News: Mulder, Scully and Carter Talk X-Files

The X-Files: I Want To Believe, written by series creator Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz and featuring the return of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson to the roles that made them famous, FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, has people getting chatty again about their dark and brooding heroes. It’s been six years since the series ended (eight, if you choose to ignore the Doggett years - when Duchovny checked out of the show and poor Robert Patrick took his place and everything started to be lame), and a decade since the last film, The X-Files: Fight the Future, so there’s some concern as to how this film is going to be received, especially since it’s paring down all the rambunctious conspiratorial insanity that really gave the show its following and opting instead for a stand-alone detective thriller to try and reach a wider audience. This means we likely won’t get much of William B. Davis’ creepy Smoking Man, but we’d better get a hell of a lot of Mitch Pileggi as the badass Walter Skinner, Mulder and Scully’s boss.

EW recently talked to the principals. Here are some of the notable quotes.

”I don’t think of Mulder as a happy guy,” Duchovny says. ”He’s like a quest hero. That’s why I like him so much. He just doesn’t give up.”

”Mulder and Scully have not been frozen in ice,” Duchovny says. ”They’ve been leading some kind of life, together or apart, in some parallel dimension. They’ve had experiences that we’ll never know about.”

Carter is quick to caution against focusing too much on make-out sessions. ”It’s two people who are passionate about the same thing, from different perspectives,” he says. ”It’s a romance of intellect.”

”I needed a long sleep,” says Anderson. ”I think I got my distance within a year or two of the series ending. I don’t think any of us really needed six years.”

Anderson says it was ”really f—ing weird” to slip back into Scully’s high but practical heels. ”I’d do things, and Chris would go, ‘I don’t think…’ and I’d go, ‘That wasn’t her, was it?”’ Carter says this ”jet lag” didn’t last. ”They’re both so smart about those characters,” he says, ”and they always have been.”

”I understand why a lot of people checked out,” says Spotnitz of the post-Duchovny season. ”It wasn’t Mulder’s quest anymore.” But he thinks six years gave people a chance to miss the show, and if this year’s comic-book convention WonderCon is any indication, he’s right: An X-Files panel was greeted by 5,000 fans making ”that screechy sound,” as Duchovny puts it. ”It’s always surprising to me to see that there are people out there who still are engaged in this show on almost a daily basis,” admits Carter.

Duchovny, for one, would prefer not to speculate about the film’s commercial prospects. ”If you try to anticipate an audience, then I think you get into trouble,” he says. ”We’ll make it, you enjoy it. And if you don’t enjoy it, then we didn’t hold up our end of the bargain. I hope that we deliver. I think it’s possible that we could deliver. I don’t think it’s just bulls—, just trying to cash in on something that’s half dead. I always felt like The X-Files as a movie franchise had real life in it.”