Six years after the culmination of the mammoth nine-year phenomenon that was The X-Files, its creator, Chris Carter, had more to say. He still had an idea for a new case for FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, but, as it turned out, that idea was darker and less PG-13-friendly than 20th Century Fox wanted at the time. The result, 2008’s The X-Files: I Want to Believe, is not the movie Carter first had. Now, two reboot seasons and almost 20 years later, Carter got a chance to revisit his imperfect creation. The new cut, fittingly entitled The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn, will debut on Hulu August 14.
Nerdist got a chance to speak to Carter about unearthing this new version, what he changed to make it, and why he’s looking forward to Ryan Coogler’s reboot.
Nerdist: I had read that you had been thinking about this cut of this movie for a while, but what was it about now that you thought was the right time to revisit it?
Chris Carter: It really came as an opportunity just presented itself. I was talking to the guy who runs the movie division at 20th Century Fox, and just on a whim I said, “Would you ever consider doing a director’s cut of I Want to Believe?” And he jumped. At first I thought, “Nah, they don’t want to spend any money.” I thought they were not going to be behind this, that it was a good idea, but nothing that would ever come to light. And sure enough, they gave us room, they gave us backing, they gave us their blessings, and we got to do the cut that we really wanted to do.
This isn’t simply a case of adding more footage. It is a different cut entirely. What was the process of revisiting it and figuring out how the new footage would be integrated in and what the new cut would look like?
Let me go back just a little bit. The original idea came from something I read, about a doctor who had transplanted the head of a monkey onto another monkey successfully. And I said, “This is X-Files territory. It’s got X-Files written all over it.” And I actually flew out to Cleveland, Ohio to meet this doctor. We sat at a bar and he explained to me how you transplant the head of a monkey onto another body and wonderful.
So, we, Frank Spotnitz and I, set out to do a story, a Frankenstein story as an X-Files. And I always felt that that story got buried under the weight of some other stories that felt that they stole [focus]. And by that I mean that the studio, I originally showed it to the studio executives when we made the movie in 2007, 2008, and I showed them a cut and the lights went up in the screening room and they were outraged. They said, “This is not the PG-13 movie promised us.”
Anyway, so we had to cut it back to what they accepted. Then we had to cut it back even further for the ratings folks. I always felt that what happened is it became a kind of Mulder/Scully romance relationship movie, and it wasn’t a good scary X-Files story. And so now we have taken the weight off of the one thing and put it on the right thing. To do that, we took seven minutes out.
Also, during the time between then and now, there have been two X-Files reboot seasons. So I felt that the audience had gotten a lot of the Mulder and Scully relationship in those reboots.
It’s interesting watching it because I kind of expected it to be gorrier, if you know what I mean. By today’s standards, it really feels like it could have passed for a PG-13 and been fine.
I completely agree with you. I’ve added this title, Vrach Frankenshteyn, to the movie because my feeling. We always set out to do a Frankenstein movie, but the audience by and large didn’t know that because it’s only touched on at the very end of the movie when Mulder’s pinning up a newspaper clipping. So, when you know the sequence where the search party is with Father Joe and they dig up that arm in the snow, it doesn’t quite make sense. It’s like it is more of a confusing element than an intriguing element. And I wanted people to know this is a Frankenstein story from the get-go.
Throughout the show, you’ve done a few kind of Frankenstein riffs. Is that a favorite story of yours?
I love the Frankenstein story. I love the idea of breathing life into a new being and the idea in this case, if your head is put on another body, are you that new person? Are you the person whose head you the body? I just love this idea. I’m certain down the line we are going to say this is not science fiction anymore, that this is going to be medical science that a head can be transplanted onto another body. This may be the key, in fact, to everlasting life when you can transplant the head of someone onto a young body.
Given the kind of streaming landscape and how much kind of content that you can get away with now versus when you were making the show back in the ’90s, do you see episodes where you would’ve pushed the envelope even more now?
Well, it’s interesting because, the television censors were more permissive than the movie censors. I could have told a scarier story on network television than I was allowed to tell for the big screen to get that PG-13 rating, which is so ironic. I just wanted to tell a really good, scary X-Files story.
The X-Files is coming back, obviously, with Ryan Coogler. Do you think that there’s a future forever for The X-Files? Is there something kind of intrinsic to humanity that will always want to visit the X-Files?
Because it’s a show about science as it pertains to science fiction, I think that there’s always interesting territory in which to explore the intersection of Mulder and Scully’s belief systems. I’m very curious what Ryan Coogler is doing. My name is on the show, but I have not read the script by choice. I’m waiting to see. I want to be surprised. I want to watch that pilot episode like everyone else is watching it as a fan of the X-Files franchise.
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This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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