Pod Insights Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin Chris Carter, X Files About this episode Chris Carter is a television writer, producer, and director best known as the creator of science fiction series The X-Files. He began his screenwriting career at Walt Disney Studios in 1985 before moving to Twentieth Century Fox Television. There, he developed The X-Files, which ran for 11 seasons and earned him multiple Golden Globe Awards, Emmy Award nominations, and a Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting. Carter has created additional series through his production company, Ten Thirteen Productions, including Millennium, Harsh Realm, The Lone Gunmen, as well as two film adaptations of The X-Files.
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Transcript 14,182 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Rick Rubin? Tetragrammaton.
0:24 Speaker 01 I was an art major originally, but I was putting myself through college making pottery. I went to Long Beach State University, which was the clay school. That was where anyone who wanted to develop their skills, there were two doctors of ceramics teaching there. And it kind of ran its course. And even though there's really interesting stuff, like industrial design, things that I'm really interested in, I decided after two years of that that it wasn't the direction I needed to be in. And I walked literally down the hill to the journalism department, walked into a teacher's office and says, "How do I become a journalism major?" He said, "Do this, do this, do this."
1:09 Speaker 01 I graduated with a degree in journalism. And because I was a surfer, I did my internship at Surfing Magazine, which was at St. Clemente. It was perfect. They were going from a bimonthly to a monthly. You know, I fit right in. I made myself indispensable. They hired me and I ended up working at the magazine on site for five years. Wow. But during that period, there was a guy working as a writer, and he was a surfer, but he was also a screenwriter. And he and I got to be friendly, and he invited me on a river rafting trip. And there was a pre-rafting party. And at that party was a woman named Dory.
1:54 Speaker 01 And Dory struck me. She made an impression on me, even though I was there with my girlfriend. A year later, I'm going through a terrible breakup, and Dory's going through a divorce. And I say to my friend Mark, I say, "Do you think Dory would ever date me?" And she finally relented, and that is 43 years ago. Congratulations. Meant to be, clearly. And that's a long way of telling you that Dory was a screenwriter then and encouraged me to write a script. I did. And it got shown around town and got me meetings and all this, you know, I was, I was in the hunt. I wrote a second script, Jeff Katzenberg at Disney, read it.
2:37 Speaker 01 One day I was a surfer, the next day I was a Hollywood screenwriter with an office and a secretary in the animation building at Disney. It was amazing. Amazing. Yeah, so it happened really fast. What was that script that he liked about? You know, I would call it in the vein, it's really not in my wheelhouse, but in the vein of kind of Ghostbusters. It was kind of a big rollicking kind of comedy. And he liked it. It was called Bad O. I wouldn't show it to anyone now. But the original script that I wrote, which was much closer to my heart, was called National Pastime. It was about, I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles called Bellflower. It was about three kids in a city like I grew up in,
3:22 Speaker 01 who don't know that they have ways to get out of the draft or going to war. And National Pastime being the obvious metaphor for that. That was really the script that got me in the door. And then this second script got me a three-picture deal. That's unbelievable. Out of the box. Out of the box. And so that was for writing movies and I met with Brian Grazer, did a script for him. I had an office in the animation building at Disney. And producers would come by and they'd knock on the door and say, hey, are you interested in doing TV? And I never said no. I said, yes, I'll, I'll do it. You're a surfer. You know, I'm a kid from Bellflower and a surfer.
4:07 Speaker 01 And people are knocking on my door, Disney saying, you want to work for us? So I said yes to everything. And so I did some Disney Sunday movies because they had revived that. It was something that was part of my childhood, the Disney Sunday movie. So I did a couple of those things. I did one with my wife. And I did a pilot at Disney for NBC. And during the filming of that pilot, I realized I couldn't just be a writer if I wanted to protect my work. I needed to be a producer. And the pilot didn't get picked up at NBC, but I made an impression. And I said to them, look, I'd like to work as a producer if you can give me a job. And they said, great. Today, I'll offer you three different jobs.
4:51 Speaker 01 The first job was on Miami Vice. And Miami Vice, you know, hit. The second job was on, I think it was called Vegas. It was also another Michael Mann show, you know, something of a hit. And then the third choice was a show called Rags to Riches, which is about five little dancing girls and a kind of Daddy Warbucks character played by Joe Bologna. We'll put you on that show immediately. So I looked at all my options and Miami Vice was shot and produced in Miami, but the writers and the writing producers were in Los Angeles. And the same thing with Vegas.
5:33 Speaker 01 It was shot in Vegas, but the writing producers were on the studio lot. And but Rags to Riches was shot in Culver City, and I would be right there working with the team. I seized that opportunity.
5:47 Rick Rubin? To be more hands-on.
5:49 Speaker 01 I wanted to learn.
5:50 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
5:50 Speaker 01 How to produce, not how to write and then have somebody else.
5:54 Rick Rubin? Not hand it off.
5:55 Speaker 01 Yes, I wanted to be a real producer.
5:57 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
5:58 Speaker 01 It was five dancing girls. I got to work with choreographers. I got to work with the composers. I got to work with costume. I got to work with everyone, production designer, and it was fantastic.
6:10 Rick Rubin? How old were you at the time?
6:11 Speaker 01 Uh, probably early 30s. But it was great. And I took that job and I stayed at NBC a little longer. But then I got hired by a guy named Peter Roth to write pilots for 20th Century Fox.
6:27 Rick Rubin? How new was Fox at that time? This is the Fox network.
6:30 Speaker 01 Fox network had just, you know, married with children. It was kind of establishing itself as the, uh, something more than a Johnny come lately. So it was kind of a heady time there with lots of energy.
6:42 Rick Rubin? Just years old, would you say, several years old?
6:45 Speaker 01 I'd say probably three, possibly four.
6:48 Rick Rubin? That's a brand-new network.
6:50 Speaker 01 Basically, brand-new.
6:51 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
6:51 Speaker 01 Even though I was hired by the 20th Century Fox studio, not by the network. So the idea was that I would create for not just Fox, but I could create for all the other networks as well. But of course, Fox was the big push. So I came up with this idea.
7:11 Speaker 01 Which became The X-Files. And we literally walked upstairs to the network to sell it to the network. And I pitched my heart out. Bob Greenblatt, the guy I pitched to, who went off to his own stellar career, wrote a chapter about that in his memoir. And it was funny. He said, I remember you asked for water. Because, you know, I was nervous. I was full of nervous energy. So anyway, they didn't buy it in the room. So we went back to the drawing board. And I, just so happened, I knew a psychologist who knew about a study called a Roper survey
7:55 Speaker 01 about the number of Americans who believed in the alien abduction phenomenon. And even though I had pitched it as such, that I brought in hard evidence of it, or you know, something of evidence. I think put them over the top in the second pitch.
8:11 Rick Rubin? Because at first it sounded too way out for them. But you showed them this is something people are actually interested in.
8:18 Speaker 01 So it's nothing else like it on TV. But I wrote them an 18-page, single-spaced outline. I involved them every step of the way in the process. They ordered the pilot. We were going to make it in Los Angeles. And we started to go through those motions. And there's a big portion of the script that takes place in the forest. And there aren't good forests, really in what they call the zone for shooting in L.A. So the suggestion was we go to Vancouver. And as it worked out, I had been to Vancouver in 1986. My wife did a Disney Sunday movie with her partner. And I got to visit and I saw these amazing forests.
9:02 Speaker 01 You know, it was like meant to be. So we moved the production up to Vancouver. It was during pilot season. So that means everyone is shooting pilots up there. And we're the last people to arrive. And so we, we get the last people to be hired. You know, it was the, everyone was taken. But Undaunted, we put together a crew up there. Brought some people from Los Angeles. Produced this pilot. And I got a call very early on. They still didn't know what it was. And I got a call very early on. There's a scene where Mulder and Scully are in his hotel room. And she's got something on her back. And he wants to see what it is.
9:45 Speaker 01 And he kind of, she kind of bears her skin to him. And I got a call, angry call from a studio executive that there wasn't enough sexual tension in that scene. And it's like, they still don't. They still don't get what he, exactly. They still don't get what the show is. They still think it's, you know, I would call it formulaic television.
10:06 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
10:06 Speaker 01 So I calmed him down and we went and we finished the pilot. And that's a story in itself. We came back, edited, temp score, got it to the studio, then to the network, and they had a screening of it. And the story that I was told, I wasn't at the screening, was that Rupert Murdoch was in the room. And so they screened the pilot. And of course, you know, the lights come up and it finishes. And everyone, of course, is looking to Rupert Murdoch, wondering what his reaction would be before they react. And he turned around and he clapped.
10:46 Rick Rubin? Wow.
10:46 Speaker 01 And it was that instant that kind of set that ship flotilla.
10:50 Rick Rubin? Amazing.
10:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:51 Rick Rubin? Do you remember where the original idea came from? Like, what were the starting pieces before you wrote anything?
10:57 Speaker 01 Yeah. When I was a teenager, there was a show, it was two, I think, two-part movies, I can't even remember now, called Kolchak, The Night Stalker.
11:06 Rick Rubin? I saw that as a kid, I did.
11:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen on television. I watched a lot of television as a kid.
11:13 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
11:13 Speaker 01 I loved it.
11:14 Rick Rubin? What other things did you watch? Tell me about your viewing.
11:18 Speaker 01 If I start to think about what I watched during that time, I remember we watched every Friday night, we watched the Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, and Love American Style in a row. I loved it. That was like my Friday night. But, you know, there were shows on like Manics and. I watched all of those. Yeah. Every one of those. Same, and I just loved them. Yeah, they were great shows. They were great shows. They were great shows. Yeah, My Conners was great. Great. Yeah, that was kind of my childhood. But Kolchak the Night Stalker really stuck with me. And so when I was at NBC, as I mentioned, Brandon Tartikoff was the main, he was the main man. He, and he had like, you know, how many seasons of being number one at NBC?
12:03 Speaker 01 So he was a just revered character. He was the younger guy, right? He's a younger guy. And it so happened that I was a baseball player growing up and there was a softball game that I got included into and Brandon was a player. So were a lot of other notable people. Anyway, we became kind of friendly and he actually, he kind of saved me through some of those lean years by throwing me some work. I remember pitching to him the idea of doing a Kolchak the Night Stalker and it didn't fly. He had no interest in doing it. But I held on to the idea. And when Peter Roth had hired me,
12:48 Speaker 01 we went to lunch and both agreed we liked Kolchak the Night Stalker and could I do something like that? So I had this idea about doing an FBI show. I had an idea about a believer and a skeptic. How did the idea of the FBI being involved? Because I don't think Kolchak was an FBI guy. No, Kolchak was a newspaper reporter. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So the FBI, because I had read something where the FBI actually investigated something called satanic ritual abuse. And that's where people believe that they've been abducted by a cult and subjected to ritual abuse, which sounds kind of expilian. Yeah. But I thought if the FBI is investigating something like that.
13:29 Speaker 01 They must be investigating aliens and I had some interest in the alien phenomenon too.
13:35 Rick Rubin? Did you ever go to a UFO convention in those days?
13:37 Speaker 01 I actually wrote a New York Times op ed about that. There were two reboots of the show in the last several years. My convention experience really shaped those stories.
13:50 Rick Rubin? Great. I used to go to those as well. I love those.
13:52 Speaker 01 They're amazing.
13:52 Rick Rubin? Amazing. Just interesting people, interesting lectures.
13:56 Speaker 01 Yes.
13:57 Rick Rubin? A lot of open-minded thought.
14:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, and you know, conspiracies galore and I've had experiences where I was invited to a meeting by a guy who was one of these, he wasn't a conspiracy monger, was a little more highbrow than that. But he invited me to a meeting with several other people where he, our phones were taken away from us.
14:23 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
14:24 Speaker 01 You know, when we entered the.
14:25 Rick Rubin? Remember his name or no?
14:27 Speaker 01 Oh yeah, his name's Foster Gamble and he had a website called Thrive. Anyway, he did a movie and I helped him with the movie and anyway, he invited me to this meeting. He wanted to know how best to market free energy devices. So it's like, really? You've got them?
14:50 Speaker 01 Something you're going to bring to the world? And yes, that was the answer. They had free energy devices. And so they asked us how we should market them and I said, you want to get these to everyone, right?
15:03 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
15:03 Speaker 01 Walmart.
15:07 Speaker 01 You know, it's the biggest retailer in America. Get them out there. And they thought that was a little bit too plebeian. I don't know what the word I would use. So it was never decided, but that was probably a dozen years ago. And the free energy devices have never appeared, but it was a great story.
15:27 Rick Rubin? Yeah, great story. Great story. So you have the Kolchak experience as a kid.
15:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:33 Rick Rubin? You take that with you. And then you decide FBI and you have this experience. Was it in a newspaper? You read the story about the FBI going into the satanic.
15:44 Speaker 01 I don't remember where I read that. But I did a lot of reading and I've always been a reader. So I picked it up somewhere.
15:52 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
15:53 Speaker 01 But it just felt weird to me that.
15:54 Rick Rubin? Yeah, it's one of those stories like it doesn't really make sense in your world.
15:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:59 Rick Rubin? And that makes it interesting.
16:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. So my brother's a scientist. So I'm interested in science.
16:06 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
16:06 Speaker 01 And he's five years younger than I am. And a brilliant guy teaches at MIT. He's a very serious scientist. And I would go to him during the run of the show and run things by him. And on the pilot, for example, there's a scene where Mulder and Scully are on a road and their car loses power. And it comes to stop him. Mulder looks at his wife and he says, we lost nine minutes. And Scully, you know, the scientist says, you can't lose nine minutes. Time is a universal constant. And so I gave that script to my brother and he read it and he said, I like this. I like this. He said, but time is not a universal constant.
16:50 Speaker 01 He's time is a universal invariant. So he contributed, he's, you know, in his way.
16:56 Rick Rubin? He refined it.
16:57 Speaker 01 He refined it.
16:58 Rick Rubin? Or fact checked it, really.
16:59 Speaker 01 He was my fact checker. But, you know, I had a number of people like that.
17:04 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
17:04 Speaker 01 Anyway, the scientist, the skeptic and the believer, because I'm a believer. I want to believe, just like the poster says. Show me the proof. I want to believe it. I believe you, but you know.
17:16 Rick Rubin? Yeah, you want to see more.
17:17 Speaker 01 Prove it to me. Exactly. So that was something that meant a lot to me, too. And Scully wears a cross around her neck. So it makes her an even more.
17:24 Rick Rubin? She's the scientist.
17:25 Speaker 01 She's a scientist, but also a person of faith.
17:28 Rick Rubin? Yes. How does faith play into the whole story, do you think?
17:31 Speaker 01 I think that it makes her an interesting character because faith and science aren't necessarily compatible so much of the time. But I think of science as the search for God. We're going to find God through our search for things like quantum physics.
17:51 Rick Rubin? Yes.
17:51 Speaker 01 So I thought that was a kind of interesting way to mold that character. And then Mulder, the believer, I described him, I think, as a MTV VJ in the pilot script.
18:05 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
18:05 Speaker 01 Because I wanted him to have that kind of energy. And David Duchovny came in and that, you know, this is also a story in itself where David and Gillian came in to read for the parts. Gillian gave me during the run of the show, the pages, whenever you do a casting session, you're handed pages with the prospective actors' names on them. And you make your notes on those pages. And I had done just that, made those notes. And on David's, it said, yes, simply. And on Gillian's, it said, test. David was somewhat of an unknown, but she was a complete unknown. So I wanted to bring her before the studio.
18:45 Rick Rubin? She was more green than he was.
18:47 Speaker 01 Very much more green. And she's like 24 years old, playing in not only an FBI agent, but a doctor, medical doctor. They struck me right away. And I had, there was a lot of pushback, actually, to get my way. Because they were thinking that Scully should be a babe. You know, they were thinking that it was kind of a television formula to make the beautiful girl and the handsome guy. And even though they're both very attractive, they didn't quite fit people's ideas of what television stars were. So I had a pretty clear idea from the get-go, what I wanted from those characters and what I wanted the spirit and tone of the pilot to be.
19:29 Speaker 01 As I said, I wrote that very detailed outline. And it was magic from the beginning. I still remember that first, the meeting, Mulder and Scully meet in his office. And we really, even though there had been some work with them together, and they tested together for the job, we hadn't really seen them, you know, with cameras in front of them. And it was magic from the beginning. Just worked. You know, the rest is history.
20:01 Rick Rubin? Tell me more about what you knew about the characters before you met the actors.
20:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:07 Rick Rubin? How you envisioned them. And how you envisioned the show before anything ever happened? Just the idea stage?
20:16 Speaker 01 I have to say, the pilot pretty much approximates my vision. It's about somebody who has absolute faith in something that he's got no proof of. His sister was abducted. That's the foundation of his faith. And he wants to prove it. And of course, he wants to find his sister. So that was, for me, that was his holy grail.
20:41 Rick Rubin? If a person's sister is abducted, it seems reasonable to believe it when it happens in your life.
20:48 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly.
20:49 Rick Rubin? It seems perfectly reasonable.
20:50 Speaker 01 Yes. And, you know, he had repressed memories or memories that had been stolen, possibly.
20:57 Rick Rubin? Wow.
20:57 Speaker 01 And we recreated that moment at some point early on in the series.
21:03 Rick Rubin? Beyond the two characters, what else did you know before you started?
21:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:08 Rick Rubin? Of what this show was?
21:09 Speaker 01 It's a procedural of some sort. You can call it a genre piece, but it's a synthesized genre piece. Horror, thriller, procedural. It has a mythology. And then it actually, in addition to that, it became a kind of comedy show. And even though there's, I would call it light comedy in the pilot, it inspired comedic episodes that would appear between the dramatic episodes and the mythology episodes and the horror. These comedy episodes where Mulder and Scully played broad comedy and somehow the audience would go with you.
21:54 Speaker 01 They would go from this dramatic episode about Mulder's mother and his father and his sister and Scully's mother and father and her sister, you know, very personal stories. And then it's like, oh, let's do a comedy episode here. So the show that you see now, the original 202 episodes, was a show that even though it was spawned from the pilot and the character ideas and the concept for the show, it actually developed a life of its own.
22:28 Rick Rubin? Did you have many?
22:30 Speaker 01 Story ideas in advance of making the pilot? Or at the time of the pilot, was there just the pilot? I developed a whole, I don't know, would you call it a lookbook? I don't know, about what the series was going to be. I actually, it wasn't required. It wasn't demanded of me to do that. But I just had kind of a marketing sense about how I needed to sell the pilot. And I made up a, you know, photos, episode descriptions. And I wish I had it today because it would be fun to go through it again. Yeah, are X-Files a real thing? Or is that a made up idea? Yeah, a made up idea, X standing for the unknown. But when I read about the sententic ritual abuse.
23:14 Speaker 01 It was inspired by something that you knew about. Exactly. But you gave it a name. And I thought that, of course, they would put that unit in the basement because they were kind of the outcast unit, you know, investigating things that go bump in the night, you know? And originally in the pilot, the cigarette smoking man, this character becomes the kind of evil genius in the show. He's there to encourage the FBI, using Scully, to debunk the X-Files. So they'll quit looking for what he actually controls, which is the government's knowledge about UFOs.
23:57 Speaker 01 And simply, the overarching concept is the government knows things they're not telling you. And that comes right from my Watergate childhood and Pentagon Papers childhood. And it was of the spirit of the 70s and 80s. Yeah. And then Ronald Reagan kind of skirted that. But when we got to Clinton, it was the same thing. There was still a mistrust, distrust of the US government. And that's a whole other story that we could investigate. It feels like that still goes on now. Without a doubt. Maybe more so than ever. It could be. And, you know, we live in a conspiracy, you know, a Washington conspiracy now.
24:42 Rick Rubin? Tell me a little bit about the culture at the time that you started the show. What else was going on? What else was on TV?
24:49 Speaker 01 I can tell you what I was up against. From the starting block, there was a show that was being produced by Fox that the guy who ran the network, a guy named Sandy Grushow, was sure that was the hit and we were the also-ran. It was called "Briscoe County Junior" or "The Adventures of Briscoe County Junior", and "Briscoe County Junior" was the name of the character, believe it or not. And that show ended up, it came and went. We outlasted everyone, but I'm trying to think what was on at the time. Steven Bochko's shows were very popular. "NYPD Blue" I think was on at the time, or roughly that time. We had just come off of "L.A. Law" if it wasn't still on.
25:33 Speaker 01 Those were the kinds of dramas people were watching.
25:36 Rick Rubin? And this wasn't that different in format, more just in subject matter it was different. Would you say that?
25:42 Speaker 01 Well, it was different in format too. Even though it was a four-act structure,
25:49 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
25:49 Speaker 01 Everything was a four-act structure. So it was similar in that sense. I want to tell you an interesting story because I'm thinking about that. So the show ended up, I would say, it had a kind of rhythm to it. And I think it was a rhythm unlike anything else on television. And we used that four-act structure, as a lot of people did with cliffhangers at the end of each act. So we made the pilot and they, of course, need to test it, to put it in front of an audience and get the audience's reaction. It's a really interesting process. They have people that they've brought in, average folk, TV watchers,
26:35 Speaker 01 and they put them in a room, sitting at a desk with a dial. That they can turn if they like something, they turn it up. But if they don't like something, they turn it down. Pretty simple process. And so they're watching it on their monitor. We've got a monitor up in our room. And it's got a graph on it because they, you know, collected data from the like it or don't like it. And so they start watching the show and they like it. They like it. The graph is going up and up and up. And all of a sudden, oh, the graph goes down. And it's like, oh, no. You know, they don't like that. And then it peaks again, and then it drops again. Then it peaks again, and then it drops again. Peaks again, and I'm watching it and I'm realizing. I go through a lot of this, you know, it's really anxiety producing.
27:19 Speaker 01 I go through it and I realize that's the nature and quality of drama. It's tension and release.
27:27 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
27:28 Speaker 01 And of, you know, of music.
27:29 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
27:30 Speaker 01 For that matter. And it was like a revelation. It can't just be all 120 miles an hour.
27:37 Rick Rubin? No.
27:37 Speaker 01 It's got to have rest.
27:41 Rick Rubin? You have to pull the bow back.
27:42 Speaker 01 Exactly.
27:42 Rick Rubin? Before you release it.
27:43 Speaker 01 And that's other than, I was an archer. So I actually have an appreciation of that, you know, physical state.
27:52 Rick Rubin? Do you think the other worldly aspects of the show was the thing that most drew people to it?
27:59 Speaker 01 I always say the show became a hit because of David and Julian Mulder and Scully.
28:05 Rick Rubin? The relationship or the characters?
28:07 Speaker 01 The relationship and the characters. You could tell that they loved each other and they respected each other. But they came at life from completely different angles. And it's that relationship and the tension and the respect. And you know what? It just comes down to that love. It took so long for it to be stated, acted upon. It was the secret sauce for the show, which is sexual tension from characters that you love and respect. He had tremendous amount of respect for her and she for him.
28:43 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
28:43 Speaker 01 And it was that that gave the show its gravity.
28:47 Rick Rubin? Considering they're FBI agents in the show, are there any requirements? Like, does the government have to approve your shows?
28:55 Speaker 01 This is a really interesting thing. I write this pilot and I call up the FBI and ask them some questions. And they're kind of reluctant to answer my question. Who are you? What are you doing? What's your name? Never heard of you. So they were reluctant to answer my questions originally. And then the show got picked up. And all of a sudden, we get a call from the FBI. And who are you? What are you doing? And I thought, oh, no, they're gonna, they're gonna shut us down. The FBI is actually-
29:30 Rick Rubin? Could they have shut you down?
29:31 Speaker 01 Of course not. It was nerve wracking because the FBI were not portrayed necessarily in a good light. But of course, they didn't shut us down. And soon enough, they became secret fans of the show. And by the time the first season aired, we got invited to Quantico and we got to-
29:50 Rick Rubin? Wow.
29:51 Speaker 01 We got the Jodie Foster treatment, as they call it.
29:53 Rick Rubin? So cool.
29:54 Speaker 01 Yeah. And actually, that, talking about what inspired the show and the idea, and the FBI was, I love Silence of the Lambs. And Scully doesn't have red hair by mistake. That was right from Jodie Foster. So that was, the FBI was, of course, front and center for me.
30:13 Rick Rubin? Did you ever get to talk to them about what did they like, what they didn't like?
30:16 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. And they, but everything was off the record. And I got to meet with people who work on the profiling, you know, just like Clary Starling worked in the Behavioral Profilers. I got to meet with them, hang out with them. We got to shoot in the firing range. You know, it was like, it was Disneyland. And that's the way it continued. I became friendly with FBI agents. I actually took a course at the FBI. So it was an immersion for me. We both benefited mutually because actually, people became interested in the FBI. There's something called the Scully Effect. And women predominantly, it changed the course of their lives and their careers.
30:59 Speaker 01 People became scientists, you know, STEM scientists, and even FBI agents because of Agent Scully. And that's actually one of the things I'm most proud of is that it actually affected people's lives in something other than just entertainment.
31:15 Rick Rubin? She demonstrated a different course available.
31:18 Speaker 01 Yes, she did.
31:19 Rick Rubin? Would the FBI ever say, hey, you got this wrong? This is how we would do it? Or would you ever contact them and say, hey, this is what's happening?
31:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:27 Rick Rubin? How would you guys handle this?
31:28 Speaker 01 It's more like that, that we would say, what would you do if, what would you do if?
31:32 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
31:33 Speaker 01 You know, the show, I always say, without Scully, without the skeptic, the show wouldn't have made it. All the science fiction is based on real science. And we were rigorous about making the science absolutely real. And it came from a lot of research on our part before the internet, where we would actually go to scientists and say, what if this, this, and this? And the show is based on those two words, what if?
32:01 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
32:01 Speaker 01 What if this science could be proven to be this science fiction? So Scully is the anchor for the show and Mulder is the person who is being pulled back from outer space.
32:15 Rick Rubin? So many of the subjects covered in the show at the time.
32:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:20 Rick Rubin? Seemed so way out.
32:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:22 Rick Rubin? And unbelievable. And so many of them have come to pass in the world.
32:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:28 Rick Rubin? Remarkably so.
32:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's crazy.
32:30 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
32:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, the first big one was clones. When they cloned that cheap dolly, you know, we were playing clones were science fiction. All of a sudden, it wasn't the case anymore. And there are so many things like that in the show.
32:45 Rick Rubin? Yeah, nanobots.
32:46 Speaker 01 Yes.
32:46 Rick Rubin? Things that now that you read about in the paper now.
32:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:49 Rick Rubin? You were talking about 30 years ago.
32:50 Speaker 01 Exactly, AI, yeah.
32:52 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
32:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, although AI's been around a really long time, yeah.
32:56 Rick Rubin? Where would all of those? Potential future ideas come from to make it into the show and then to make it into the world.
33:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, you hire a group of people, really talented people, which is the secret to the success of the show. And secret to my success is based on the smart, talented, good work of a select group of people who had good ideas and who made the show what it is. And they, you know, the writers come in. It's not like they're just doing your concept. They are recreating, developing your concept. And it so happened that I either hired or was suggested that I hire just the right people to make it work and.
33:51 Rick Rubin? Would they do research as well?
33:52 Speaker 01 Yes.
33:53 Rick Rubin? It's not just like made up fiction.
33:56 Speaker 01 No.
33:56 Rick Rubin? It always seems like it's rooted in some.
33:59 Speaker 01 It is.
34:00 Rick Rubin? Something.
34:00 Speaker 01 Yes, it's rooted in science or it's rooted in conspiracies. It's rooted in, you know, just like satanic ritual abuse. I had a neighbor growing up who believed this young woman that she had been subjected by her family to satanic ritual abuse, things like that. Someone told me I had a dream. I saw a ghost. You know, a lot of it was pulled from thin air like that.
34:26 Rick Rubin? Have you ever had a metaphysical experience in your life?
34:29 Speaker 01 Well, I'd like to say I haven't. But like anyone who's experienced kismet, serendipity, coincidence, déjà vu, I've had all those things and I have thoughts about that, too.
34:44 Rick Rubin? Yeah. It was a long time or many episodes before we ever saw an ET.
34:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, the law was laid down. I mean, that we are not going to see an alien for five years. Of course, we saw an alien first episode of season two.
35:01 Rick Rubin? Because clearly on the show, we get the impression they're aliens. But by not seeing them.
35:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:08 Rick Rubin? There's always this doubt.
35:09 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly.
35:11 Rick Rubin? And was the plan to keep that as long as possible?
35:14 Speaker 01 Keep it as long as possible. And like all the rules I laid down, everyone broke them.
35:21 Speaker 01 Freely.
35:22 Rick Rubin? How did it change? Once you see an alien.
35:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:26 Rick Rubin? It's really a different show, no?
35:27 Speaker 01 It is, and I was given very good advice, and I've spoken about this, you know, since the beginning, that one of the reasons this show succeeded is a conversation I had with a man named Rick Carter, no relation, but forty-year-old friendship, and now an Academy Award-winning production designer, but he was, has been Steven Spielberg, among other top directors there, production designer. And when I wrote the pilot, I gave it to him to read. He had just done forty-four episodes of a Spielberg series called Amazing Stories, and they had worked, you know, twenty-two episodes in a season, and they were all different.
36:10 Speaker 01 So no standing sets, you know, just, it's really hard to do what they had done. Then the show was canceled after the second season, and that was right when I gave him the X-Files pilot. And he read it, and he said, "I like this." He says, "But I'm gonna give you some really good advice." He says, "You're not gonna have any time or any money, so put all the scary stuff in the shadows. Let us imagine the scary stuff, and you're gonna get a lot of mileage, and you're actually gonna be able to produce the show." And that was such sage.
36:45 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
36:45 Speaker 01 Advice that really saved us.
36:47 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
36:47 Speaker 01 Because they always stack the odds against you, because they know, you know, in their hearts, you're gonna fail.
36:54 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
36:54 Speaker 01 You know, most things fail. But that advice really set the path that we started on, and the cinematography became dark, which is great for the feel and atmosphere of the show. We were in Vancouver, which has free atmosphere. Everything contributed to that cinematic experience that was scarier by what you imagined than by what you saw.
37:22 Rick Rubin? Yeah, our imagination is much wilder than anything you can show on the screen.
37:26 Speaker 01 Always, yes.
37:27 Rick Rubin? So if you imply it.
37:28 Speaker 01 Yep.
37:29 Rick Rubin? Everyone gets to make their own scary monsters.
37:31 Speaker 01 Exactly, that's, you know, that's the secret to movie making, right?
37:34 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
37:39 Rick Rubin? How would you decide to add a new character over time? How would that happen? And how would you decide when a new character came, whether that character was gonna stay or whether they were just on one episode?
37:50 Speaker 01 You've got to be bold. To kill off a popular character is kind of shooting yourself in the foot. But we did that. We would put characters everyone came to know and love. And at the end of the first season, for example, there's a character named Deep Throat. And he dies at the end. And his last dying words are, "Trust no one." And it became a kind of, you know, that was the hook.
38:13 Rick Rubin? What was his character?
38:14 Speaker 01 He was Deep Throat. He was like Deep Throat in
38:18 Rick Rubin? In The Watergate Story.
38:19 Speaker 01 In The Watergate Story, All the President's Men, which continues to be a movie I watch every year.
38:25 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
38:26 Speaker 01 What is remarkable about that movie to me is everyone knows the outcome of that movie when you sit down to watch it. And yet, it's still riveting.
38:34 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
38:35 Speaker 01 It's an intense experience. And I wanted to bring that experience to the show, too.
38:40 Rick Rubin? Yeah. One of the stars gets pregnant in real life. And I imagine you weren't expecting that.
38:47 Speaker 01 No.
38:48 Rick Rubin? And how do you deal with that?
38:50 Speaker 01 It's funny. It was really a fork in the road. I had a network executive say to me, "You've got to fire her. You've got to replace her." We can't have a pregnant actress on the show who plays a chaste scientist. And, you know, when the people spending the money are giving you the orders, and that's the way it works, you have to take it seriously. Anyway, I told them I didn't want to get rid of her. I thought I'd make her disappear with the storyline. And sure enough, I was able to have Scully abducted. And we had to shoot around her pregnancy for a time.
39:32 Speaker 01 I remember I did a scene where she's at a supermarket checking out and something happens with the scanner or something. There's, you know, something paranormal happens. And we just hit her behind the, all the stuff at the counter.
39:47 Rick Rubin? You could only see her head sticking up?
39:48 Speaker 01 You could only see her head, exactly.
39:49 Rick Rubin? Was that a common thing where things would happen in real life and it would impact what was possible to do?
39:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that's the big one is that with Scully's abduction, it really changed the way the mythology.
40:03 Rick Rubin? And you were never planning on that originally?
40:06 Speaker 01 No, that just happened. We had to figure it out on the fly.
40:08 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
40:09 Speaker 01 It's part of the mystery of doing what we do and of doing what you do is discovery and accident and revolutionary things on the show that change your mind. That said, and this is another rabbit hole, when the show got to be like in season seven or so, and we had this mythology, and the mythology was really the way to deal with Mulder and Scully's personal lives and their relationship and their relationship to Mulder's sister's abduction, among other things, that's what Scully believes and what she's seen. We did a movie in year five of the show
40:51 Speaker 01 and it just so happens that Scully is lying in the snow and ice when a UFO takes up. And of course, she's turned away. She's indisposed and she turns away and she never sees the spaceship. So it's stuff like that we played with. But I was gonna say that in like season seven, I realized that the stories almost start telling themselves because you've laid down so much foundation that the shape of the building is dedicated to what you have already laid out.
41:27 Rick Rubin? Would you ever look back to old episodes to find loose threads that you could continue?
41:33 Speaker 01 Yes, and there were keepers of that.
41:37 Speaker 01 Faith, Frank Spottenitz came to work on the, we were in the same book club early on. He was writing for Entertainment Weekly. I hired him in season two of the show and we became kind of keepers of the mythology. And would do roughly four mythology shows a season.
41:56 Rick Rubin? So those would be personal shows based on
41:59 Speaker 01 Yes.
41:59 Rick Rubin? Their backstories and their relationship.
42:02 Speaker 01 And their relationship, but also on what the government knew and wasn't telling us about aliens and UFOs. Yeah.
42:10 Rick Rubin? Did the scientist ever have a metaphysical experience during the course of the show?
42:14 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, yeah, at one point we switched it. So he, she became the believer and he became the skeptic.
42:20 Rick Rubin? Very interesting.
42:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was, and it was, it was a big moment and a big direction change.
42:26 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
42:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:27 Rick Rubin? And how did it impact her to become a believer? What's that like when someone is
42:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:34 Rick Rubin? A person of science
42:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:36 Rick Rubin? And who gets shown
42:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:38 Rick Rubin? Something that they can't believe.
42:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:40 Rick Rubin? What happens?
42:42 Speaker 01 You know, it's almost like, you know, not believing your own eyes.
42:45 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
42:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:46 Rick Rubin? So she did believe her own eyes before she questioned whether what she saw was actually what she saw.
42:52 Speaker 01 She's a scientist at heart.
42:54 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
42:55 Speaker 01 And we can go into what she saw and what it's all about. And actually, I'm going to jump forward with you here just a little bit. The last two seasons of the show, we did, I think, six episodes and then 10 episodes. Came back to do what they called season 11, season 12, even though during the first nine years of the show, we would typically do 22 to sometimes 25 episodes a season. It was a lot.
43:21 Rick Rubin? Wow.
43:22 Speaker 01 Anyway, but we came back and we did these episodes and I was a big fan of the Nausicaä, my struggle books. I loved
43:29 Rick Rubin? I don't know those books.
43:30 Speaker 01 There are a number of them and they are detailed. Accounts of this guy Nausicaä's life. I just loved them. So I decided to do four episodes called My Struggle. It was Mulder's struggle, Scully's struggle, the cigarette-smoking man, the evil villain's struggle. And then the struggle of Mulder and Scully's son. They actually have a baby together. And they end up having to give the baby away to keep it safe. And that baby has grown to a young man. And that reunion was long-hoped-for by X-Files fans. So I wanted to deal with that at the very end of the show. And so through those four episodes,
44:14 Speaker 01 which are, continue to be largely misunderstood, I developed possibly what is the biggest idea that the X-Files has ever posited. And I'll tell you that it's going to affect, that X-Files is about to be rebooted. Really? Yes, by this guy Ryan Coogler, you know, a very successful movie director. Has a movie in the theaters right now called Sinners. Big hit. He's going to do it. He wants to do it with a diversity cast. But he's got something to deal with that he's not aware of yet. And that is that Scully's character will come to know shortly something
44:56 Speaker 01 that will not only change the course of her life, career, biology, but the course of all of our lives and for generations to come. So it's a big idea that I built in. And I laid it out sparingly and kind of cryptically and vaguely. But at the very end, I lay in a clue that to this day, I think four years later, no one has figured out. And so I'm really looking forward to the revelation. Wow. So there's a clue hanging out there. There's a clue hanging out there. That no one's picking up on. Yes.
45:39 Speaker 01 But that leads to a very big story coming. Very big. It's amazing.
45:45 Rick Rubin? That's amazing. Do you think about this all the time?
45:47 Speaker 01 I think about it. Every time I read something, I think, that's interesting. You know, it's everything, you know how it is.
45:53 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
45:54 Speaker 01 And your book spells it out. It's the nature of art and artists.
45:59 Rick Rubin? We're given clues everywhere we look.
46:01 Speaker 01 You know, all you do is open your eyes. You know, driving down the street, you know, be a careful driver like I am, but look around.
46:08 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
46:09 Speaker 01 You know, just open your eyes to life and the world. And, you know, I just, I walk outside every night.
46:13 Rick Rubin? Do you make notes?
46:15 Speaker 01 I make notes. I have to force myself to make notes because I always think I have a great memory.
46:20 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
46:20 Speaker 01 And it's not as good as I'd like it to be.
46:22 Rick Rubin? Yeah, I find if I don't write things down, that it's gone.
46:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:26 Rick Rubin? It's gone.
46:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:26 Rick Rubin? Sometimes I even write it down and then don't know what it means later. That's how gone it is. Was it difficult to keep up with the number of stories you needed? You said 22 to 25.
46:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:37 Rick Rubin? Per season.
46:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:39 Rick Rubin? That's a tremendous amount of stories. How do you do that?
46:42 Speaker 01 Really, it's only standing set is Mulder's office at the FBI. And so that means you are on the road creating.
46:52 Rick Rubin? Everything.
46:52 Speaker 01 Everything.
46:53 Rick Rubin? Yeah, everything's from scratch.
46:54 Speaker 01 Everyone was a little movie unto itself.
46:57 Rick Rubin? Yes.
46:57 Speaker 01 So that was hard. And once again, I hired just the right people. Or they, those people came into my life. And directors were all important to our success. And there are four of them that, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say they're as responsible as anyone on the show for the success of the show.
47:19 Rick Rubin? And that's not always the case with TV.
47:20 Speaker 01 It is not. They're guns for hire mostly.
47:23 Rick Rubin? Would like director one work on this week? And then director two work on the next week? And so director one would end up coming back for the fifth? Something like that?
47:32 Speaker 01 Yes, it worked kind of like that where they.
47:35 Rick Rubin? They took turns. Or hopped over each other. Would shows be in production all the time?
47:41 Speaker 01 Yes. You know, you never had enough scripts to begin.
47:44 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
47:44 Speaker 01 I worked 11 and a half months a year. And if I wasn't writing those extra two weeks on vacation, I was already behind. There's a famous Rod Serling quote where he says, if I drop my pencil, I'm two weeks behind.
47:58 Rick Rubin? How great was Rod Serling?
48:00 Speaker 01 You know, that's the TV we grew up on.
48:02 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
48:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:03 Rick Rubin? Genius.
48:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:04 Rick Rubin? Genius. Brilliant.
48:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:07 Rick Rubin? Does the government ever turn on the agents over the course of the series?
48:12 Speaker 01 Yes.
48:14 Speaker 01 And it's all part of the plan. I call them Evil Geniuses. Kurt Anderson wrote a book called Evil Geniuses. Came out a few years ago. It's excellent. And it really, for me, says a lot about what I was trying to imagine and build into the show for decades. And Kurt Anderson makes a very factual case for this. Where we are today has been in progress for decades. And that this moment in time is the realization of a lot of really careful, drawn-out processes
48:57 Speaker 01 with a lot of people who don't necessarily want the best for all of us.
49:03 Rick Rubin? Tell me more about that book. I'd never heard of it.
49:05 Speaker 01 No, it's a wonderful book. Kurt Anderson, he was with Graydon Carter, the co-creator of Spy Magazine. I knew about him. He was very instrumental in my life as a young writer. He wrote a book called The Real Thing. And, you know, I think he had been a member of the Harvard Lampoon. He was very funny and acerbic. And it was just the kind of tone I wanted to develop in my own writing.
49:32 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
49:33 Speaker 01 And so I read that book. I loved it. And I'm sure I, you know, I pulled from it. So highly unlikely, or I should say, it was completely out of the blue. We won a Golden Globe Award. And I'm being interviewed at the ceremony after we won. And someone, a reporter, said to me, "Compare the Golden Globes to the Emmys." I said, "Well, it's the same thing, you know. It's Hollywood ballots and et cetera." Which, I wasn't fudging, but it's the Hollywood foreign press who votes for the movies on the Golden Globes. And it's your peers who vote for the Emmys. So I was quoted somewhere.
50:17 Speaker 01 And I think in The New Yorker, Kurt Anderson reamed me.
50:23 Speaker 01 With this quote, he obviously, you know, I don't know what I'm talking about, blah, blah, blah. So I took it upon myself to call Kurt Anderson.
50:33 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
50:33 Speaker 01 This guy who, you know, I admired and now has taken me down. And I said to him, and I just want to talk to you about that piece. I said, because I've been a fan of yours for a long time and I'm going to prove it to you. And I said to him on the phone, I said, "Horrid yellow grubs colonize my rice bowl, elders knowing smirks." That was the real thing, haiku in his book. And I had carried it with me, I remembered that haiku. And we ended up talking about having lunch. We never did it, but it was, it was a big, it was a real memorable moment for me.
51:12 Rick Rubin? What was the syndicate?
51:14 Speaker 01 The syndicate is the group of evil geniuses that the cigarette smoking man is one of the leaders. He was part of the hierarchy who are keeping the secret and in league.
51:29 Rick Rubin? Do they work for the government or no?
51:30 Speaker 01 Yes, they do, but of course, there's something called above top secret, which is where they would be. They are in league with the aliens and the colonists and about how, what the aliens have plans for. And that figure, I was telling you about this big idea I have for the show. That is part and parcel.
51:50 Rick Rubin? Are the government in on everything in the stories? Is there anything that the government doesn't know about or isn't involved in?
51:58 Speaker 01 For example, the president wouldn't know about a lot of what the cigarette smoking man is doing. That is that above top secret, the idea that.
52:06 Rick Rubin? But it's still the government.
52:07 Speaker 01 It is still the government, right?
52:09 Rick Rubin? It's not like some corporate hierarchy outside of the government.
52:13 Speaker 01 No, although we teased that Glenn Morgan, one of the amazing people that came to work on the show, he and his partner, James Wong, wrote some of the best episodes, ended up directing some of the best episodes. He actually played with this idea, which is really kind of ripped from the headlines, that we now not only fight wars with our military, we hire these corporate mercenaries and they go out and they do this work and they don't necessarily have to operate under the same rules and regulations that our military has to operate under. So they are a kind of. Renegade.
52:52 Rick Rubin? NGOs.
52:53 Speaker 01 Yes, NGOs, exactly.
52:55 Rick Rubin? That works its way into real life, too. It's amazing. How important was it for each episode to stand on its own? As opposed to being, this gets you along in the story?
53:07 Speaker 01 So if we did twenty-two to twenty-five episodes a season, and we only did four mythologies, all the rest are standalone stories. And we did what became to be known as Monster of the Week episodes. So, you know, most episodes stand on their own.
53:24 Rick Rubin? And who's Ted O'Malley?
53:27 Speaker 01 Ted O'Malley is the stand-in for Alex Jones.
53:33 Rick Rubin? Really?
53:34 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, not in real life, but he, he.
53:38 Rick Rubin? He's based on Alex Jones.
53:39 Speaker 01 He's our Alex Jones. Yeah.
53:42 Rick Rubin? Would you get ideas from listening to Alex's show?
53:44 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
53:45 Rick Rubin? Of like what the?
53:45 Speaker 01 Yeah. In fact, when, after that season, I got a call from Alex Jones. He says, hey, you did a character like me. You wanna get together? And I was busy.
53:55 Rick Rubin? Oh, too bad. It'd probably make for a really good story.
53:58 Speaker 01 It would have.
54:03 Rick Rubin? The first three seasons, success was really growing.
54:06 Speaker 01 It was.
54:06 Rick Rubin? And you're on Friday nights.
54:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:08 Rick Rubin? And then, all of a sudden, the network decides to put you on Sunday nights.
54:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:13 Rick Rubin? Why does that happen? How do you feel about it?
54:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:15 Rick Rubin? What's going on?
54:16 Speaker 01 It's a good question. And how I felt about it was I felt I was against it.
54:22 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
54:22 Speaker 01 I had made a joke. I said, my autobiography is gonna be called Friday's Nine. So it's like, you know, I loved our time slot. It was.
54:31 Rick Rubin? It worked.
54:32 Speaker 01 It worked. It was, it was the perfect show on the perfect night. And that's not a night where a lot of people are watching TV, you know? There aren't a lot of available.
54:41 Rick Rubin? People are creatures of habit.
54:42 Speaker 01 They are. And they, everyone goes out on Friday nights. So they didn't give us the most coveted time slot to begin with. But I felt it was.
54:49 Rick Rubin? It worked.
54:50 Speaker 01 It worked. Yeah. It was our time slot. And when they came to me and said they wanted to put it Sunday night, I'm thinking, that's where the Disney shows are. You know, it's, Sunday night is like a big family night. And it's like, we're a cult show. I don't wanna be a Sunday show. It just had a kind of cotton candy feel to me. But I listened to them and their reasoning, which was not unpersuasive.
55:14 Speaker 01 And the show went to Sunday nights. And the great thing about that is a cult show grew into a big cult show.
55:25 Rick Rubin? Really?
55:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
55:25 Rick Rubin? So the audience followed?
55:27 Speaker 01 The audience followed and we gained-
55:28 Rick Rubin? And it grew even more.
55:28 Speaker 01 New audience, right? Also, one of those things where-
55:32 Rick Rubin? Could have gone either way.
55:33 Speaker 01 It could have gone either way.
55:34 Rick Rubin? Yeah. Tell me about the international nature of the show. You did shows in different parts of the world.
55:39 Speaker 01 Yeah. There's lots of stories about aliens in different parts of the world. There's a thing called the Tunguska Incident, which was, in Russia, a UFO incident. And so, of course, we went to Tunguska, Russia, in the show and played that out, made that part of the mythology. So UFO sightings, incidents, abductions have taken place around the world. And so, it's still amazing to me that we have this international audience for the show. That someone, Kumail Nanjani, the actor, who we ended up working with, told me that he, it's like every Friday night, he and his family watch it in Pakistan.
56:24 Speaker 01 You know, and it's like, you hear that, and it's like, really?
56:27 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
56:28 Speaker 01 You got it in Pakistan? But, you know, it had a global reach.
56:32 Rick Rubin? It also speaks to the nature of when you're dealing with things that are otherworldly or metaphysical, that's not bound to our culture.
56:42 Speaker 01 Right.
56:42 Rick Rubin? That's a universal human interest.
56:45 Speaker 01 You're exactly right. And that was just luck.
56:49 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
56:50 Speaker 01 Although that Roper survey-
56:52 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
56:52 Speaker 01 That psychologist friend gave me-
56:56 Rick Rubin? Yes.
56:56 Speaker 01 Really spelled out in scientific terms what percentage of the population actually believed in the phenomenon.
57:05 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
57:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:06 Rick Rubin? At one point, we find out one of the main characters has cancer.
57:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:10 Rick Rubin? Where did the idea come from and why did you decide to go in that direction?
57:14 Speaker 01 It had to do with Scully's abduction and what had been done to her, or what, we didn't know quite yet, what had been done to her. And that alien intervention or exposure had possibly produced the cancer, but also possibly cured the cancer. So it was really just taking something that had happened. This is where the story starts telling itself.
57:42 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
57:42 Speaker 01 And capitalizing on it.
57:46 Rick Rubin? You said you, after the fifth season, you'd do a movie.
57:49 Speaker 01 Yes.
57:50 Rick Rubin? Where does the idea come to do a movie?
57:53 Speaker 01 David Duchovny said, because there had been talk about doing a movie.
57:58 Rick Rubin? What can you do in a movie that you can't do on TV?
58:00 Speaker 01 Well, what you can do is you get, instead of a $3 million budget, you get a $75 million budget.
58:07 Rick Rubin? So it's a bigger, bigger production?
58:10 Speaker 01 It's a big screen approach. And the show, and the story you tell has to have that kind of big screen scope. It's got to do something that catapults the show into a new orbit. And that's the plan. But David had come to me and he says, "Look, there's talk about this movie, but if you are, you're not going to do it, tell me, because I'm going to go off and do something else."
58:34 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
58:34 Speaker 01 So I thought, it's a better idea to do the movie than it was to not do the movie. Ended up, so the whole season four, I have written the movie script. We are prepping the movie script through season four of the show. We're still in Vancouver. And I have a second show on TV. So we are...
59:03 Speaker 01 Prepping a movie and I have another show that has 22 episodes a year. It was, I still don't know how I survived. It was the hardest year of work in my life, especially the way I did the work. I'll tell you just quickly also, it's not micromanagement, it's obsession with the show and its success and the storytelling and everything about it. Because, you know, I was, I tried to involve myself in everything. In the end, it was important to the show, but it was also not necessarily a healthy way to live your life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was the black oil? That was my idea that we've got this product
59:46 Speaker 01 living beneath us that we use with abandon. And it's ancient. And in that substance, which we think of as fuel, there lives something that predates us. And I thought that was like the aliens themselves. Yeah. And just came to you, that idea? Yeah. It's a great idea. I was mentioning that, a big idea that I was talking about, that I laid in through the last two seasons. Actually, part of that, I just had another conversation, it's an ongoing conversation with my brother, about existence.
1:00:31 Speaker 01 My brother who is, teaches physics. Math is a big part of his life. And we always have this conversation about, are we creating math or are we discovering math? And I'm, for me, it's a no-brainer. For me too, no-brainer, very clear. Yeah, it's the universe. Yeah. And we are just discoverers. Math is mapping something that we experience. Yes. But it isn't creating it. Right. It's just a way to describe it. Exactly. Pet, math is some other, call it a higher power, call it God, call it whatever you want to call it, the universe, Mother Nature. An intelligence.
1:01:14 Speaker 01 An intelligence, that's the even better way to put it, is out there, it has created math. You could say that I just saw a play about Rachmaninoff, that Rachmaninoff...
1:01:30 Speaker 01 Was discovering that music.
1:01:32 Rick Rubin? Yes.
1:01:34 Speaker 01 I just love that idea.
1:01:35 Rick Rubin? Yes.
1:01:36 Speaker 01 That we are discoverers.
1:01:37 Rick Rubin? Yes.
1:01:38 Speaker 01 I.
1:01:38 Rick Rubin? We're not truly creators.
1:01:40 Speaker 01 Right.
1:01:42 Rick Rubin? We're recognizing things around us.
1:01:45 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:01:45 Rick Rubin? And I think the word I used in the book was either reproducing it or re-presenting it.
1:01:51 Speaker 01 Yes. But it's. We are the filter then.
1:01:54 Rick Rubin? Yeah, we can put a frame on it and share it and say, hey, look at this.
1:01:58 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:01:59 Rick Rubin? But we're saying, hey, look at the rain.
1:02:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:02:01 Rick Rubin? We're not creating the rain, we're pointing to it.
1:02:04 Speaker 01 Right. Yeah, but my bigger idea.
1:02:07 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:02:08 Speaker 01 In part, and it's a part of where I was going with my mythology episodes, is that I want to take it a large step further.
1:02:18 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:02:19 Speaker 01 I want to say that, you know, there's this music of the spheres, this idea that the planets are in alignment as such, and it is a musical chord of sorts. That we are seeing a shape of our solar system that may actually predict the shapes of everything else in our universe. And I don't know that this is not untrue.
1:02:44 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:02:45 Speaker 01 Even though it's kind of unfounded. Is that I wonder if everything, every potentiality, every possibility is out there, and it's we are simply living our lives based on our finding the best potential outcomes, expressions, et cetera, that the universe has some kind of beauty to it like that, that the aliens know.
1:03:14 Rick Rubin? Beautiful.
1:03:14 Speaker 01 That's what the aliens know, is they know those things. And that's why we can't seem to, you know, we see them, but we can't. They know things that we don't know.
1:03:24 Rick Rubin? I love the idea of the music of the spheres and the idea of harmony being the thing that, I don't know if locks it together is the right word. But you know, if you hear someone singing, and then someone comes in and singing a harmony note, and they're sharp or flat, when they lock in.
1:03:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:41 Rick Rubin? Something happens.
1:03:43 Speaker 01 Right.
1:03:43 Rick Rubin? And they vibrate together.
1:03:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:45 Rick Rubin? We could feel it in our bones.
1:03:47 Speaker 01 Right. I believe it.
1:03:48 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:03:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:50 Rick Rubin? Tell me about working with the network. Were they helpful? Did they get in the way?
1:03:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:54 Rick Rubin? What's good about having a partner like that? And what's bad about it?
1:03:57 Speaker 01 The bad thing is, early on, as I was saying, they anticipate your failure. So they're very micromanaging, hands-on, nervous as can be.
1:04:09 Rick Rubin? Undermining or not really?
1:04:10 Speaker 01 Not undermining.
1:04:11 Rick Rubin? Certainly not intentionally.
1:04:12 Speaker 01 Not intentionally.
1:04:13 Rick Rubin? No, they want it to do that.
1:04:14 Speaker 01 Just doing their job. And these people have jobs and, you know, their job is to, they're executives, to make executive decisions.
1:04:21 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:04:22 Speaker 01 But luckily, we were with a, we were talking about, Fox was a new network. We were breaking some new ground. We were doing OK. So they, you know, eventually came to the conclusion that we knew what we were doing. And so that developed through the first three seasons of the show. Season three may be one of the best seasons of the show. And so everyone was riding high and, you know, go get them and...
1:04:52 Rick Rubin? Did it take all the way to season three before they were trusting of you, would you say?
1:04:59 Speaker 01 No, I mean, we had a lot of trust and a lot of goodwill. And that's because there are a lot of really good people who worked at the network and the studio, who were part of the shepherding process. So we were really lucky in that sense. But we got to season three and we had momentum. And in season four, the team of Glenn Morgan and James Wong came back. They had a show on that didn't go in the end. And they came back to the show. And they did an episode called "Home." And this is maybe one of the most popular episodes ever on the show.
1:05:44 Speaker 01 And it's scary as hell and...
1:05:46 Rick Rubin? What's the subject matter?
1:05:47 Speaker 01 It's mutant kids who probably were having sex with their mother and...
1:05:55 Rick Rubin? We don't know that for sure.
1:05:57 Speaker 01 We can surmise it.
1:05:59 Rick Rubin? OK.
1:05:59 Speaker 01 And...
1:06:01 Rick Rubin? So inbreeding?
1:06:02 Speaker 01 Killers, inbreeding. And it's a great episode.
1:06:07 Speaker 01 The, I don't know how we got it past the, what they call standards and practices at the in-house censors. But because they believed we knew what we were doing by season four, it's like, okay, you guys, you know, you know better than we. You know what is drawing an audience.
1:06:24 Rick Rubin? Where the line is.
1:06:25 Speaker 01 Yes. So the episode made it past all the checkpoints and it aired. And the day after it aired, I got a phone call from the guy who hired me originally, Peter Roth, screaming at me, "Never again. And then that episode will never air again. You've gone too far." And, you know, it's like, it started the process all over again. So now all of a sudden, we were being watched carefully because we had upset somebody in New York. So, you know, it was, you know, a turning point in the show. We had to be much more careful about.
1:07:07 Speaker 01 And the censors that you can imagine, you know, were also given their orders to watch for our shenanigans.
1:07:16 Rick Rubin? But you also said it was the most popular episode of the show.
1:07:20 Speaker 01 Eventually it became the most popular. Because it was too scary for network television is what it was. And we had broken the rules.
1:07:28 Rick Rubin? When you were doing it, did it feel intentional on your part or no? Did it just feel like this is just a good episode?
1:07:34 Speaker 01 They pitched it to me in its kind of rough plot points. We did very detailed storyboards. And we, I mean extremely detailed and that came.
1:07:48 Rick Rubin? Almost like watching an episode just with still.
1:07:50 Speaker 01 It's with three by five cards, but it's a mosaic, isn't it?
1:07:56 Rick Rubin? Drawings?
1:07:57 Speaker 01 No, they're, it's all hand letter, written descriptions of scenes.
1:08:02 Rick Rubin? I see.
1:08:03 Speaker 01 And there were.
1:08:03 Rick Rubin? No visuals though.
1:08:05 Speaker 01 No visuals. No.
1:08:06 Rick Rubin? Words.
1:08:07 Speaker 01 Words. And they pitched it to me in very, much rougher shape and form than we, than I was used to. But by season four, these guys had written some of the best episodes of the show. They knew what they were doing. I knew they knew what they were doing. And so they, they pitched to me a rough idea and it was based on a documentary called My Brother's Keeper, which I liked. And so, you know, run with it. You know what you're doing. It makes my job easier that I can take care of other business. Anyway, um, the show, as I said, caused a lot of trouble. We did a second movie.
1:08:46 Speaker 01 And the second movie, they were going to give us a third of the budget of the first movie. And we were going to do what was, in essence, a standalone episode of the show in movie form. And they would give us, you know, a small budget to do that. And so that sounded like an opportunity for me. It was 2008. The show had been off the air for six years. Let's revive it and do something good. And they said, we want a PG 13 movie. I said, you know, it's no problem because network television basically is PG 13.
1:09:25 Speaker 01 It was a really hard and painful lesson to learn. Is that a PG rating is actually less permissive than network television standards.
1:09:38 Rick Rubin? Wow.
1:09:39 Speaker 01 And so when I've turned in the first cut of the show to the studio, not dissimilar to the call that I had gotten about never again. I got a very angry talking to by the studio executive saying, you've gone too far. This is too much. You've got to cut this back. This is not a PG 13 movie. This is not a family movie. And I co-wrote and directed
1:10:07 Rick Rubin? Wow.
1:10:07 Speaker 01 the movie.
1:10:08 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:10:08 Speaker 01 And so it was a big surprise and kind of ugly. And so we had to go cut the movie.
1:10:16 Rick Rubin? In your mind, those were all things that you could have done on the TV show without it being a problem?
1:10:21 Speaker 01 Probably pushing the limits in some ways, but it's a movie.
1:10:24 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:10:24 Speaker 01 And so, you know, you want a big screen experience.
1:10:26 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:10:27 Speaker 01 So, you know, we trimmed the movie. And then, as predicted by this guy, this executive, we ran it in front of the centers, the people that rate movies, and they said, "No, cut it back even farther. You've got to make this for a more limited audience." And it hurt the movie. For sure. And I can tell you today Yeah. that I just got permission to do a director's cut of the movie, yeah. That's great news. Big news, yeah. That's great news. What was the story of the first movie? The story of the first movie is a mythology episode about experiments being conducted,
1:11:08 Speaker 01 but that there also is a natural component to the abduction of people that involves a virus. And it's communicated through bee stings. And it's a complicated episode that takes us to the Arctic, where there's an underground base, where abductees are being held in suspended animation. And, you know, it's just playing with the mythology and the characters' relationships. Was there anything on the show ever predictive of the pandemic? Yes. Tell me about that. In the first reboot of the movie, only a few years ago,
1:11:51 Speaker 01 she was the chief science advisor for the series originally. And she gave me a lot of science that the show ended up being based on. She's a virologist from the University of Maryland. She is the daughter of my wife's longtime friends. So it was one of those things where the Human Genome Project was taking shape. And I had met really interesting people, but she knew about it in depth, and she knew the science. She had given me that episode idea for the science for the final episode of the first season called "The Erlenmeyer Flask." And that will figure in this big idea that I keep Yeah. teasing for the show. It figures in there.
1:12:35 Speaker 01 But Anne came back to the show as our science advisor, chief science advisor. And she and another woman, a doctor from Canada, convinced me that we needed to do an episode about a pandemic. And we did. We did a pandemic episode before the pandemic. Wow.
1:12:57 Rick Rubin? Amazing.
1:12:58 Speaker 01 It is. It's like, you know, you say in your book, you know, some ideas are.
1:13:03 Rick Rubin? It's time for it to happen.
1:13:04 Speaker 01 It's time for it to happen.
1:13:05 Rick Rubin? Yeah. Was it common for science advisors to pitch you ideas on possible stories?
1:13:12 Speaker 01 No.
1:13:13 Rick Rubin? Had that ever happened before?
1:13:14 Speaker 01 Yes, but, no, we actually didn't take pitches from people. It was, I thought, a recipe for unhappiness. And so all the episode ideas were in-house. She would really comment on our science. She would help lead us in directions, but it wasn't an idea.
1:13:34 Rick Rubin? Wasn't a pitch.
1:13:35 Speaker 01 It wasn't ever a pitch.
1:13:37 Rick Rubin? Who else, besides the science and FBI people, would say, when you would give them the examples and they would say, well, you could consider this? Were there any other people, like, in the orbit? Either story people or comedians or anyone that would like a way to involve more ideas?
1:13:57 Speaker 01 We were rich with ideas, so I have to say no. I was part of a really great team.
1:14:04 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:14:05 Speaker 01 And sometimes it didn't work, and there are breakdowns, there are miscues. But the group of writers that worked on the show, the group of producers that worked on the show, made it the show that it became. We grew up with the internet.
1:14:23 Rick Rubin? The show started pre-internet.
1:14:25 Speaker 01 It started kind of with the internet. We were both growing up together, really. Because we could, we would go into chat rooms, Glenn Morgan more so than I, and get the feedback. If the show aired from, you know, nine to 10.
1:14:43 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:14:43 Speaker 01 At 10 o'clock, he would hear feedback from fans.
1:14:48 Rick Rubin? Describe the audience.
1:14:50 Speaker 01 You know, it's largely women. And it has a lot to do with their relationship, I think. But I was still reading, opening, you know, envelopes with fan mail. And I opened one and it was a woman who gave me a critique of the show that I took to heart. What she liked about it.
1:15:09 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:15:10 Speaker 01 What she didn't like about it.
1:15:11 Rick Rubin? I love this.
1:15:12 Speaker 01 She convinced me.
1:15:14 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:15:15 Speaker 01 We had something, but we had to focus on these things. It was kind of that, that.
1:15:22 Rick Rubin? When did this come? When in the trajectory?
1:15:24 Speaker 01 It came at the end of the first season.
1:15:26 Rick Rubin? Okay.
1:15:26 Speaker 01 So she had watched twenty odd episodes. And I read it and I thought, she's right. It didn't lead me in a direction. It just told me what to focus on.
1:15:38 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:15:39 Speaker 01 It almost was like she was commenting on the spirit of the show. What made it an exciting show for her. And it's not that I had forgotten those things or that they were new to me. But it was just her encouragement that struck me. And so I named a character after her in the season finale.
1:16:02 Rick Rubin? Great.
1:16:02 Speaker 01 That episode. If you watch the pilot, the first episode called Deep Throat and the Ermeyer flask at the end. Basically, that is the foundation for the entire mythology of the show.
1:16:15 Rick Rubin? Wow.
1:16:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:16:17 Rick Rubin? The show was filmed in Vancouver for many years and then moved to LA?
1:16:20 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:16:21 Rick Rubin? Why'd you move?
1:16:22 Speaker 01 The actors wanted to come home. It was like they had been on location for five years. And they wanted to, you know, be with their friends.
1:16:33 Rick Rubin? How did that impact the show, do you think?
1:16:35 Speaker 01 I thought it was a good thing. It's among the reasons the show was successful was it was made in Vancouver. It could double for almost anywhere in the US. And the shows took place across the US. It had free atmosphere most of the year. It had the personnel who were completely invested in the show. From a P A to a grip to a, you know, best boy to a sound, production sound mixer. Like a family. A family was in it. And I tell people, they say, how did you do it? And why did you do it for so long? For me, and I always give the same answer.
1:17:19 Speaker 01 It was that esprit de corps. If you don't have that sense that everyone is working together. And as I say that, in the back of my brain, it says, don't forget about this. Is that along the way, saboteurs may be too strong a term. But there are people who don't necessarily have your best interests at heart. Yeah, yeah. And that was the case there in Vancouver? No, it wasn't actually. I don't want to be cryptic about it, but it was. Cryptic's your game. I know, cryptic is my game. That's what you do. No, it was just the craziness of producing a TV show. We're in the dramatic arts. And I tell people this.
1:18:04 Speaker 01 I was, I was on the board of the local theater in Santa Barbara. And I loved the artistic director. And they decided to get rid of him because they had gotten complaints that he was too hard to work with. And I said, we work in the dramatic arts. You deal with dramatic people. These are people who live passionately and have passionate reactions. Temperamental. They're by nature. Exactly, they express themselves. You know, they wanted somebody who was controllable. Well, I say the same thing about what I'm vaguely referring to is that.
1:18:43 Speaker 01 It's the dramatic arts. You have dramatic people, people that can cause dramas.
1:18:47 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:18:48 Speaker 01 And not necessarily ones that make the show any better.
1:18:53 Rick Rubin? You said you left a clue at the end of the last episode that's leading towards something big coming in the future.
1:18:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:19:00 Rick Rubin? Did you put that clue there knowing something was gonna come in the future?
1:19:06 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:19:08 Rick Rubin? How did you know that?
1:19:10 Speaker 01 I just thought the X-Files could go on forever.
1:19:13 Rick Rubin? Yeah, and it will. Like, in your mind, if this is an ongoing thing.
1:19:17 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:19:17 Rick Rubin? Regardless of whatever business situations or...
1:19:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
1:19:22 Rick Rubin? The story goes on.
1:19:23 Speaker 01 Yes, the story goes on in my mind and I hope in reality.
1:19:28 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:19:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:19:30 Rick Rubin? Were there decisions that you made that you thought were important that turned out to be inconsequential? And the opposite, any things that you thought didn't really matter that turned out to mean a whole lot? In terms of storylines and plots?
1:19:42 Speaker 01 I wanna say that there are episodes that came about that changed the course of the show. And I'm gonna tell you that there are episodes, but I have to tie them to individual writers like Vince Gilligan, who went on to develop Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He had his own brand of X-File that really changed the course of the show. So that was a good hire. That was also somebody you just left alone.
1:20:11 Rick Rubin? When did he come in, what season?
1:20:13 Speaker 01 He came in, I think, season, like, maybe late season two. It was one of those lucky things. We're talking about keep your eyes open, keep your antenna.
1:20:24 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:20:25 Speaker 01 Trained.
1:20:25 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:20:26 Speaker 01 The man who wrote and directed Risky Business, Paul Brickman.
1:20:30 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:20:31 Speaker 01 Was a friend. And years before the X-Files, he told me about a writer who had written a movie and the movie was not a hit. But he said, "This guy, he's the real deal." And his name is Vince Gilligan. And I remembered it. And so at some point, I realized...
1:20:54 Speaker 01 Through my agent, who also represented Vince Gilligan, that he liked the show. He was a fan of the show. So Vince came in and talked to us one day and we kind of convinced him to write an episode. That episode led to, I think, seven-plus years on the show.
1:21:13 Rick Rubin? Amazing.
1:21:14 Speaker 01 And changed the course of the show. But there were other people who similarly affected the course of the show. He would write episodes and they were big kind of comedy episodes with Frank Spontance, who I already mentioned, and John Schibin. They, those three would write episodes together that ended up creating a conquered territory on the show.
1:21:41 Rick Rubin? Has the show got more popular? Was it easier to draft really talented writers?
1:21:47 Speaker 01 No.
1:21:48 Rick Rubin? Tell me about that.
1:21:51 Speaker 01 It was a hard show to write.
1:21:52 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:21:53 Speaker 01 And we blew through some some notable writers. But then there are people who just dug in and gave it their all and I'm still friendly with these people. They, they made us a success.
1:22:09 Rick Rubin? What was The Lone Gunman?
1:22:11 Speaker 01 That came from the team of Morgan and Wong. They did an episode where they, I think, maybe Glenn, maybe both of them had gone to a UFO convention and seen these guys who had this kind of conspiracy. And I'm probably doing this a big disservice because it probably didn't happen exactly like this. Whatever it was they saw at that convention, they brought it forward with these guys, The Lone Gunmen, had a tabloid called The Lone Gunmen about the Kennedy assassination. They became known as The Lone Gunmen, but the paper was called The Lone Gun Man. Anyway, they became very important to the show in storytelling sense because they were people out there
1:22:53 Speaker 01 on the fringes of the phenomena.
1:22:57 Rick Rubin? Is it true there was an episode about a plane flying into the World Trade Center?
1:23:01 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:23:02 Rick Rubin? How is that possible?
1:23:04 Speaker 01 It wasn't on The X-Files. It was on a spinoff called The Lone Gunmen.
1:23:07 Rick Rubin? But still, how is that possible? It's too specific.
1:23:12 Speaker 01 We weren't the first people to actually suggest this. The World Transcendence was designed to take an airplane strike.
1:23:21 Rick Rubin? Really?
1:23:22 Speaker 01 But a small airplane, not a jetliner. So it wasn't that it wasn't out there as a suggestion, or a thought, or a concern. So we just capitalized on that.
1:23:35 Rick Rubin? What are some of the wildest plotlines you can remember that were actually based on stories that were true?
1:23:45 Speaker 01 It's hard to answer that. I'll give you an answer by telling you something that is somewhat embarrassing. You know, we're talking about a show that is over 30 years old.
1:23:56 Rick Rubin? Yeah, and hundreds of episodes, so it's impossible to keep track of it.
1:23:59 Speaker 01 Several hundred, yes. And so, anyway, my wife and I decided a couple summers ago to watch the show again from the beginning. And it was mind blowing.
1:24:12 Rick Rubin? Great experience?
1:24:13 Speaker 01 Great experience.
1:24:14 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:24:15 Speaker 01 But I would be asked a number of times during each episode, "How did you do that?" And my answer, common answer, was, "I don't remember."
1:24:26 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:24:27 Speaker 01 So a lot of-
1:24:28 Rick Rubin? Would you be surprised by anything you saw on the show, or no?
1:24:31 Speaker 01 Typically, no, because I was involved in every episode to some lesser or greater degree. So I lived and breathed the show.
1:24:41 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:24:42 Speaker 01 So, no, they weren't surprising to me, but it was almost sometimes like watching the show for the first time.
1:24:48 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:24:48 Speaker 01 It was wonderful.
1:24:50 Rick Rubin? Probably in many ways, it was like watching the show for the first time for real, because when you're so involved in making it, you can't really see it with eyes like an audience member.
1:25:02 Speaker 01 And you are pointing out something that was one of these lightning bolt moments. We did that first movie in season at the end of four. Beginning of five, we made that movie. And I had for five years roughly before the movie premiered, been watching the show at home with my wife. And a couple of times I went out to the, in Vancouver on Friday nights, a bar started showing me. Oh, great. And people came to the bar. It was great and I got to sit with them. Yeah. That was really exciting. Yeah. But generally, I watched the show, you know, in the editing room. Yeah.
1:25:45 Speaker 01 So at the premiere of the first movie, I decided to go up to the balcony and watch the show from the balcony. One of the reasons I am doing what I'm doing today and chose my career is I went to see Apocalypse Now on one of its first nights and I loved it. I loved it. And there's a scene where Frederick Forrest is in the jungle and a tiger leaps out. It's one of the big scare. Big scare. And so when I saw the movie that night,
1:26:26 Speaker 01 I went home to San Clemente, whatever that is, 80 miles, and decided I wanted to go back the next night to see the movie again. Wow. So I drove to the center of Madonna to see the movie again. But I knew the tiger was going to jump out. Yeah. So where did I turn my perspective to the audience? I wanted to watch everyone jump. And in fact, that's what everyone did. And I said, this is powerful. I want to do this. Wow. That balcony experience with the X-Files movie was similar to that, where I got to look down and see, are they laughing at the right point? Are they jumping at the right point? Are they scared? You know, it was really satisfying. That's great.
1:27:11 Rick Rubin? Would you call The X-Files sci-fi or no?
1:27:14 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:27:15 Rick Rubin? And what?
1:27:16 Speaker 01 I resisted it.
1:27:17 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:27:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, there's, Steven Spielberg always said that Close Encounters was speculative science.
1:27:23 Rick Rubin? It's great.
1:27:24 Speaker 01 Yes, so I went with that. That's what I said.
1:27:26 Rick Rubin? That's great. Do you think of it as a political show?
1:27:30 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:27:31 Rick Rubin? How has the world changed since The X-Files?
1:27:34 Speaker 01 That's a good question. I can tell you that the show ended in 2002. And that's very close to 2001, which is a very important turning point in the history of, you know, Planet Earth.
1:27:50 Rick Rubin? Yeah.
1:27:51 Speaker 01 Everyone loved the conspiracy, idea that there was a conspiracy and they, that the government was not acting in your best interests. And when 9/11 happened overnight,
1:28:08 Speaker 01 the government was there to protect us. And we believed that the government was protecting us.
1:28:14 Rick Rubin? We believed it or we wanted to believe it?
1:28:16 Speaker 01 We wanted to believe it, because we don't anymore. We think that, in fact, that's changed and, you know, that now it's, you know, called the deep state, whatever it is. But it gave us a clear chance to believe.
1:28:33 Rick Rubin? Would you connect the show ending and 9/11 as somehow related?
1:28:38 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:28:38 Rick Rubin? Wow. Is it possible The X-Files is actually nonfiction?
1:28:43 Speaker 01 Yes, it is possible and it has to do with science. Because the show is based on what if, sometimes the what if becomes...
1:28:54 Rick Rubin? If, it is, is.
1:28:56 Speaker 01 Is, exactly, yeah.
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