Frank Spotnitz is as integral a part of The X-Files as creator Chris Carter and Mulder and Scully are. He wrote 48 episodes of the series as well both of the movie versions, and executive produced the series. He also wrote and produced The X-Files spin-off series The Lone Gunmen along with Chris Carter’s other TV series, Millennium and Harsh Realm. He also had the unenviable task of reviving (unsuccessfully) the 70s’ cult classic Night Stalker, which was one of the inspirations behind the The X-Files. Frank spoke with SFL web-editor Chris Patmore on the phone from LA, for an interview to appear in movieScope magazine. This is an edited transcript of that interview, where Frank talks about The X-Files, the new movie and his fear of being blamed for 9/11.
There is another interview with Spotnitz and Chris Carter on the SFL podcast.
How did you first get involved with The X-Files?
Well, by accident. My first career was as a reporter. I was a wire service reporter and I worked in New York and Paris, and I decided I didn’t want to be a reporter any more, so I moved back to Los Angeles to change careers and study screenwriting. Before I began film school I joined a book group in LA, and in that book group was Chris Carter. This was years before The X-Files, when he was writing TV movies for Disney. So we were in this book group together for two and half years, it ended and I went to film school and I didn’t speak to him or see him, then The X-Files came on air, and I started watching, because I knew the name and thought the show was great. It never occurred to me to write for it because I was going to write movies: I had no interest in television. Towards the end of season one a friend of mine, who wanted to write for television, said, “You know this guy Chris Carter?” and I said yes. So he asked, “Would you call him for me and see if he’ll hear some story ideas so can write for the show?” I felt very awkward about doing it, but I said OK. I called Chris and he said, “No, I won’t hear your friends ideas but if you have anything I’ll hear what you have.” So I thought, what do I have to lose? I came up with three ideas and pitched them and he shot them all down. He didn’t buy one of them and I thought that was a big waste of time. Then a few weeks later he called me and said, “You know, I didn’t buy any of your ideas, but they were all good and here’s why, here’s what was good about each one of them; this, this and this. I’ve just lost two writers who are leaving the show and I need some new writers, so how would you like to come on staff?” That was a Thursday, and I joined The X-Files the following Monday. And that’s how I got started. It was a very, very tough, demanding environment. He was a very demanding boss and I was completely new to everything. It was my first job in Hollywood. I had no sense of how the politics for writing staff, or the studio, or the network and I made many mistakes, and the only reason I hung on is that I had this immediate connection to the show. I really had this immediate feel for what the show was about, and I grew and figured out what I was doing as the show went on.
Did your background as a reporter help you with ideas for the show?
It did enormously and actually Chris and I talk about this all the time because he also had a background as a reporter. He wasn’t a news reporter, he was a reporter for a surfing magazine, but you still have to gather information quickly, synthesise it, order it, write concisely – those are really useful skills, especially in television writing where the deadlines are always present.
So how did you move from being a writer to being one of the producers?
I went from being a staff writer to being an executive producer in three years, which is extremely unusual, but I think it was because firstly the feeling for the show that I just mentioned. Secondly because Chris didn’t really recognise titles, so you could come in as a beginning staff writer, such as I was, and not only be present at the story meetings for all the episodes, which I was from day one, but be asked to go into editorial, or go to casting, or look at visual effects, or supervise a sound mix, or go to the music playback. Instantly he wanted you to try your hand at being a producer as well as a writer. I loved it and really thrived on it and was given a lot more responsibility than my job title would suggest, in a very short period of time. His thinking was; first of all, if you could do it well, then why not take the help, and secondly, the better producer you are in television the better writer you’ll be. The more you understand about every part of the process the better you can tailor your scripts to be produced. So I really benefited from that openness.
So did you get to direct as well?
I did, but it was very late in the run of the series. What happened was, as the show went on I became valued for my story sense and my primary job became breaking the stories, as they call it. Figuring out what each episode would be, and how the story would unfold and all those types of things. You are constantly working on at least five stories all the time and it was impossible for me to get away to direct, because when you direct you are basically unavailable for anything else for a period of three weeks. Finally, David Duchovny was leaving the show – he’d actually left and was there part time in season eight – and he said to me, “You’ve got to direct. If you don’t direct you are going to regret it forever that you didn’t do it.” It was almost at the very end of the year, we didn’t have that many more stories to write, and I directed one of the last episodes of season eight, and I directed again at the beginning of season nine, and that was only possible because it was so early in the season, in that instance. I loved it and I had a fantastic time doing it. What I didn’t appreciate until I did it, was that I had spent so much time in the editing room by that point; I’d literally edited hundreds of hours of film that I had a very clear, intuitive sense of how film cuts together. When you’re writing you’re sort of directing it in your head anyway, and when you’ve edited a lot you have a pretty clear sense of how to piece those scenes together, so it felt pretty natural by the time I got around to it.
Quite a few directors don’t do any editing so they don’t always shoot enough coverage.
Right. I don’t know how you can be a successful director unless you understand editing. You’ve got to know how that film is going to piece together, and there are so many nuances to the editing process about how long to hold on certain shots, and what shots you need to get in and out of the scene. There are a number of great directors who started out as editors, and that’s always made sense to me. That’s half the battle really, knowing what pieces of film you need.
What about story ideas for The X-Files? Did you go onto hundreds of conspiracy websites looking for inspiration?
It’s funny because we really grew up with the internet. In the early days of the show we did zero research on the internet, and I remember my second episode, which was called Our Town, about cannibalism in a chicken processing plant in the Deep South. I actually went to the UCLA research library looking for books, and all the books on cannibalism had been stolen, of course, and that’s how we had to do research back then. By season nine it was unbelievable how much research you could get at your fingertips just by being on the internet. It was interesting because story ideas didn’t usually come to us through sources you’d expect and I think that was sort of the genius of Chris’s concept for the show was that The X-Files could make anything frightening. It could be lightning, it could be water, it could be things that are not traditional horror subject matter. It’s always the hardest question to answer, “where do story ideas come from?” but very rarely did they come from a traditional horror source, like a Frankenstein or Dracula story. Sometimes, but that was the exception.
So were you also using the “what if…” technique a lot?
The “what if” and especially a lot of the mythology episodes throughout history tended to look a lot towards real things that had happened that we could fictionalise and weave into the alien mythology storyline.
You were also heavily involved in the short-lived spin-off series The Lone Gunmen.
That was a labour of love for all of us. I think it came a little too late, unfortunately. By that time the peak of The X-Files popularity had already passed and it made no real business sense to be embarking on a spin-off that late in the game, but we loved those characters, and I have to say it was such a pleasure to do something that had lightness to it. It was just goofy and silly and always fun to do.
You were one of the writers of the prescient pilot episode. How did you feel on September 11? [The pilot episode of the series featured a story where a plane is hijacked and flown towards the Twin Towers, at the government’s instigation, in order to start a war to bolster the failing economy. The episode aired six months before the events of September 11 2001.]
I have to say I felt sick for many reasons. The first thing that came to my mind was The Lone Gunmen. I distinctly remember that because everyone remembers where they were when it happened. I was directing my second episode of The X-Files, on September 11, and I woke up a little late because we’d been shooting late the night before. I turned on the TV and there it was. At that point one of the Twin Towers was on fire, and I immediately thought of The Lone Gunmen. I had this secret fear that they would find out whoever did this was inspired by our show, because we’d been on network TV only six months prior, and it had been a highly-rated show. It was for weeks that I had this gnawing feeling they were going to find out that the bad guys were inspired by us. Not only did they not find that out, not only did we subsequently find out that the hijackers had been plotting this a long time before The Lone Gunmen was broadcast, but a sort of collective amnesia set in where almost no one remembered that The Lone Gunmen had been on the air with a similar storyline to 9/11. It really took years before people took notice that there was a parallel.
There are a lot of people who believe that your version of the event, where the government was behind it, is what really happened. It seems all very X-Files.
It’s interesting. The BBC did a documentary about this last year, and I agreed to be interviewed about it, because I’ve thought a lot about conspiracy theories, and I said in the broadcast that I don’t believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy staged by the United States government. I got a lot of angry reaction from people saying I shouldn’t have been on the show and why are they talking to me. That’s one where I don’t think the government was behind it, however I do think that the government manipulated the tragedy to stage a war – there’s not much controversy about that at this point – and that was something that was in The Lone Gunmen episode; that the bombing of the Twin Towers would be used to stage a war against a tin pot dictator.
You were also involved with the remake of Night Stalker, which is credited as the inspiration behind The X-Files.
Yes.
It didn’t do particularly well…
No.
Do you think it was because following on from Darren McGavin was too much of a hard job?
I’m a huge fan of the original Night Stalker, as you can imagine. I even wrote Darren McGavin into The X-Files mythology, got to know him and love him. ABC asked me to redo the show and I struggled with how to approach this, and I came to the conclusion that it would be disastrous to attempt to imitate Darren McGavin. He’s one of a kind. Anything you did to try and do another Darren McGavin would fail and pale by comparison, so I went in a different direction. I kind of knew I was going to get killed because, and I was asking for it I have to say, in fairness to my critics, because if you are going to take a beloved title you’ve got to expect – part of the reason people are even checking it out is because of the original title – so if you are going to veer dramatically away from what that title was you’re going to get slammed. What I hoped and believed, and I said this to the network and the studio at the time, if we are given the chance, if the show went on for a while, that initial outrage of violating the purity of the Night Stalker vision would fade and people would see the integrity of what the new approach was. Well, that did not happen [laughs] because we were off the air after seven weeks. It didn’t get a chance to get anything at all other than slammed. But I am proud of the work that we did do, and removed from the heat of comparisons to Darren McGavin and so on, I think it does hold up quite well. The other interesting thing is I got to know a lot of Night Stalker fans, true die-hard Night Stalker fans, and the more you know about the history of the Night Stalker, the more you understand that the original Night Stalker movies were fantastic.
They were written by Richard Matheson (I Am Legend).
Exactly. But the TV series was not successful. In fact Darren McGavin hated the TV series and was responsible for killing it. It did not work as a TV series.
I thought it was quite good, but that was back in the ’70s when I was much younger and there wasn’t anything else like it on at the time.
That’s exactly right. That’s how the critics felt too. You are looking at it through the filter of when you were 13 or 14. But to sustain a TV series, especially 30 years on when people are a lot more sophisticated, you simply couldn’t do what had been done before. Darren McGavin’s family and Jeff Rice, the original writer, Dan Curtis, who produced the original movie and was a consultant on my show, and a lot of the critics who had written about the series – I don’t want to name them, they know who they are – were all silently in my corner all said you couldn’t go back to the original version.
It seems like a lot of TV series never really get a chance to develop and pick up an audience before they get axed, especially with genre shows.
Unfortunately. It’s not that the people in the networks are stupid and mean, that’s not the case, although people bash them for having trigger fingers. It’s just that the competition is so fierce right now and the American networks are really struggling to survive right now. They lose audience every year and they can’t afford to stick with something, no matter how good it is, if it is not a hit right out of the gate. If you look at the history of television and see how many really fantastic shows would never have been if that had been the environment in the past – like Hill Street Blues or Seinfeld, and there are countless others, like the original Night Stalker. Star Trek was cancelled after three years because of low ratings. In the old days things had time, but in the current climate you really have to win them right out of the gate or odds are you’re not going to be around.
It’s the same with the music industry as well.
Everything. The movie business too. It’s become a very do or die culture.
On to the new movie; what was the thinking behind bringing out a movie so long after the series had finished? Was it a cynical cashing in, like SEX IN THE CITY?
If things had gone according to plan this would have been a little more simple. The hope was to do the movie right after the show ended. They actually came to us before the show ended to do another movie. The first one was successful and made money for them, and at the time we said no, we’re still doing the show. Then the show ended in 2002 and we were too tired to go back to it right away. Then in 2003 Chris and I did start meeting to figure out what the story would be if we did do another movie – and we figured it out, or enough to pitch it to the studio. We did and they said great and they started making deals. I made my deal early in 2003. They started negotiating with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, and then Chris, and that dragged on for months, maybe even a year. Then, when it seemed like we were close to having a deal and starting work on the film a legal dispute arose between Chris and the studio. I believe it was about profits from the TV series – I wasn’t privy to what the details were – and the whole thing stopped dead cold for three years while this legal dispute dragged on. Then in January of last year, 2007, Chris and the studio settled their dispute and literally the next day the movie was back on. The funny thing that happened, now not then, was that in those four years we had lost all the notes that we had made on the story for the movie. So we had to start over. We remembered some things from memory about the plot, but we really had to start from scratch in terms of the character stuff and where Mulder and Scully were in their lives. I have to say that, as accidents so often are, it turned out to be a blessing because it was far more interesting for the gap. We, Chris and I, had changed over those years, and Mulder and Scully had changed, and we had something very new to us to say about them and The X-Files. It was quite interesting and enjoyable to return to the characters.
Are there any plans for another X-Files movie after this one?
I’d love to do another one. I don’t know. It does depend on how this one does. What Chris and I said to ourselves is, let’s just make a great movie. Let’s make the best movie we can make with these characters and if it’s the last one then we’ll go out proud of the work, and if it’s not we’ll have made a good movie that will hopefully set a new foundation for more. It doesn’t end on a cliff-hanger note begging for another sequel. It ends as a movie should end, as a satisfying movie experience. That was important to us because we wanted to make a movie that the fans love, obviously, because we want to reward and honour our fans, but it was also very important to us that this movie worked for people who never saw The X-Files, who never checked it out, or who don’t watch television, or the many, many people who were too young to watch The X-Files when it was on television because it was 16 years ago that it started. I hope there’ll be more because we are certainly proud of this one.
So no chance of reviving The Lone Gunmen?
You never know. I would love to, I have to say. Nobody’s ever really dead in The X-Files, anyone can come back.