Alien abduction. Killer viruses. Mutants, murder and madness. Welcome to paranoia central. Simon Braund meets David Duchovny and asks just what the hell is going on with the X-Files? Photographic evidence: Mark Anderson.

   For anyone who has spent the last decade in a flotation tank, The X-Files is a phenomenally popular TV series that chronicles the adventures of two FBI agents,Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). The mismatched duo are assigned to unsolved cases (the X-Files of the title) within the bureau, which invariably involve the paranormal, the supernatural and the inexplicable. The brainchild of executive producer and co-writer Chris Carter, the show premiered in the US on September 10, 1993 and over the course of five series has soared up the ratings like a particularly tenacious rat up an unusually accommodating drainpipe, bagging a fistful of prestigious awards along the way.
   Saturated in conspiracy theories, millennial paranoia and populated with a cast of shadowy, recurring characters and ever-elusive extra-terrestrials, it is such stuff as Trekker-style cults are made of. And with the odd bedfellows pairing of Mulder and Scully (Mulder is the believer, driven by the abduction of his sister to expose an alleged global cover-up of alien activity on Earth; Scully is the sceptic, a medical doctor who is equally convinced that everything has a rational explanation), The X-Files peddles the most riveting line of will-they-won´t-they sexual tension since Bruce Willis attempted to wisecrack his way into Cybill Shepherd´s knickers in Moonlightning.
   When the X-Files movie (subtitled, with appropriate inscrutability, Fight The Future) opened recently in the States, reviews were lukewarm. But with the TV shows 20
million strong audience to draw on, plus scores of dedicated X-Philes (as its hard-core fans are inevitebly known) aching for an inter-season fix, box office has been predictably boffo. And expectations are high for a similarly profitable performance when the film, directed by series regular Rob Bowman and co-starring Martin Landau, opens in the UK.

  According to Chris Carter, the basic concept for the X-Files and its underlying darkly conspiratorial tone stemmed from Watergate and the stunning relevation that a national government was capable of lying to the public. It´s tempting to see The X-Files fitting neatly into the fine American tradition of sci-fi as political allegory: the alien invaders acting as a thinly veiled metaphor for communist/fascist subversives. The series and the film also incorporate such spectres of the New World Order as black helicopters, faceless government operatives and an international cabal that manipulates events behind a cloak of secrecy.
   Duchovny, though, who has played the pathologically paranoid Mulder for five years, is unconvinced by so lofty an interpretation. "It sounds to me like Chris is making things up in retrospect," he says with a knowing grin. "I think every era has its government betrayal, and I suppose if Chris said that was his motivation then it was. But I think the X-Files comes more from Chris´s personal sense rather than his political sense. His sense of humanity is more in tune with the show´s sense of humanity."

  The New York-born Duchovny came to The X-Files after a string of small but significant roles in films such as The Rapture, Kalifornia and Julia Has Two Lovers. He was also memorable as cameraman Rollie Totheroh in Sir Richard Attenborough´s Chaplin, as
Charles Grodin´s arch nemesis in the inexplicably popular slobby-dog flick Beethoven and as transvestite Dennis/Denise Brynson in David Lynch´s Twin Peaks. He is delighted when informed that his performance in Zalman King´s softcore vat of ordure The Red Shoe Diaries is just as famous here as in the States.
   "Great, let´s talk about that and not The X-Files then," he says gleefully.
   Enjoying a semi-flourish film career, Duchovny still wasn´t planning to do any television until his English manager urged him to read the script for an intriguing new pilot.
   "I was afraid of getting involved with a show that would run for a long time," he explains. "Actually, it was more the fear of getting involved in a bad show that ran for a long time. But I thougth the script was good and I liked the character. I didn´t think it would become a series because it was about aliens which I thought was kind of a silly topic. People might be interested but I didn´t see how you could elaborate on it. I thought: four of five episodes and you either catch the alien or you don´t. If you don´t, people will get bored. If you do, that´s the end of it. I thought I was being very clever. I thought I could do a part I wanted to do, make a little money and get out." However, to paraphrase a famous jock poet, the best laid plans of mice and men go wobbly when viewing figures head for the stratosphere and you become not only the anti-hero idol of millions but also the latest person to don the "thinking womans´ crumpet" yellow jersey.
   "What I liked about Mulder," says Duchovny, "is that I´d just done three parts that had to do with some odd sexuality, and here was a character who had no sexuality, or at least no superficial sexuality. To me what Freud said about all energy being sexual in the same as Indian chakra, which is about sexual energy starting at the base of the spine and moving up into different cerebral and emotional realms. I thought, okay, here´s a chance to develop that energy, which I´m already comfortable with (see The Red Shoe Diaries. If you must.), bring it up the spine and create a character whose energy is channeled into some quest other than the physical.That´s why I wanted to do the role. I didn´t go, 'Finally, a script about aliens!'"
    Apparently Duchovny´s moulding of Mulder went a little further than simply stoking up his chakra and pointing it in the right direction.
   "Chris Carter has this image of Mulder looking like Vitas Gerulaitis. I didn´t think that was quite right," he says, with equisite dryness. "I made a decision based on all that silly mystical stuff about chakra, and I also decided he was not going to be Dr. Who. I told myself that he was not going to be a mad scientist. He has to be reliable, even though he´s insane. I knew he was crazy, but he had to appear sane."
   "I mean," he says, warming to his topic, "on paper the things that we´re doing are absolutely ridiculous. They´re just silly. When I first did interviews for the show and I had to explain to people was it was about, I´d be in the middle of it, and suddenly think to myself, this is the most ridiculous stuff I´ve ever said in my life. I had to say to people, 'Look, trust me, it´s really good. It sounds terrible, but it isn´t.' "
   In fact, the X-Files is very far from terrible. It is, arguably, the best non-comedy series to have emerged from the patchy quagmire of American TV since Laura Palmer was zipped into a body bag. And Duchovny has a pretty firm idea of where its appeal lies. "It´s not camp," he says, "and that is one way we could have gone with it. I´m not a science fiction fan so I may be wrong, but it seems to me there are two types of sci-fi. There´s the campy Dr. Who style, and then there´s the opera style, like Star Trek. Star Trek is very parabolic, you know that Spock represents the mind and that Kirk represents the heart. It´s like reading a medieval morality play. We try to ground things in reality, not in parable and not in camp. I think we´re unique in that we´re trying to do a drama about extraordinary things yet trying to minimise them in order to make them real."

   Talk of an X-Files movie was rife among the creativy team fairly early in the show´s run. But it wasn´t until Christmas 1996 that Chris Carter and writing partner Frank Spotnitz actually bashed out a workable storyline. Holed up in a hotel room in Hawaii for eitght weeks, they conceived a plot that would revolve around the ongoing mythology of the show.
    "I always knew that the movie would be along the lines of the governmentconspiracy," says Carter, "which is the heart and soul of the series."
   The challenge facing them, though, was how to transfer the essence of The X-Files to the big screen is such a way that it would appeal to fans of the series without alienating people who had never seen it.
   "I was always very confident that it would transfer well," says Duchovny. "I wasn´t overly aware of the things that could have gone wrong. Now I´ve seen the film and I know it works and I know it´s good I´m beginning to appreciate what the dangers were. Superficially, it could´ve bombed and tarnished the lustre of the series. It could easily alienated fans by either changing too much or revealing too much of the mystery. And it could´ve been incomprehensibleto non-fans - a $60 million dollar in-joke."
    The success of the film lies in its trick of pulling all the disparate strands of the series into a cohesive whole. Familiar faces, such as Cigarette Smoking Man and Well Manicured Man are skilfully woven into the plot to keep the fans happy, but they are also given suitably pivotal roles so as not to appear anomalous to non-fans. It is, however, a precarious balance. And although the Mulder/Scully chemistry is strong enough to survive the broader canvas there are several expositional scenes which might appear more than a little clumsy to anyone already familiar with their character traits and the nuances of their relationship.
    In one instance, a dispirited Mulder pours his heart out to an incredulous bartender. It´s an inebriated and not entirly comfortable précis of a character that Duchovny has honed to perfection over the last five years.
    "I think that was the greatest challenge of the movie," he says. "How do you introduce a character who people already know and love? But the scene in the bar is nowhere near as bad as Scully´s speach. Scully´s basically, 'Mulder, I´ve been with you for five years and I gave up a career in medicine...' It´s horrible. Luckily with mine I was drunk so I could give you all the self-pity and the self- explanation and the self-absorption that are the necessity of back-story speeches. To me the scene works because I´m playing of Glenne Headly, the bartender, who is standing in for the audience members who know nothing and you see how ridiculous this man really is. That to me is very clever."
    And, to be fair, if you´re familiar with the series, it makes you äppreciate just how common this type of speech is in other movies.
    "Yeah, I know," agrees Duchovny. "It´s kind of unfair to single out our movie. It´s too easy because you´re waiting for it to happen, you´re sitting there going 'Well, how are they going to explain this...' "
    "In the scene (where Mulder and Scully, back on the beat after closing of the X-Files, are searching for a hidden bomb in the Dallas Federal Building), you´ve got Scully being hyper-rational and Mulder going, 'I´m all for women´s intuition' and everybody gets the idea. After five years you can rely on a lot of goodwill from the audience about what their relationship is. The gestures between us become less and less because the audience supplies the rest. It´s really become a relationship of glances. In the movie, because the audience doesn´t necessarily have that goodwill, it´s got to be more verbal. It´s got to be, 'We´ve been working together for five years and I trust you and blah, blah, blah'. It´s just one of the necessary evils. But also one of the interesting challenges, to try to make that as full as the more subtle types of communication."

   Another challenge for Duchovny was adapting to the grindingly slow pace of moviemaking after the frentic shooting schedule of the TV series.
    "Doing a movie you have a lot more time, which is usually a good thing because you´re creating a character and you want as much time as you can get. In TV-land we do about seven or eight pages of script a day. In movieland we do about a page-and-a-half, sometimes less. The pace is six times as slow. I didn´t need all that time because I wasn´t discovering a new character, so it was very hard for me to keep focused. It´s also an action movie so there was a lot of set-up, a lot of lightening and a lot of special effects - a lot of alien business. That takes an incredibly long time to do, much more than you´d ever think. We spent three days just doing the exit from the building before the explosion in the opening scene, which is maybe half-a-page of script. For an actor, that´s boring. It just meant I ran into a cab, drove a hundred yards, got out of the cab and said, 'Next time you´re buying'. And that took three days. It can drive you crazy. TV, I guess, is more athletic. You´re out there hitting the ball every day, you´re playing a match every day. A movie is more like playing three matches in three months. I had maybe five days doing what I consied heavy scenes - the meat, the fun part of acting. And I had five weeks of running around pointing my flash- light."
    Thankfully, all this has paid of handsomely and the movie itself is predominantly free of bullshit parts. What is perhaps more grati- fying is how a $60 million budget has allowed Bowman to put things on the screen that the TV is only ever able to hint at.
    "For a viewer, I think you get the best of both worlds," says Duchovny. "We deliver the humanity and the relationships between the characters and the mission they´re on. But beyond that, we show so much more of the hardware. On TV our aliens are children in rubber suits standing behind a screen. We can´t show them because they look like children in rubber suits..."
    While we´re on the subject of aliens...
    "What, do I believe in them?," he says this with the amused resignation of a man who could have retired to Bermud by now had he been given a dollar bill for every time this question was asked.
    "It seems likely to me that there would be something out there," he says deliverately. "There´s probably some planet out there somewhere where they have a television show called the Z-Files, and right now some interviewer is asking this hideously ugly actor, 'So, do you believe in humans?'."

Simon Braund