“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.”

In fact, Carter and Spotnitz had actually created the germ of the story back in 2004, but the comprehensive notes had somehow disappeared. What looked like a loss was actually a net gain. “We essentially stuck with the same story, although we actually had forgotten some of it,” says Carter. “But these were all good things, because when we came back to it, we came back to it in a fresh way.”

Fast Shoot

After years of waiting for a green light on their project, Carter and Spotnitz found themselves in hurry-up mode through production and post. “The opening date they gave us was hard and fast,” says Carter. “With about 60 days of filming, mostly in Vancouver, modest budget, short prep, short post.”

They had no choice but to make the film at television pace. “We began filming December 10 and finished filming March 19,” says Carter, “but it felt like a hundred days, because three of the those weeks were in the snow.”

Carter was helped considerably by the careful planning he and Spotnitz had written into the script. “Everything was pretty much designed,” he says. “I never did a take 10 if I got what I wanted on take 3. I moved on.”

Up to Camera

To keep pace with his fast camera, Carter persuaded his neighbor, Richard Harris, an Oscar-winning editor, to come out of retirement and cut his first feature film in Final Cut Pro. “The schedule really was the villain here that needed to be slayed,” says Carter. “I don’t think we could have done this movie without a system that facilitated the speed and also without people who knew how to use the system beautifully.”