Chris Carter in The Virtue of Paranoia
This is an portion of the interview written by David Lipsky as seen in issue number754 of Rolling Stone
You'd think that people who spend their time dreaming up conspiracies would have beards and wave their hands a lot when they talk. Chris Carter is placid, handsome, cleanshaven. He pauses to find the right words- the breaks can sometimes last a few seconds - and when he talks again, the words are the correct ones. It's as though he is writing as he speaks , running a kind of mental thesaurus program.
" Right now I'm reading about these things called peak experiences or peakmoments," he says speaking of future X-Files plots. "I've had an idea that I've wanted to do since the first season - and I could never figure out a way to do it - which is the idea of perfect happiness: that perfect happiness is our natural state, and that if we ever find it we will spontaneously combust."
If that's so, maybe Chris Carter should be wearing an asbestos suit. The son of a construction worker, he grew up a surfer in blue-collar Los Angeles suburb. After college, he walked into Surfing Magazine and became one of it's editors. In 1982, after watching Raiders of the Lost Ark six times in six days, he realized his need to tell stories.("Those first ten minutes are so intense", he syas, "It was almost like not taking a breath. I felt that Ihad an imagination that worked almost like that.") By chance, a relative was a talent agent, and two years later, Carter had a three-picture screen writing deal. In 1992, just as his own dark preoccupations with trust and government were becoming the national mood, Carter was hired by Fox to develop a television show. Now in the middle of its fourth season, The X-Files is the highest rated program on the Fox Network. The show is seen in 60 countries. In some of them, the two part episodes that run during American sweeps week are edited together and are packaged as mini-movies. An actual movie - an X-Files feature- is planned for release next summer. Carter is writing the screen play.
Back to my X-FilesSite