The X-Files: I Want to Believe Cut to the Truth

“I’m done chasing monsters in the dark.”

That’s former FBI agent Dana Scully speaking in the trailer for the new franchise feature film The X-Files: I Want to Believe, pretty much guaranteeing an imminent run of chasing, monsters, and darkness. But until very recently, the words might just as easily have been spoken by X-Files series creator Chris Carter. It’s been six years since the last X-Files TV show aired, ten since Fight the Future, the first X-Files movie opened. And according to Carter himself, the search for the Truth very nearly stopped there.

“There was a time when I was happy to just look back at the good work that we’d done and move ahead to more good work,” he says “But I was convinced by my colleagues Frank Spotnitz and David Duchovny that there was a great movie to be made, and that the time was right. And while I wasn’t against it, they really helped push me in the direction of making the movie.”

That sounds a little like an X-Files plot point, with echoes of a despondent Mulder being encouraged by Scully to carry on his quest. And it’s not the only instance of X-resonance in the making of Carter’s new film, which involved extreme secrecy pacts; ominous deadlines; a mysteriously lost story; the fortuitous un-retirement of a wise editor; the helpful emergence of a technology wizard; an unstoppable conspiracy of Macs; and a harmonic convergence of suits and creatives around Final Cut Studio.

Backstory

Fox approached Carter and co-producer/writer Frank Spotnitz about making a second X-Files movie in 2002. But the project was afflicted with serial delays: conflict with the TV schedule; fatigue from same; legal issues over TV rights; and scheduling conflicts with the stars. “I thought this would never happen,” says Spotnitz. “Then in January 2007 they resolved the dispute and literally the next day the movie was back on.”

Both Carter and the studio had taken notice of the efforts of hardcore fans who’d rented billboard space and taken out ads in the trade papers to say they wanted to see another movie. “Fox felt that there was a window for it, and that that window was now,” says Carter. “So really we made this movie for the fans. But we also realized that if this was going to be not the last movie, we had to make it also for people who might not be as familiar with the show.”

They settled on doing a “monster” show, in the tradition of the standalone scary TV episodes that made up almost two-thirds of the TV show’s run, rather than pursuing a “mythology” story arc that featured aliens and cover-ups. “We set up to tell a very scary story using two characters who we would introduce you to, without that introduction being a burden on the hardcore fans,” says Carter. “We integrated that introduction into the story line. We tried to create a good thriller, a mystery, call it science fiction. It works on all those levels, and it also works as an X-File.”