BBC Radio 1 "Movie Update" interview, August 26, 1998

Interviewer (Mark Kermode): All over the world cinema goers have been swooning to the mysterious charms of Mulder and Scully in the long awaited X Files movie.....and here's the plot so far..... There's a global conspiracy involving government agents and extraterrestrials, nobody believes in it but Spooky Mulder, who almost but never quite solves the mystery and almost but never quite gets off with Dana Scully and in the last five minutes of any episode, all the evidence gathered up to that point either explodes, evaporates or flies off into space. Needless to say, it's absolutely brilliant, particularly if, like me, you're a conspiracy nut who really wants to believe that behind every senseless tragic accident, there's a mysterious man with a cigarette and a smoking gun.

[.......Theme music and excerpt from London meeting of the Syndicate....... "the virus has mutated" etc.etc.]

DD:If there's evil in the world and you can pinpoint it on some middle-aged Canadian man who smokes cigarettes and if you could find him and put him in jail or kill him or punish him and take him out of power, then I guess your fantasies of the world would be set right and that's Mulder's fantasy in some way. I think he's childlike in that way in that he thinks that the bad people can be found, the truth can be found.

[.....Theme music and excerpt "......take away what he holds most valuable, that with which he cannot live without"......]

Interviewer: There are two moments in the film in which you actually kiss: one of them is mouth-to-mouth resuscitation which doesn't really count......

DD:Well, I slipped some tongue in there during the resuscitation.......

Interviewer: Yeah, you have to (DD: Yeah.) But there is this fantastic tension in the moment in which Mulder and Scully almost, almost do, before something else intervenes. I wonder whether you have any thoughts about what would happen if they actually did.

DD:Oh god....hmmm... No, I mean, I think that once two people have sex in life and in art, you can't just say, "You know when we made love last night, well just let's forget that ever happened and go back to the way we were". You can never go back to the way you were. And then, you have this image of Mulder and Scully, you know, creeping down hallways with their guns drawn and Scully saying " You know, Mulder I wish you'd put the toilet seat down. I went to pee last night and I nearly fell in". And it's not what the X Files does so I think that, if we went past that point, dramatically it would be a huge problem.

[Excerpt from Mulder and Scully on the roof: "Mulder, Mulder."..Hoo!"...." Jesus, Mulder!"]

Interviewer: The whole, you know, notion of the series and the conspiracies, the monsters, the milleni....everything, to me it's like television sex, because it's charged up, you know everything about it is like that.

DD:Aside from the fact that Mulder and Scully don't consummate, nothing is ever consummated, from the lighting, which is never fully lit, to the characters who never really kiss, to, you know, the conspiracy which is never really revealed. All you have is the prelude to sex and then the cigarette after, but you never get the actual sex.

[Excerpt from the Mulder drunk in the bar scene: "They call me Spooky..etc.etc.... and when it hits it's going to be the shit storm of aaalll time".....]

DD: The biggest challenge was to make it palatable not just to the fans but to widen the audience and to get people in who had never heard of the X Files, if that's possible, and never seen it.

Voices of British cinema goers: ...."Brilliant, all of it, every single minute of it..."

...."I thought it was a little bit confusing; I don't really watch the series"

....."and the sexual tension"....(giggle)

DD:I really think that we did it. I mean the audience response has been great, it's doing great business, but the kind of deliberate confusion that the show fosters is new to some people and all I can say is, like, "anybody out there, who wants to see this movie and doesn't watch the show, if you're leaving a little confused, you're supposed to feel good about that, not like you're an idiot."

......[Theme music]........

Interviewer: David Duchovny, talking about the terrific X Files movie, which is currently playing at a cinema near you......