More or less. Well, if I thought waiting was bad on a television series I didn’t know waiting until I got to a feature. What’s to light on a glacier? But still it seemed as if we waited endlessly and then did our simple shots so many times that every possible angle must have been covered. Even when we shot on set in Los Angeles, a three-hour wait between blocking and shooting was typical, it took that long to light.
And then, of course, if one is in a group scene one might wait for up to two days, endlessly doing one’s lines off camera to support the other actors before one’s own coverage is shot. How do you remain fresh in those circumstances? We had a large Syndicate scene in the film when John Neville, as the Well-Manicured Man, confronts the rest of us. He was on one side of the room and we were on the other, and so for nearly two days Rob Bowman, the director, shot over John’s shoulder while he got coverage of each of us for our lines and our reactions. Finally, when he had everything he wanted from that side he announced that we would “turn around” for the next day’s shooting. In mock amazement John feinted a faint, he had been off camera for so long. But the real problem was the next day. Rob and Chris didn’t like what John was doing when they finally paid attention to his performance. Film directors tend to focus exclusively on the actor in the shot. Now when they finally noticed his performance they wanted it to be different. But he had already been doing it this way for two days. How did they expect him to change now, locked in as he perforce was? I guess they worked it out somehow. But I was reminded of many — fifty — years earlier watching the great John Dexter and Peter Shaffer trying to fix Black Comedy when we beginners knew better how to do it. Had Rob had experience as a theatre director he might have realized that a group scene is an ensemble scene, and, given that he now had so much more time than when we were doing television, rehearsed it as a group until all the pieces fit together and then shot it. The television directors were really excited by having so much time on the feature, but they used it to do more television, not to do better drama, or so it seemed to a neophyte film director like me.
I have been asked to do some pretty strange things for The X-Files — fly in helicopters, smoke, sit in a makeup chair for four hours — but never before or since have I been asked to ‘unact’ a scene, never mind my biggest and best scene. Chris called me personally on this one, and so he should have. It seems when they ‘tested’ the film, meaning when they showed it to focus groups, a tenuous test at best, the viewers who didn’t know the series didn’t ‘get’ my scene; there were too many references to my ongoing relationship with Mulder. And since they wanted the movie to stand alone for an audience unfamiliar with the series as well as to appeal to regular fans, my scene would have to go. Well, that’s bad enough, to be told that your great scene will be dropped from the movie. But I had to return to L.A. to reshoot the background to the action that would replace the cut scene. And so I went back to L.A. to shoot myself out of my best scene. And as if that weren’t bad enough, none of what I did in that reshoot appears in the movie.
I guess all actors work in different ways, but my simple suggestion to one actor that we run our lines in advance of shooting our scene the next day provoked an odd response: “Well, I can read my lines back to you if that helps, but I won’t be learning them.” Perhaps feature film actors, used to so much time, don’t have to worry about basic things like learning one’s lines. I imagine he felt he would be more natural if he worked in this way. He wasn’t. Armin Meuller-Stahl, nominated for an Oscar in Shine, worked quite differently. He could be seen saying his lines over and over again to himself between takes. Apparently he had been so keen on the show he had asked to be in the feature, but was now quite challenged by Chris Carter’s convoluted dialogue.
We call it running lines, but for me, and many others, what we are really doing is having a quiet rehearsal of our scene, feeling out how it is going to play with the other actor. Director Kim Manners understood this all too well, having once been an actor himself, and he would see us doing lines, walk over to us, cross his arms, and listen to what we thought would be our private rehearsal. Suddenly we had to up our intensity a notch or five. At the other extreme, doing low budget features in Vancouver as one does, one can encounter the opposite problem. In these films there is often a female ‘star’ who was really famous for something else, something other than her acting skills, an ex-model for instance. For one of these, running lines was an exercise in rote memory only; we would run the scene together and then without taking a breath she wanted to run it again from the beginning and repeat this procedure several times. I had to explain that I needed a pause before doing it again since I needed to get my head back into the beginning of the scene before starting again. For me, it’s not about the words — at least I hope not — it’s about the circumstances, the actions, and the thoughts.
Fame was coming in other ways. Now that my character was considered a key component of the series, we ‘stars’ of the show were expected to appear at the “upfronts” held annually in the spring in New York. What is an “upfront,” you might well ask. It is the occasion when each network announces its coming season to potential advertisers and to the media, an event seeming to attract more attention than a declaration of war or certainly more than a Canadian by-election. Strictly speaking it’s a sales event. The stars, I prefer to call them actors, are put up in a first-class hotel, in our case the Royal Rihga, where we have to stickhandle our way around professional autograph dealers constantly on the prowl outside the hotel. It’s lovely to have a free expenses-paid trip to New York, but why are we here? At the event itself, held at some major conference centre, we are escorted, often through the kitchens, to some holding area beneath the event itself. Drinks and food are provided and we do what actors do best: we wait. At a given moment, the stars of each show are summoned and led up to the wings of the stage where they again wait. Finally, when their show is announced, each actor crosses the stage and then returns to the holding area. That’s it; that’s what they, we, do. We are paraded in front of buyers. The difference between that and a slave auction is only the price, my dear.
And then there are the awards shows. I’ve never been a fan of those. I watched the Academy Awards once and was so bored I haven’t watched them since. But for three years running, the principal actors of The X-Files were nominated for the Screen Actors Guild ensemble acting award. I believe this is the only awards show that presents an award to the actors as a group, recognizing the interdependency of what we do. Probably we were obliged to attend the show, but I don’t recall being at all reluctant; I was curious and who knows, maybe it would be useful ‘networking.’ Barbara was invited as well and once again we had first-class treatment. We were seated at a table near the front, one year, right with the A-list stars. We were walked down the red carpet, interviewed as if we might have something important to say, and wined and dined throughout. I knew nothing of the tradition of seat-fillers, so it was with some surprise that on returning to our table with drinks I found someone sitting in my chair, one of the many extras who had been standing in the back waiting to pounce on any empty chair. It soon became clear that this game of musical chairs was designed to impress the television audience that the live audience was full and terribly interested in everything that was going on.
We never did win the award, not surprising really, since we were much less of an ensemble show than many others. But it was sweet to see how the winning shows, who had to pick a spokesperson to accept the award, always chose one of the minor performers, never the obvious star. We had been instructed to choose a spokesperson before the award was announced so that we would be ready if we won. No one in our group seemed anxious to deal with this issue. Finally I asked David how he thought we should approach it. His response? Oh, he guessed he would do it. Typical of our show, I guess. No suggestion that it be me, or Chris Owens, or Mitch. Well, I guess we weren’t really an ensemble at all.
Heading South
While my billing and finan
cial remuneration were improving, my actual participation in the series began to diminish in season 5, primarily because I died — for the first time. I was to die on the show two more times before we were done. And another fourteen times on other shows since then. I died in the second episode of the season and didn’t reappear until episode fourteen. How did I come to life? Well, we don’t really know, but I was hiding in a cabin on top of Grouse Mountain, no, sorry, it was supposed to be North Hatley, Quebec. Anyone who knows them both would never confuse them, Grouse Mountain being in the Coastal Range in British Columbia with coniferous trees and heavy wet snow, while North Hatley is in the lower Appalachians with deciduous trees and dry snow. CSM was hidden away in a mountain cabin typing letters on an old typewriter to his son, not the rumoured Mulder but to young Agent Spender, wonderfully played by Chris Owens who had previously played me as a young man. To get the letters to him, a young boy had to trudge through the snow and collect the letter along with a five dollar bill and take it down the mountain to mail it. One has to wonder how I was getting my cigarettes and food if mailing a letter was such a challenge, but only the literal-minded would ask such questions.
Apparently I left my wife and young son when he was a baby and he has never forgiven me despite my letters hoping for reconciliation. But more mysterious is the plight of the wife, Spender’s mother, who appears to be an abductee — by aliens if you were wondering. How do we know this? As Scully argues, by hypnotic regression. Spender splendidly challenges the notion of hypnotic regression and, of course, he is right. But as this is The X-Files, he is wrong. CSM’s erstwhile wife has indeed been abducted, on my authority it later seems, and in episode twelve of season 6 she is taken up to wherever the aliens are. And forgotten. By the end of the series she is still there; there is no further reference to her.
Mind you, Spender’s explanation of his mother’s condition is almost as dubious. He maintains that his mother went insane because his father left them when he was little. Apparently it was true that his father, me, left them when Spender was tiny, but if that were a sufficient cause of insanity there would be a lot more loonies in the world than seems apparent.
Meantime, after many more adventures that didn’t include me, X-Files sped towards its end, well, not it’s real end, it is The X-Files, but to the end of season 5, to an episode called “The End,” to the burning of Mulder’s office, by me, and to the end of filming in Vancouver. The X-Files leaving Vancouver and moving to Los Angeles was to many a major betrayal. Crew and producers had dedicated their lives to the show, had given up personal lives to work the gargantuan hours the show required, and now were to be left with little more than a basketball — David’s parting gift to the crew — as the production shifted to L.A. Few had the option to follow the show to L.A.; the U.S. border may be porous for uneducated Mexicans, but it’s an iron wall to professional Canadians. And why did the show move? Well, it rains a lot in Vancouver. Never mind Vancouver is considered one of the best cities in the world in which to live, David decided he couldn’t take the rain any longer and wanted to shoot where it was sunnier. Good for him, not good for the show; the light in southern California is bright and etching, dispelling any sense of mystery that had been such a major part of the show. In fairness to David, rain wasn’t really the issue; he just made the mistake of joking about it on a talk show and Vancouverites, who constantly make the same jokes, didn’t forgive him for it. Truth is, David was getting married and wanted to have a family life in Los Angeles. It’s a fair enough request, but some felt he could have been more considerate of the Canadians who had helped make the show such a success.
Still, the move was fine for me. They were able to get the appropriate permits for the principal actors; we were flown first-class to L.A. and put up in a first-class hotel whenever we were needed. Working on set was really easy as I had a trailer right outside the door of the studio. Working off set was something else, shooting in a desert being a shock to my cold weather system. On balance though I was happy to have the opportunity to work in L.A. and learn something of that world.
Whether it was a function of shooting in L.A., or that the show was now mainstream with a lot more money, or that the creative team had improved, or all of the above, the production values of season 6 are high, and the tone very professional, quite a contrast to the early seasons. For me, my billing had moved to first position, after David and Gillian of course, and my role in the storylines that involved me enhanced. The personal relationships underpinning the major science fiction arc were more developed, my relation to my son for instance, the official one, not Mulder, though that was to come, and the curious history of my relationship with Agent Fowley, played by Mimi Rogers. And the evolution of Gillian’s bust line continued though she was not yet showing the remarkable and unlikely cleavage of the last seasons — well, ratings began to slip; they had to do something.
Ratings were still up during season 6, and with money flowing in Chris Carter took a huge gamble, leased the Queen Mary, the famous Cunard liner now in dry dock in California, and did an episode almost all in one take and mostly in German, with yours truly as the leading German speaker — who unfortunately beyond counting to three and saying “thank you,” speaks not a word of that language. The episode, entitled “Triangle” for the famous Bermuda triangle where ships and planes are thought to have disappeared without trace, posits a story where Mulder somehow comes upon the Queen Anne, a luxury liner that disappeared in 1939. In the episode the ship is hijacked by Germans at the beginning of the war in order to capture a passenger, a scientist with the knowledge to make an atomic bomb. Mulder is able to incite a riot onboard and force the ship to return to the triangle and disappear, thus preventing the Germans getting the bomb and ensuring that history would unfold as it did. But did this really happen or is it all some kind of dream? Some of the people onboard have contemporary counterparts: Spender is a tough SS man, Skinner is a senior officer, and I am an officer, smoking of course, calmly wielding the most power and the most brutality. And Scully is one of the passengers who ends up helping Mulder and finally allowing the “shippers” — devoted X-Files fans primarily interested in the relationship of Mulder and Scully — to get the passionate Mulder/Scully kiss for which they have waited so long.
Acting in a foreign language is challenging enough, but Chris decided on a shooting style that would mean shooting the entire episode in just a few very long takes. I never knew why he decided to do this, perhaps to suggest an older style of filmmaking that would suit the time shift nature of the episode. It does that nicely on the old Queen Mary, but why use that style in the modern scenes? Whatever the reasoning, the challenges for the actors are major, since they have to get everything right in a long take, hit all their marks exactly, get all their lines exactly right, keep in the light, etc. On the other hand they don’t have to match another shot; I could light my cigarette and draw on it when it felt right; I didn’t have to match to another take. But I had to speak German fluently and without hesitation, no second takes. Looking at the episode now, I’m quite impressed. German suits me; I might have done well as a German actor. Maybe it just suits CSM, giving him the authority he seeks more easily.
Mind you, it’s not clear I was actually speaking German. I had been given a tape with my lines in German and had rehearsed from that, checking my pronunciation and intonation against the tape. The American actors on the set were pretty impressed and asked me where I had learned German. The German-speaking actors on the set had no idea what I was saying. I’ve often wondered how they did the episode in Germany. Did a German actor dub my lines into real German?
The shooting style was never repeated on the series so far as I know. It certainly has its risks, for one can see moments that are not in good focus and line readings I am sure an actor would like to redo, but the flow of the episode is impressive and the performance, of Gillian in particular, is dynamic. She is able to truly build the performance in real time, allowing the emotion to grow a
s it would in life, or on the stage. All in all, it’s a pretty impressive episode.
In the middle of the season we returned to the mythology arc with a vengeance. Two episodes, one called “Two Fathers” and a second called “One Son,” presumably because I shot one of my sons at the end of the second episode, built on the story line of the feature — I think. The show had now abandoned its postmodern flirtation with the surreal and firmly planted itself in the ‘modern’ world of science fiction, although a fiction so convoluted I am still trying to grasp it years later.
Okay, so here’s the story: in 1947 aliens landed on the planet at Roswell, New Mexico. By 1973 a secret cabal based in the State Department understood the aliens were going to colonize Earth and agreed to work with them — to assist in the creation of a human/alien hybrid that would function as a slave race to serve the colonists. The aliens gave us a foetus so that we would have their DNA — I wonder they didn’t just give us the code — in return for which each member of the cabal gave up a loved one to guarantee their loyalty. CSM gave up his wife. Bill Mulder refused to participate so his daughter, Fox’s sister, was kidnapped and abducted. The aliens were waiting for the experiment to succeed, the creation of the hybrid, and then they would invade. Our group at the same time worked secretly on developing a vaccine that would destroy the alien force as expressed through black oil. (The aliens sometimes seemed to appear as black oil, sometimes as ET-like creatures, and sometimes in human shape.) We would spread the virus for the vaccine by bees and thereby save the human race. But the experiment for the hybrid was successful before the virus had been developed, so now we were back to plan A.
Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir Page 29