert Murdoch wondering what his reaction would be before they react. And he turned around and he clapped.

Wow. And it was that instant that kind of set that ship flotilla. Amazing. Do you remember where the original idea came from? Like what were the starting pieces before you wrote anything? Yeah, when I was a teenager, there was a show, it was two, I think two part movies, I can't even remember now, called

Colchack the Knight's Doctor. I saw that as a kid, I think two-part movies, I can't even remember now, called Colchack, The Night's Doctor. I saw that as a kid, I did. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen on television. I watched a lot of television as a kid. Yeah. What other things did you watch? Tell me about your viewing as-

If I start to think about what I watched during that time, I remember we watched every Friday night, we watched the Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, and Love American Style in a row. I loved it. That was like my Friday night. But you know there were shows on like Mannix and yeah I watched all of those. Every one of those. Same. And I just loved them. They were great shows. They were great shows. Yeah, my Connors was great. Great.

Yeah. That was kind of my childhood. But Colt Jack the Night Stalker really stuck with me. And so when I was at NBC, as I mentioned, Ranin Tartikov was the main, he was the main man. He had like, you know, how many seasons of being number one at NBC. So he was just a revered character. He was the younger guy, right? He's a younger guy.

And it so happened that I was a baseball player growing up, and there was a softball game that I got included into, and Brandon was a player. So were a lot of other notable people. Anyway, we became kind of friendly, and he actually, he kind of saved me through some of those lean years by throwing me some work. I remember pitching to him the idea

of doing a Kolchek the Night Stalker, and it didn't fly. He had no interest in doing it, but I held on to the idea. And when Peter Roth had hired me, we went to lunch and both agreed we liked Kolchak the Night Sucker and could I do something like that. So I had this idea by doing an FBI show. I had an idea about a believer and a skeptic. How did the idea of the FBI being involved? Because I don't think Kolchak was an FBI guy.

No, Kolchak was a newspaper reporter. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So the FBI, because I had read something where the FBI actually investigated something called satanic ritual abuse. And that's where people believe that they've been abducted by a cult and subjected to ritual abuse, which sounds kind of X-file-ian. But I thought, if the FBI is investigating something like that,

they must be investigating aliens, and I had some interest in the alien phenomenon, too. Did you ever go to a UFO convention in those days? Oh, yeah. I actually wrote a New York Times op-ed about that. There were two reboots of the show in the last several years. My convention experience really shaped those stories. Great. I used to go to those as well. I love those. They're amazing. Amazing. Just interesting people, interesting lectures. Yes. A lot of open-minded thought. Yeah. And conspiracies galore. And I've had experiences where I was invited

to a meeting by a guy who was one of these, he wasn't a conspiracy monger, was a little more highbrow than that, but he invited me to a meeting with several other people where our phones were taken away from us when we entered the- Remember his name or no? Oh yeah. His name is Foster Gamble.

And he had a website called Thrive. Anyway, he did a movie and I helped him with the movie. And anyway, he invited me to this meeting. He wanted to know how best to market free energy devices. So it's like, really? You've got them? Something you're going to bring to the world? Yes, that was the answer, that they had free energy devices.

So they asked us how we should market them. I said, you want to get these to everyone, right? Yeah. Walmart. It's the biggest retailer in America. Get them out there. And they thought that was a little bit too plebeian. I don't know what the word I would use. So it was never decided.

But that was probably a dozen years ago. And the free energy devices have never appeared, but it was a great story. Yeah, great story. Yeah. Great story. So you have the coal check experience as a kid. Yeah. You take that with you,

and then you decide FBI and you have this experience. Was it in a newspaper you read the story about the FBI going into the satanic? I don't remember where I read that, but I did a lot of reading, and I've always been a reader. So I picked it up somewhere. But it just felt weird to me that if they... Yeah, it's one of those stories. Like, it doesn't really make sense in your world,

and that makes it interesting. Yeah, exactly. So my brother's a scientist, so I'm interested in science. Yeah. And he's five years younger than I am. And a brilliant guy, teaches at MIT. He's a very serious scientist. And I would go to him during the run of the show

and run things by him. And on the pilot, for example, there's a scene where Mulder and Scully are on a road and their car loses power. And it comes to a stop and Mulder looks at us watching and he says, we lost nine minutes. And Scully, the scientist says, you can't lose nine minutes. Time is a universal constant. And so I gave that script to my brother and he read it and he said, I like this, I like this.

He said, but time is not a universal constant. He said time is a universal invariant. So he contributed, he's in his way. He refined it. He refined it. Or fact checked it, really. He was my fact checker, but I had a number of people like that.

Anyway, the scientist, the skeptic, and the believer, because I'm a believer, I want to believe just like the poster says. Show me the proof. I want to believe it. I believe you, but you know, prove it to me. So that was something that meant a lot to me too. And Scully wears a cross around her neck, so it makes her an even more... She's the scientist.

She's a scientist, but also a person of faith. Yes. How does faith play into the whole story, do you think? I think that it makes her an interesting character because faith and science aren't necessarily compatible so much of the time. But I think of science as the search for God. We're going to find God through our search for things like quantum physics. So I thought that was a kind of interesting way to mold that character. And then Mulder the Believer, I described him,

I think, as a MTV VJ in the pilot script. Because I wanted him to have that kind of energy. And David Duchovny came in, and this is also a story in itself where David and Jillian came in to read for the parts. Jillian gave me, during the run of the show, the pages. Whenever you do a casting session,

you're handed pages with the prospective actors' names on them, and you make your notes on those pages. And I had done just that, made those notes. And on David's, it said, yes, simply. And on Jillian's, it said, test. David was somewhat of an unknown, but she was a complete unknown. So I wanted to bring her before the studio.

She was more green than he was. Very much more green. And she's like 24 years old playing in not only an FBI agent, but a doctor, medical doctor. They struck me right away. And I had, there was a lot of pushback actually to get my way because they were thinking that Scully should be a babe.

They were thinking that itully should be a babe. You know, they were thinking that it was kind of a television formula to make the beautiful girl and the handsome guy. And even though they're both very attractive, they didn't quite fit people's ideas of what television stars were. So I had a pretty clear idea from the get-go what I wanted from those characters

and what I wanted the spirit and tone of the pilot to be. As I said, I wrote that very detailed outline, and it was magic from the beginning. I still remember that first meeting, Mulder and Scully meet in his office, and we really, even though there had been some work with them together, and they tested together for the job, we hadn't really seen them with cameras in front of them.

And it was magic from the beginning. Just worked, you know, the rest is history. Tell me more about what you knew about the characters before you met the actors, how you envisioned them, and how you envisioned the show before anything ever happened. Just the idea stage. I have to say, the pilot pretty much approximates my vision. It's about somebody who has absolute faith

in something that he's got no proof of. His sister was abducted. That's the foundation of his faith. And he wants to prove it. And of course he wants to find his sister. So that was, for me, that was his holy grail. If a person's sister is abducted,

it seems reasonable to believe it when it happens in your life. Yes, exactly. It seems perfectly reasonable. Yes. And, you know, he had repressed memories or memories that had been stolen, possibly. Wow. And we recreated that moment at some point early on in the series. Beyond the two characters, what else did you know before you started of what this show was? It's a procedural of some sort. You could call it a genre piece, but it's a synthesized genre piece,

horror, thriller, procedural, it has a mythology, and then it actually, in addition to that, it became a kind of comedy show. And even though there's, I would call it, light comedy in the pilot, it inspired comedic episodes that would appear between the dramatic episodes and the mythology episodes and the horror, these comedy episodes

where Mulder and Scully played broad comedy and somehow the audience would go with you. They would go from this dramatic episode about Mulder's mother and his father and his sister and Scully's mother and father and her sister, you know, very personal stories. And then it's like, oh, let's do a comedy episode here. So the show that you see now, the original 202 episodes was the show that even though it was spawned from the pilot and the character ideas and the concept for the show,

it actually developed a life of its own. Did you have many story ideas in advance of making the pilot or at the time of the pilot, was there just the pilot? I developed a whole, I don't know, what do you call it, a lookbook? I don't know, about what the series was going to be. I actually, it wasn't required, it wasn't demanded of me to do that,

but I just had kind of a marketing sense about how I needed to sell the pilot. And I made up a, you know, photos, episode descriptions, and I wish I had it today because it would be fun to go through it again. Yeah, are X-Files a real thing or is that a made up idea? I had it today because it would be fun to go through it again. Yeah. Are X-Files a real thing? Or is that a made-up idea?

Yeah, a made-up idea. X standing for the unknown. But when I read about the synthetic ritual abuse. It was inspired by something that you knew about. Exactly. But you gave it a name. And I thought that, of course, they would put that unit in the basement

because they were kind of the outcast unit, you know, investigating things that go bump in the night, you know, and originally in the pilot, the cigarette smoking man, this character, becomes the kind of evil genius in the show. He's there to encourage the FBI using Scully to debunk the X-Files so they'll quit looking for what he actually controls, which is the government's knowledge about UFOs. And

simply the overarching concept is the government knows things they're not telling you. And that comes right from my Watergate childhood and Pentagon Papers childhood. And it was of the spirit of the 70s and 80s. And then Ronald Reagan kind of skirted that. But when we got to Clinton, it was the same thing. There was still a mistrust, distrust of the US government. And that's a whole other

story that we could investigate. Yeah, let's do it. It feels like that still goes on now. Without a doubt. Maybe more so than ever. It could be. And, you know, we live in a conspiracy, you know, a wash in conspiracies now. In a world of artificial highs and harsh stimulants, there is something different, something clean,

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Learn more at athleticnicotine.com slash tetra and experience next level performance with athletic nicotine. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Tell me a little bit about the culture at the time that you started the show. What else was going on? What else was on TV? I can tell you what I was up against. From the starting block, there was a show that was being produced by Fox that the guy who ran the network, a guy named Sandy Grushow, was sure that was the hit and we were the also ran.

It was called Briscoe County Junior or the Adventures of Briscoe County Junior and Briscoe County Junior was the name of the character, believe it or not. And that show ended up, it came and went. We outlasted everyone, but I'm trying to think what was on at the time. Stephen Botchko shows were very popular. NYP, Blue, I think was on at the time, or roughly at that time. We had just come off of LA Law if it wasn't still on. Those were the kinds of dramas people were watching.

And this wasn't that different in format, more just in subject matter it was different. Would you say that? Well, it was different in format too. Even though it was a four act structure, everything was a four act structure. everything was a four act structure. So it was similar in that sense. I want to tell you an interesting story

because I'm thinking about that. So the show ended up, I would say, it had a kind of rhythm to it. And I think it was a rhythm unlike anything else on television and we used that four act structure as a lot of people did with cliffhangers at the end of each act. So we made the pilot and they of course need to test it to put it in front of an audience and get the audience reaction. It's a really interesting process. They have people that they've brought in, average folk, TV watchers, and they put them in a room

sitting at a desk with a dial that they can turn. If they like something, they turn it up. If they don't like something, they turn it down. Pretty simple process. And so they're watching on their monitor. We've got a monitor up in our room, and it's got a graph on it because they collected data from the like it or don't like it. And so they start watching the show and they like it, they like it, the graph is going

up and up and up. And all of a sudden, the graph goes down. It's like, oh, no, they don't like that. And then it peaks again, and then it drops again, and it peaks again, oh no, they don't like that. And then it peaks again and then it drops again and it peaks again and then it drops again, peaks again and I'm watching it and I'm realizing, I go through a lot of this, it's really anxiety producing.

I go through it and I realize that's the nature and quality of drama, this tension and release and of music for that matter. And it was like a revelation. It can't just be all 120 miles an hour. It's got to have rest. You have to pull the bow back. Exactly.

Before you release it. And I was an archer, so I actually have an appreciation of that, you know, physical state. Do you think the otherworldly aspects of the show was the thing that most drew people to it? I always say the show became a hit because of David and Julie and Mulder and Scully. The relationship or the characters?

The relationship and the characters. You could tell that they loved each other and they respected each other, but they came at life from completely different angles. And it's that relationship and the tension and the respect. And you know what? It just comes down to that love. It took so long for it to be stated, acted upon. It was the secret sauce for the show, which is sexual tension from characters that you

love and respect. He had tremendous amount of respect for her and she for him. And it was that that gave the show its gravity. Considering their FBI agents in the show, are there any requirements? Like, does the government have to approve your shows? This is a really interesting thing, is I write this pilot and I call up the FBI

and ask them some questions, and they're kind of reluctant to answer my question. Who are you? What are you doing? What's your name? Never heard of you. So they were reluctant to answer my questions originally. And then the show got picked up. And all of a sudden we get a call from the FBI. And who are you? What are you doing? And I thought, oh, no, they're gonna shut us down. The FBI is actually... Could they have shut you down? Of course not.

It was nerve-racking because the FBI were not portrayed necessarily in a good light. But, of course, they didn't shut us down. And soon enough, they became secret fans of the show. And by the time the first season aired, we got invited to Quantico, and we got to... Wow. We got the Jodie Foster treatment, as they call it. So cool. And by the time the first season aired, we got invited to Quantico and we got to... Wow.

And we got the Jodie Foster treatment, as they call it. So cool. Yeah, and actually that, talking about what inspired the show and the idea, and the FBI was, I love Silence of the Lambs. And Scully doesn't have red hair by mistake. That was right from Jodie Foster. So that was, the FBI was of course front and

center for me. Did you ever get to talk to them about what did they like, what they didn't like? Oh yeah, but everything was off the record and I got to meet with people who work in the profiling, you know, just like Claree Starling worked in the behavior of profilers. I got to meet with them, hang out with them. We got to shoot in the firing range. It was like it was Disneyland. That's the way it continued. I became friendly with FBI agents.

I actually took a course at the FBI. So it was an immersion for me. We both benefited mutually because actually people became interested in the FBI. There's something called the Scully effect. And women, predominantly, it changed the course of their lives and their careers. People became scientists, STEM scientists, and even FBI agents because of Agent Scully. And that's actually one of the things I'm most proud of

is that it actually affected people's lives as something other than just entertainment. She demonstrated a different course available. Yes, she did. Would the FBI ever say, hey, you got this wrong, this is how we would do it? Or would you ever contact them and say, hey, this is what's happening.

Yeah. How would you guys handle this? It's more like that, that we would say, what would you do if, what would you do if. You know, the show, I always say, without Scully, without the skeptic, the show wouldn't have made it. All the science fiction is based on real science.

And we were rigorous about making the science absolutely real, and it came from a lot of research on our part, before the internet, where we would actually go to scientists and say, what if this, this, and this? And the show is based on those two words, what if. What if this science could be proven to be this science fiction? So Scully is the anchor for the show

and Mulder is the person who is being pulled back from outer space. So many of the subjects covered in the show at the time seemed so way out and unbelievable and so many of them have come to pass in the world, remarkably so. Yeah, it's crazy. The first big one was clones. When they cloned that sheep Dolly, we were playing clones were science fiction, all of a sudden it wasn't the case anymore. And there are so many things like that in the show.

Yeah, nanobots, things that now, that you read about in the paper now, you were talking about 30 years ago. Yeah, exactly. AI. Yeah. Although AI has been around a really long time.

Where would all of those potential future ideas come from to make it into the show and then to make it into the world? Yeah. You hire a group of people, really talented people, which is the secret to the success of the show and secret to my success. It's based on the smart, talented, good work of a select group of people who had good ideas and who made the show what it is. And they, you know, the writers come in, it's not like they're just doing your concept. They are recreating, developing your concept.

And it so happened that I either hired or was suggested that I hired just the right people to make it work. And... Would they do research as well? Yes. Because it's not just like made up fiction. No.

It always seems like it's rooted in some... It is. Something. Yes, it's rooted in science or it's rooted in conspiracies. It's rooted in, you know, just like satanic ritual abuse. I had a neighbor growing up who believed, this young woman, that she had been subjected by her family to satanic ritual abuse.

Things like that. Someone told me I had a dream. I saw a ghost. You know, a lot of it was pulled from thin air like that. Have you ever had a metaphysical experience in your life? Well, I'd like to say I haven't, but like anyone who's experienced kismet, serendipity, coincidence, deja vu, I've had all those things and I have thoughts about that too. It was a long time or many episodes before we ever saw an ET.

Yeah. The law was laid down by me that we are not going to see an alien for five years. Of course, we saw an alien first episode of season two. Because clearly on the show, we get the impression they're aliens, but by not seeing them, there's always this doubt. Yes, exactly. And was the plan to keep that as long as possible?

Keep it as long as possible. And like all the rules I laid down, everyone broke them freely. How did it change once you see an alien? Yeah. It's really a different show, no? It is. And I was given very good advice,

and I've spoken about this since the beginning, that one of the reasons this show succeeded is a conversation I had with a man named Rick Carter, no relation, but 40-year-old friendship, and now an Academy Award-winning production designer. But he was a has-been, Steven Spielberg, among other top directors Award winning production designer, but he was, has been Steven Spielberg, among other top directors there, production designer. And when I wrote the pilot, I gave it to him to read.

He had just done 44 episodes of a Spielberg series called Amazing Stories. And they had worked, you know, 22 episodes in a season and they were all different. So no standing sets, you know, 22 episodes in a season and they were all different, so no standing sets, you know, just, it's really hard to do what they had done. Then the show was canceled after the second season and that was right when I gave him the ex-Files pilot and he read it and he said, I like this.

He says, I'm gonna give you some really good advice. He says, you're not gonna have any time or any money. So put all the scary stuff in the shadows. Let us imagine the scary stuff and you're gonna get a lot of mileage and you're actually gonna be able to produce the show. And that was such sage advice. It really saved us

because they always stack the odds against you because they know, you know, in their hearts you're gonna fail. You know, most things fail, but that advice really set the path that we started on and the cinematography became dark, which is great for the the feel and atmosphere of the show. We were in Vancouver, which has free atmosphere. Everything contributed to that cinematic experience that was scarier by what you imagined than by what you saw. Yeah, our imagination is much wilder

than anything you can show on the screen. Always, yes. So if you imply it, everyone gets to make their own scary monster. Exactly. That's the secret to movie making right there. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy,

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You've got to be bold. To kill off a popular character is kind of shooting yourself in the foot. But we did that. We would put characters everyone came to know and love. And at the end of the first season, for example, there's a character named Deep Throat, and he dies at the end, and his last dying words are, trust no one.

And it became a kind of, you know, that was the hook. What was his character? He was Deep Throat. He was like Deep Throat in- In the Watergate story. In the Watergate story, In the Watergate story, All the Press Knows its Man, which continues to be a movie I watch every year.

Yeah. What is remarkable about that movie to me is everyone knows the outcome of that movie when you sit down to watch it. And yet it's still riveting. Yeah. It's an intense experience. And I wanted to bring that experience to the show too.

One of the stars gets pregnant in real life and I imagine you weren't expecting that. No. And how do you deal with that? It's funny. It was really a fork in the road. I had a network executive say to me, you've got a fire. You got to replace her. We can't have a pregnant actress on the show

who plays a chaste scientist. And when the people spending the money are giving you the orders and that's the way it works, you have to take it seriously. Anyway, I told them I didn't want to get rid of her. I thought I'd make her disappear with a storyline. And sure enough, I was able to have Scully abducted. And we had to shoot around her pregnancy for a time.

I remember I did a scene where she's at a supermarket checking out and something happens with the scanner or something paranormal happens. And we just hid her behind all the stuff at the counter. You could only see her head sticking out? You could only see her head, exactly. Was that a common thing where things would happen in real life and it would impact what was possible to do?

Yeah, and that's the big one, is that with skullase abduction, it really changed the big one, is that with Scully's abduction, it really changed the way the mythology developed. And you were never planning on that originally. No, that just happened. We had to figure it out on the fly. Yeah. It's part of the mystery of doing what we do

and of doing what you do, is discovery and accident and revolutionary things on the show that change your mind. That said, and this is another rabbit hole, when the show got to be like in season seven or so, and we had this mythology, and the mythology was really the way to deal

with Mulder and Scully's personal lives and their relationship and their relationship to Mulder's sister's's personal lives and their relationship and their relationship to Mulder's sister's abduction among other things. That's what Scully believes and what she's seen. We did a movie in year five of the show and it just so happens that Scully is lying in the snow and ice when a UFO takes up and of course she's turned away. She's indisposed, and she turns away, and she never sees the spaceship. So it's stuff like that that we played with.

But I was going to say that in like season seven, I realized that the stories almost start telling themselves. Because you've laid down so much foundation that the shape of the building is dedicated to what you've already laid out. Would you ever look back to old episodes to find loose threads that you could continue? Yes, and there were keepers of that faith. Frank Spotnitz came to work on the, we were in the same book club early on. He was writing for Entertainment Weekly. I hired him in season two of the show

and we became kind of keepers of the mythology and would do roughly four mythology shows a season. So those would be personal shows based on Yes. their backstories and their relationship. And their relationship, but also on what the government knew and wasn't telling us about aliens and UFOs. Yeah.

Did the scientist ever have a metaphysical experience during the course of the show? Oh, yeah. Yeah. At one point, we switched it. So she became the believer and he became the skeptic. Very interesting. Yeah, and it was a big moment and a big direction change. Yeah.

And how did it impact her to become a believer? What's that like when someone is a person of science and who gets shown something that they can't believe? Yeah. What happens? And it's almost like, you know, not believing your own eyes. Yeah. Yeah.

So she did believe her own eyes before she questioned whether what she saw was actually what she saw. She's a scientist at heart. And we can go into what she saw and what it's all about. And actually, I'm gonna to jump forward with you here just a little bit. The last two seasons of the show,

we did I think six episodes and then 10 episodes, came back to do what they called season 11 and season 12, even though during the first nine years of the show, we would typically do 22 to sometimes 25 episodes a season. It was a lot. Anyway, but we came back and we did these episodes and I was a big fan of the Nausgard My Struggle books. I love them. There are a number of them and they are detailed accounts of this guy Nausgard's life. I just loved them. So I decided to do four episodes called My Struggle. It

was Mulder's Struggle, Scully's Struggle, The Cigarette Smoking Man, The Evil Villain's Struggle, and then the struggle of Mulder and Scully's son. They actually have a baby together and they end up having to give the baby away to keep it safe. And that baby has grown to a young man. And that reunion was long hoped for by X-Files fans. So I wanted to deal with that at the very end of the show. And so through those four episodes, which are, continue to be largely misunderstood, I developed possibly what is the biggest idea

that The X-Files has ever posited. And I'll tell you that it's going to affect... The X-Files is about to be rebooted. Really? Yes, by this guy Ryan Coogler, you know, very successful movie director. Has a movie in the theaters right now called Centersners, big hit. He's going to do it, he wants to do it with a diversity cast, but he's got something to deal with that he's not aware of yet and that is that

Scully's character will come to know shortly something that will not only change the course of her life, career, biology, but the course of all of our lives and for generations to come. So it's a big idea that I built in and I laid it out sparingly and kind of cryptically and vaguely, but at the very end, I lay in a clue that to this day, I think four years later, no one has figured out. And so I'm really looking forward to the revelation.

And you know, I think- So there's a clue hanging out there. There's a clue hanging out there. That no one's picking up on. Yes. But that leads to a very big story coming. Very big. It's amazing.

That's amazing. Yeah. Do you think about this all the time? I think about it. Every time I read something, I think, that's interesting. It's everything, how it is. Yeah. And your book spells it out.

It's a nature of art and artists. And given clues everywhere we look. You know, all you do is open your eyes. You know, driving down the street, you know, be a careful driver like I am, but look around. Yeah. You know, just open your eyes to life and the world. And you know, I just, I walk outside every night

and look at the stars. I make notes. I have to force myself to make notes because I always think I have a great memory. Yeah. And it's not as good as I'd like it to be. I find if I don't write things down that it's gone. Sometimes I even write it down and then don't know what it means later. That's how gone it is.

Was it difficult to keep up with the number of stories you needed? You said 22 to 25 per season. That's a tremendous amount of stories. How do you do that? Really, it's only standing set is Mulder's office at the FBI. And so that means you are on the road, creating everything.

Everything. Yeah, everything's from scratch. Everyone was a little movie unto itself. So that was hard. And once again, I hired just the right people or they those people came into my life and directors were all important to our success and there are four of them that you know I wouldn't I wouldn't say they're as responsible as anyone on the show for the success of the show. That's not always the case with TV. It is not.

They're guns for hire mostly. Would like director one work on this week and then director two work on the next week? And so director one would end up coming back for the fifth, something like that? Yes. It worked kind of like that, where they hopped over each other. Would shows be in production all the time?

Yes. You know, you never had enough scripts to begin. I worked 11 and a half months a year. And if I wasn't writing those extra two weeks on vacation, I was already behind. There's a famous Rod Serling quote where he says, if I drop my pencil, I'm two weeks behind. How great was Rod Serling?

You know, that's the TV we grew up on. Yeah. Genius. Genius. Brilliant. Does the government ever turn on the agents over the course of the series? Yes.

And it's all part of the plan. I call them evil geniuses. Kurt Anderson wrote a book called Evil Geniuses, came out a few years ago. It's excellent. And it really, for me, says a lot about what I was trying to imagine and build into the show for decades. Kurt Anderson makes a very factual case for this. Where we are today has been in progress for decades. And that this moment in time is the realization of a lot of really careful, drawn out processes

with a lot of people who don't necessarily want the best for all of us. Tell me more about that book. I never heard of it. It's a wonderful book. Kurt Anderson, he was with Graydon Carter, the co-creator of Spy Magazine. I knew about him. He was very instrumental in my life as a young writer. He wrote a book called The Real Thing. And I think he had been a member of the Harvard Lampoon. He was very funny and acerbic,

and it was just the kind of tone I wanted to develop my own writing. And so I read that book. I loved it, and I'm sure I pulled from it. So highly unlikely, or I should say it was completely out of the blue, we won a Golden Globe award. And I'm being interviewed at the ceremony after we won,

and someone, a reporter said to me, compare the Golden Globes to the Emmys. I said, well, you know, it's the same thing. It's Hollywood ballots and et cetera, which I wasn't fudging, but it's the Hollywood foreign press who votes for the movies on the Golden Globes, and it's your peers who vote for the Emmys. So I was quoted somewhere,

and I think in the New Yorker, Kurt Anderson ringed me. He said, with this quote, he obviously, I don't know what I'm talking about, blah, blah, blah. So I took it upon myself to call Kurt Anderson, this guy who I admired and now has taken me down. And I said to him, and I just want to talk to you about that piece, I said, because I've been a fan of yours for a long time

and I'm gonna prove it to you. And I said to him on the phone, I said, horrid yellow grubs colonize my rice bowl, elders knowing smirks. That was the real thing, haiku in his book. I had carried it with me. I remembered that haiku. And we ended up talking about having lunch.

We never did it, but it was a real memorable moment for me. What was the Syndicate? The Syndicate is the group of evil geniuses that the cigarette smoking man is one of the leaders, he was part of the hierarchy, who are keeping the secret and in league. Do they work for the government or no? Yes, they do, but of course,

there's something called above top secret, which is where they would be. They are in league with the aliens and the colonists and about what the aliens have plans for. And that figure, I was telling you about this big idea I have for the show, that is part and parcel. Are the government in on everything in the stories? Is there anything that the government doesn't know about

or isn't involved in? For example, the president wouldn't know about a lot of what the cigarette smoking man is doing. That is that above top secret. The idea that... But it's still the government. It is still the government, right? It's not like some corporate hierarchy outside of the government.

No, although we teased that. Glenn Morgan, one of the amazing people that came to work on the show, he and his partner, James Wong, wrote some of the best episodes, ended up directing some of the best episodes. He actually played with this idea, which is really kind of ripped from the headlines, that we now not only fight wars with our military, we hire these corporate mercenaries, and they go out and they do this work and they don't necessarily have to operate under the same rules and regulations that our military has

to operate under. So they are a kind of renegade. Ingeos. Yes, ingeos, exactly. That works its way into real life too. It's amazing. How important was it for each episode to stand on its own as opposed to being this gets you along in the story? So if we did 22 to 25 episodes a season and we only did four mythologies,

all the rest are standalone stories. And we did what became to be known as monster of the week episode. So, you know, most episodes stand on their own. And who's Ted O'Malley? Ted O'Malley is the stand in for Alex Jones. Really? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, not in real life, but he, he, he's based on Alex Jones. Yeah. Would you get ideas from listening to Alex's show? Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, not in real life, but he, he, he's based on Alex Jones. Yeah. Would you get ideas from listening to Alex's show? Oh yeah. Of like what the, yeah. Yeah. In fact, when after that season, I got a call from Alex Jones.

He says, Hey, you did a character like me. You want to get together? And, uh, I was busy. Oh, too bad. Probably make a really good story. Would have. LMNT. Element Electrolytes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best?

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Yeah. Then all of a sudden, the network decides to put you on Sunday nights. Yeah. Why does that happen? How do you feel about it? Yeah. What's going on?

It's a good question. How I felt about it was I felt I was against it. Yeah. I had made a joke. I said, my autobiography is going to be called Fridays of Nine. So it's like I loved our time slot. It was. It worked.

It worked. It was the perfect show on the perfect night. That's not a night where a lot of people are watching TV. There aren't a lot of available. People are creatures of habit. They are and everyone goes out on Friday night. So they didn't give us the most coveted time slot to begin with, but I felt it was. It worked. It worked. It was our time slot. And when they came to me and said they want to put a

sundae, I'm thinking that's where the Disney shows are. Sunday night is like a big family night. I was like, we're a cult show. I don't want to be a Sunday show. It just had a kind of cotton candy feel to me. But I listened to them and their reasoning, which was not unpersuasive. And the show went to Sunday nights. And the great thing about that is a cult show grew into a big culture.

Really? Yeah. So the audience followed. The audience followed and it grew even more. New audience, right. Also one of those things where- It could have gone either way. It could have gone either way. Tell me about the international nature of the show.

You did shows in different parts of the world. Yeah. There's lots of stories about aliens in different parts of the world. There's a thing called the Tunguska incident, which was in Russia, a UFO incident. And so of course, we went to Tunguska, Russia in the show and played that out, made that part of the mythology. So UFOs, sightings, incidents, abductions have taken place around the world.

And so it's still amazing to me that we have this international audience for the show, that someone, Kumail Nanjiani, the actor who we ended up working with, told me that he is like every Friday night, he and his family watch it in Pakistan. You know, it's like you hear that, it's like, really? You got it in Pakistan, but you know, it had a global reach. It also speaks to the nature of when you're dealing with things that are otherworldly or metaphysical, that's not bound to our culture.

Right. That's a universal human interest. You're exactly right. And that was just luck. Yeah. Although that Roper survey that that psychologist friend gave me really spelled out in scientific terms, what percentage of the population

actually believed in the phenomenon? Yeah. At one point we find out one of the main characters has cancer. Where did the idea come from and why did you decide to go in that direction? It had to do with Scully's abduction and what had been done to her or what we didn't know quite yet what had been done to her or what we didn't know quite yet what had been done to her. And that alien intervention or exposure had possibly produced the cancer,

but also possibly cured the cancer. So it was really just taking something that had happened. This is where the story starts telling itself and capitalizing on it. You said after the fifth season you do a movie. Yes. Where does the idea come to do a movie? David Duchovny said,

because there had been talk about doing a movie. What can you do in a movie that you can't do on TV? Well, what you can do is you get, instead of a $3 million budget, you get a $75 million budget. So it's a bigger production. It's a big screen approach. And the story you tell has to have that kind of big screen scope.

It's got to do something that catapults the show into a new orbit. And that's the plan. But David had come to me and he says, look, there's talk about this movie, but if you're not going to do it, tell me because I'm going to go off and do something else. So I thought it's a better idea to do

the movie than it was to not do the movie. It ended up, so the whole season four, I have written the movie script. We are prepping the movie script through season four of the show. We're still in Vancouver, and I have a second show on TV. So we are prepping a movie, and I have another show that has 22 episodes a year.

It was, I still don't know how I survived, it was the hardest year of work in my life, especially the way I did the work. I'll tell you just quickly also, it's not micromanagement, it's obsession with the show and its success and the storytelling and everything about it. Because, you know, I was, I tried to involve myself in everything. In the end, it was important to the show, but it was also not necessarily a healthy way to live your life. Yeah. What was the black oil? What was the black oil? That was my idea that we've got this product living beneath us that we use with abandon, and it's ancient. And in that substance, which we think of as fuel, there lives something that predates us,

and I thought that was like the aliens themselves. Yeah. And just came to you? Yeah. That idea? Yeah. It's a great idea. I was mentioning that big idea that I was talking about

that I laid in through the last two seasons. Actually, part of that, I just had another conversation, it's an ongoing conversation with my brother, about existence. My brother who teaches physics, math is a big part of his life. And we always have this conversation about, are we creating math or are we discovering math?

And I'm for me, it's a no brainer for me too. No brainer. Very clear. Yeah. It's the universe. Yeah. And we are just discoverers. Math is mapping something that we experience. Yes.

But it isn't creating it. Right. It's just a way to describe it. Exactly. Yeah. but it isn't creating it. It's just a way to describe it. Exactly. That math is some other, call it a higher power, call it God, call it whatever you want to call it, the universe, Mother Nature. And intelligence. And intelligence, that's the even better way to put it, is out there, it has created math. You could say that I just saw a play about Rachmaninov,

that Rachmaninov was discovering that music. Yes. I just love that idea. Yes. That we are discoverers. Yes. I... We're not truly creators.

Right. We're recognizing things around us. Yes. And I think the word I used in the book was either reproducing it or representing it. Yes. We are the filter then. Yeah.

We can put a frame on it and share it and say, hey, look at this. Yes. But we're saying, hey, look at the rain. Yeah. We're not creating the rain. Yes. Right.

We're pointing to it. Right, yeah. But my bigger idea, in part, and it's a part of where I was going with my mythology episodes, is that I wanna take it a large step further. I wanna say that there's this music of the spheres, this idea that the planets are in alignment as such,

and it is a musical chord of sorts, that we are seeing a shape of our solar system that may actually predict the shapes of everything else in our universe. I don't know that this is not untrue, even though it's kind of unfounded. Is that I wonder if everything, every potentiality, every possibility is out there.

And it's, we are simply living our lives based on our finding the best potential outcomes, expressions, et cetera, that the universe has some kind of beauty to it like that that the aliens know. Beautiful. That's what the aliens know, is they know those things. And that's why we can't seem to, you know, we see them, but we can't, they know things that we don't know.

I love the idea of the music of the spheres and the idea of harmony being the thing that, I don't know if locks it together is the right word, but you know, if you hear someone singing and then someone comes in and singing a harmony note and they're sharp or flat, when they lock in, something happens and they vibrate together. We could feel it in our bones.

Right, I believe it. Tell me about working with the network. Were they helpful? Did they get in the way? What's good about having a partner like that and what's bad about it? The bad thing is early on, as I was saying, they anticipate your failure.

So they're very micromanaging, hands-on, nervousness can be- Undermining or not really? Not undermining. Certainly not intentionally. Not intentionally. No, they want it to be done. Just doing their job.

And these people have jobs and their job is to, they're executives to make executive decisions. But luckily we were with a, we were with a, we were talking about Fox was a new network. We were breaking some new ground. We were doing okay. So they, you know, eventually came to the conclusion that we knew what we were doing.

And so that developed through the first three seasons of the show. Season three may be one of the best seasons of the show. And so everyone was riding high and go get them and... Did it take all the way to season three before they were trusting of you, would you say? No, I mean, we had a lot of trust and a lot of goodwill and that's because there are a lot of really good people who worked At the network and the studio who were part of the

Shepherding process so we were really lucky in that sense, but we got to season 3 and we we had momentum and in season 4 the team of Glenn Morgan and James Wong came back, they had a show on that didn't go in the end, and they came back to the show, and they did an episode called Home. And this is maybe one of the most popular episodes ever on the show.

And it's scary as hell. What's the subject matter? It's mutant kids who probably were having sex with their mother and... We don't know that for sure. We can surmise it. Okay. So inbreeding.

Killers, inbreeding. And it's a great episode. The I don't know how we got to pass the what they call standards and practices at the in-house sensors but because they believed we knew what we were doing by season four it's like okay you guys you know you know better than we you know what that is drawing an audience. What the line is. Yes. So the episode made it past all the checkpoints and it aired.

And the day after it aired, I got a phone call from the guy who hired me originally, Peter Roth, screaming at me, never again. And that episode will never air again. You've gone too far. And, you know, it's like, it started the process all over again. So now, all of a sudden, we were being watched carefully because we had upset somebody in New York.

So, you know, it was, you know, a turning point in the show. We had to be much more careful about, and the censors that you can imagine, you know, were also given their orders to watch for our shenanigans. But you also said it was the most popular episode of the show. Eventually it became the most popular. So it's like-

Because it was too scary for network television is what it was. And we had of the show. Eventually it became the most popular. Yeah, so it's like- Because it was too scary for network television is what it was. And we had broken the rules. When you were doing it, did it feel intentional on your part or no? Did it just feel like this is just a good episode? They pitched it to me in its kind of rough plot points. We did very detailed storyboards and we,

I mean, extremely detailed and that came. Almost like watching an episode. It is like watching an episode. It's with three by five cards, but it's a mosaic, isn't it? Drawings? No, it's all handwritten descriptions of scenes. I see.

And there were no visuals though. No visuals, no. Words. Words. And they pitched it to me in very, much rougher shape and form than I was used to. But by season four, these guys had written some of the best episodes of the show.

They knew what they were doing. I knew they knew what they were doing. So they pitched to me a rough idea and it was based on a documentary called My Brother's Keeper, which I liked. And so, you know, run with it. You know what you're doing. It makes my job easier that I can take care of other business. Anyway, the show, as I said, caused a lot of trouble. We did a second movie, and the second movie, they were going to give us a third of the budget of the first movie, and we were going to do what was, in essence, a standalone episode of the show in movie form,

and they would give us, you know, a small budget to do that. And so that sounded like an opportunity for me. It was 2008, the show had been out there for six years. Let's revive it and do something good. And they said, we want a PG-13 movie. I said, you know, it's no problem because network television basically is PG-13. I said, you know, it's no problem because network television basically is PG-13. It was a really hard and painful lesson to learn is that a PG rating is actually less

permissive than network television standards. Wow. And so when I've turned in the first cut of the show to the studio, not dissimilar to the call that I had gotten about Never Again, I got a very angry talking to by the studio executive saying, you've gone too far, this is too much, you've gotta cut this back, this is not a PG-13,

this is not a family movie. And I co-wrote and directed the movie. And so it was a big surprise and kind of ugly. And so we had to go cut the movie. In your mind, those were all things that you could have done on the TV show without it being a problem? Probably pushing the limits in some ways, but it's a movie. And so, you know, you want a big screen experience.

So, you know, we trimmed the movie, and then as predicted by this guy, this executive, we ran it in front of the censors, the people that rate movies, and they said, no, cut it back even farther. You've got to make this for a more limited audience. And it hurt the movie. For sure.

And I can tell you today that I just got permission to do a director's cut of the movie. That's great news. Big news. That's great news. What was the story of the first movie? The story of the first movie is a mythology episode about experiments being conducted,

but that there also is a natural component to the abduction of people that involves a virus, and it's communicated through bee stings. And it's a complicated episode that takes us to the Arctic where there's an underground base where abductees are being held in suspended animation. And it's just playing with the mythology and the characters' relationships.

Was there anything on the show ever predictive of the pandemic? Yes. Tell me about that. In the first reboot of the movie, only a few years ago, she was the chief science advisor for the series originally, and she gave me a lot of science that the show ended up being based on.

She's a virologist from the University of Maryland. She is the daughter of my wife's longtime friends. So it was one of those things where the Human Genome Project was taking shape. I had met really interesting people, but she knew about it in-depth and she knew the science. She had given me that episode idea for the science for the final episode me that episode idea for the science

for the final episode of the first season called the Erlenmeyer Flask. And that will figure in this big idea that I keep teasing for the show, it figures in there. But Anne came back to the show as our science advisor, chief science advisor, and she and another woman, a doctor from Canada, convinced me that we needed to do an episode about a pandemic.

And we did. We did a pandemic episode before the pandemic. Wow. Amazing. It is. It's like, you know, you say in your book, you know, some ideas are... It's time for it to happen. It's time for it to happen. It's time for it to happen. Yeah.

Was it common for science advisors to pitch you ideas on possible stories? No. Had that ever happened before? Yes. But no, we actually didn't take pitches from people. It was, I thought, a recipe for unhappiness. And so all the episode ideas were in-house.

She would really comment on our science. She would help lead us in directions, but it wasn't an idea. It wasn't a pitch. It wasn't ever a pitch. Who else besides the science and FBI people would say, when you would give them the examples and they would say, well, you could consider this. Were there any other people like in the orbit,

either story people or comedians or anyone that would like a way to involve more ideas? We were rich with ideas. So I have to say no. I was part of a really great team. And sometimes it didn't work. And there are breakdowns, there are miscues. But the group of writers that worked on the show,

the group of producers that worked on the show, made it the show that it became. We grew up with the internet. The show started pre-internet. It started kind of with the internet. We were both growing up together, really, because we would go into chat rooms, Glenn Morgan more so than I, and get the feedback. If the show aired from nine to ten, at ten o'clock he would hear feedback from fans. Describe the audience.

You know, it's largely women. And it has a lot to do with the relationship, I think. But I was still reading, opening envelopes with fan mail. And I opened one and it was a woman who gave me a critique of the show that I took to heart. What she liked about it, what she didn't like about it. I love this. She convinced me we had something,

but we had to focus on these things. It was kind of that. When did this come? When in the trajectory? It came at the end of the first season. So she had watched 20-odd episodes. And I read it, and I thought, she's right. It didn't leave me in a direction.

It just told me what to focus on. Yeah. It almost was like she was commenting on the spirit of the show, what made it an exciting show for her and It's not that I had forgotten those things or that they were new to me, but it was just her Encouragement that Struck me and so I named a character after her in the season finale great that episode And so I named a character after her in the season finale. That episode, if you watch the pilot, the first episode called Deep Throat and the Erlenmeyer

flask at the end, basically that is the foundation for the entire mythology of the show. Wow. Yeah. The show was filmed in Vancouver for many years and then moved to LA? Yes. Why'd you move? The actors wanted to come home. It was like they had been on location for five years,

and they wanted to, you know, be with their friends. How did that impact the show, do you think? I thought it was a good thing. It's among the reasons the show was successful was it was made in Vancouver. It could double for almost anywhere in the US and the shows took place across the US. It had free atmosphere most of the year.

It had the personnel who are completely invested in the show from a PA to a grip to a best boy To sound production sound mixer like a family family was in it and I tell people they say how did you do it? And why did you do it for so long? For me, I always give the same answer It was that a sprit of core if you don't have that sense that everyone is working together, and as I say that in the back of my brain, it says don't forget about this, is that along the way

saboteurs may be too strong a term, but there are people who don't necessarily have your best interests at heart. Yeah. And that was the case there in Vancouver? No, it wasn't actually. I don't want to be cryptic about it, but it was... Cryptic's your game. I know, cryptic is my game. That's what you do.

No, it was just the craziness of producing a TV show. We're in the dramatic arts, and I tell people this. I was on the board of the local theater in Santa Barbara, and I loved the artistic director, and they decided to get rid of him because they had gotten complaints that he was too hard to work with. And I said, we work in the dramatic arts,

you deal with dramatic people. These are people who live passionately and have passionate reactions. Temporamental. Temporamental, by nature. Exactly, they express themselves. You know, they wanted somebody who was controllable. Well, I say the same thing about

what I'm vaguely referring to, is that it's the dramatic arts. You have dramatic people, people that can cause dramas and not necessarily ones that make the show any better. You said you left a clue at the end of the last episode that's leading towards something big coming in the future. Yeah. Did you put that clue there knowing something something was going to come in the future?

Yes. How did you know that? I just thought the X-Files could go on forever. Yeah, and it will. Like in your mind, if this is an ongoing thing, regardless of whatever business situations or the story goes on. Yes, the story goes on in my mind and I hope in reality. Were there decisions that you made

that you thought were important that turned out to be inconsequential and the opposite? Any things that you thought didn't really matter that turned out to mean a whole lot? Terms of storylines and plots. I wanna say that there are episodes that came about that changed the course of the show. And I'm going to tell you that there are episodes, but I have to tie them to individual writers

like Vince Gilligan, who went on to develop Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He had his own brand of X-File that really changed the course of the show. So that was a good hire. It was also somebody he just left alone. When did he come in? What season? He came in, I think season, like maybe late season too.

It was one of those lucky things. We're talking about keep your eyes open, keep your antenna trained. The man who wrote and directed Risky Business, Paul Brickman, was a friend. And years before The X-Files, he told me about a writer who had written a movie, and the movie was not a hit. But he said, this guy, he's the real deal and his name is Vince Gilligan.

And I remembered it. And so at some point I realized through my agent, who also represented Vince Gilligan, that he liked the show. He was a fan of the show. So Vince came in and talked to us one day and we kind of convinced him to write an episode. That episode led to, I think, seven plus years on the show. Amazing.

And changed the course of the show. But there were other people who similarly affected the course of the show. He would write episodes and they were big kind of comedy episodes with Frank Spontanez, who I already mentioned, and John Scheiband. Those three would write episodes together that ended up creating a conquered territory on the show.

As the show got more popular, was it easier to draft really talented writers? No. Tell me about that. It was a hard show to write. Yeah. And we blew through some notable writers, but then there are people who just dug in

and gave it their all. And I'm still friendly with these people. They made us a success. What was the lone gunman? That came from the team of Morgan and Wong. They did an episode where they had, I think maybe Glenn, maybe both of them had gone to a UFO convention and seen these guys who had this kind of conspiracy, and I'm probably doing this a big disservice

because it probably didn't happen exactly like this. Whatever it was they saw at that convention, they brought it forward with these guys, the lone gunman, had a tabloid called the lone gunman about the Kennedy assassination. They became known as the lone gunman, but the paper was called the lone gun man. Anyway, they became very important to the show

in storytelling sense, because they were people out there on the fringes of the phenomena. Is it true there was an episode about a plane flying into the World Trade Center? Yes. How is that possible? It wasn't on the X-Files. It was on a spinoff called World Trade Center. Yes. How is that possible? It wasn't on the X-Files.

It was on a spin-off called The Lone Gunman. But still, how is that possible? It's too specific. We weren't the first people to actually suggest this. The actual, the World Trade Center was designed to take an airplane strike. Really? But a small airplane, not a jetliner.

So it wasn't that it wasn't out there as a suggestion or thought or a concern. So we just capitalized on that. What are some of the wildest plot lines you can remember that were actually based on stories that were true? It's hard to answer that. I'll give you an answer by telling you something that is somewhat embarrassing. You know, we're talking about a show

that is over 30 years old. Yeah, and hundreds of episodes. So it's impossible to track. Several hundred, yes. And so anyway, my wife and I decided a couple summers ago to watch the show again from the beginning. And it was mind-blowing. Great experience?

Great experience. Yeah. But I would be asked a number of times during each episode, how did you do that? And my answer, common answer was, I don't remember. Yeah. So a lot of- Would you be surprised by anything you saw on the show or no?

Typically no, because I was involved in every episode to some lesser or greater degree. So I lived and breathed the show. So no, they weren't surprising to me, but it was almost sometimes like watching the show for the first time. It was wonderful. Probably in many ways, it was like watching the show

for the first time for real, because when you're so involved in making it, you can't really see it with eyes like an audience member. And you are pointing up something that was one of these lightning bolt moments. We did that first movie in season at the end of four, beginning of five we made that movie. And I had for five years roughly before the movie premiered

been watching the show at home with my wife. And a couple times I went out in Vancouver on Friday nights, a bar started showing me. And people came to the bar, it was great. And I got to sit with them and that was really exciting. But generally, I watched the show in the editing room. So at the premiere of the first movie, I decided to go up to the balcony

and watch the show from the balcony. One of the reasons I am doing what I am doing today and chose my career is I went to see Apocalypse Now on one of its first nights. And I loved it. I loved it. And there's a scene where Frederick Forrest is in the jungle and a tiger leaps out. It's one of the big scare, big scare. And so when I saw the movie that night,

I went home to San Clemente, whatever that is, 80 miles, and decided I wanted to go back the next night to see the movie again. Wow. So I drove to the center of the dome to see the movie again. But I knew the tiger was going to jump out. So where did I turn my perspective?

To the audience. I wanted to watch everyone jump. And in fact, that's what everyone did. And I said, this is powerful. I want to do this. Wow. That balcony experience with the X-Files movie was similar to that, where I got to look down and see,

are they laughing at the right point? Are they jumping at the right point? Are they scared? It was really satisfying. That's great. Would you call The X-Files sci-fi or no? Yes. And what?

I resisted it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's, Steven Spielberg always said that close encounters were speculative science. It's great. Yeah. So I went with that. That's was speculative science. It's great. Yes, so I went with that. Yeah, that's good.

That's what I said. That's great. Do you think of it as a political show? Yes. How has the world changed since the X-Files? That's a good question. I can tell you that the show ended in 2002, and that's very close to 2001, which is a very important turning point in the history

of Planet Earth. Everyone loved the conspiracy, idea that there was a conspiracy and that the government was not acting in your best interests. And when 9-11 happened, overnight, the government was there to protect us. And we believe that the government was protecting us. We believed it or we wanted to believe it? We wanted to believe it because we don't anymore. We think that, in fact, that's changed.

And, you know, that now it's, you know, called the Deep State or whatever it is. But it gave us a clear chance to leave. Would you connect the show ending in 9-11 as somehow related? Yes. Wow. Is it possible the X-Files is actually nonfiction? Yes. It is possible, and it has to do with science. Because the show is based on what if, sometimes the what if becomes.

If, it is, is. It is, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tetragrammaton is a podcast. Tetragrammaton is a website. Tetragrammaton is a whole world of knowledge. What may fall within the sphere of tetragrammaton? Counterculture? Tetragrammaton. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammaton.

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