Chris Carter on the Future of The X-Files on Fox and Film
I thought The X-Files revival was good, not great, but its ratings were good enough to leave Fox eager for more. But what about creator Chris Carter?
Den of Geek spoke with Carter about the upcoming home release of the revival mini-series and of course asked about its future:
DoG: The revival series ended on quite a cliff-hanger, so can we expect to see more of Mulder and Scully any time soon?
Carter: Yes, I’ve already got the call from Fox saying they want more episodes. I think now it’s just a matter of figuring out when we can all co-ordinate our schedules to do it. So yes, I think absolutely you’re going to see more, and of course, that means you’re going to see how we get ourselves out of that very steep, sharp cliff!
DoG: We got to the end and thought, that can’t be the end of it! Presumably that’s how you wanted us to feel?
Carter: Yes, well it’s a tradition of The X-Files, ending on a cliff-hanger like that, and I have to say that as cliff-hangers go, this was a big one for us. People are asking me crazy questions about it, asking me who’s driving the spaceship, I thought that was one of the craziest questions I’ve ever heard.
Star Gillian Anderson has recently been hired to play Media in Bryan Fuller’s American Gods and told TV Line of the show’s future, “Fox owns this show. I can’t imagine, with the ratings that we’ve got and the way we ended this season, that there won’t be more X-Files. They will find a way to get that done. Because I spoke about it briefly with [Fox CEO] Dana Walden today, so there’s an appetite there and… a chance certainly to find how we’re gonna get ourselves off this precipice.”
Carter also told Den of Geek he’d be open to another X-Files movie but he’d have a specific approach in mind.
“Whatever it would be, would be a big screen approach, meaning that it would be a big screen story, and I think we told a very big screen story in the first movie,” he told them. “And in the second movie we took a darker, more stand-alone approach, and I think an audience wants a big screen, more epic approach from a big screen X-Files story, so I think whatever it would be, I think it would now be built on the experiences of both of those movies.”
The interviewer also brought up mini-Mulder and Scully, aka Miller and Einstein, aka Robbie Amell and Lauren Ambrose. Carter called them a mirror of our favorite characters and “While we don’t have any hold on those actors beyond our desire to see them again, I think that they’ve now entered the accepted X-Files fandom.” He also said:
You know, Fox had come to me at one point and said would you be interested in doing this without Mulder and Scully, and I hadn’t ever thought about that, and actually I don’t know that I would do that. But it was an interesting question and so I thought, I’m going to play with that idea, and introduce younger mirror images of Mulder and Scully and see what that does to the story-telling, and I found an episode where I thought it suited that approach, and I found two terrific actors to play those parts, and so I think it was a gamble that paid off.
Hmm. Agree to disagree on that Mr. Carter.