"Tempus Fugit."

We did a lot of research into the episode, how the FAA proceeds, how the ‘Go team’ - as they are called, hits the site and what they look for. The flight recorders, the systems that they put back together, how they go about the mystery of solving the mystery of what caused a plane crash. And they are very, very good at it, I think there are only four or five plane crashes in the last thirty years that are unsolved, they don’t know what made them crash and so we were playing on that rarity.

This movie was really built from scratch, we had nothing available to us, we didn’t haul anything but junk for the plane crash. And we actually went to North Carolina and purchased a tail section of a 737, had it hauled all the way to Vancouver so we could put it in that field. It was the only recognisable bit of the plane and it’s very important that it look like a wreckage, that there be something that tells you that it is a plane crash or else the audience, I think, is going to think we just put a bunch of junk out in a field.

We had a FAA investigator come and look at our site and he said "this is it, this is exactly what it looks like", it is a big undertaking but we sort of threw caution to the wind and ended up, I think, with something that is really frightening.

I think the people being sucked out of the door in the airplane is as scary as any airplane footage I’ve ever seen. Selling the idea that the plane is in a tractor beam with a UFO outside is the big buy, you have to imagine what’s going on without being told.

This episode, we sort of wanted to make it as big as we possibly could and so we wanted to go from the air to the sea, to the bottom of lake Sacandaga.

Something you don’t do on television is do underwater sequences, it’s time prohibitive, it’s costly, especially to do them at night because it takes special lighting set-ups and usually you don’t have the crew to do it but we happen to have several divers on our crew who are very gung-ho and pushing for these things. So we’ve done several underwater bits and this is just another one where we’ve combined both real ocean dives, in this case even though it doubles as a lake. And there’s some tank work as well, we have access to a little tank, that amazingly it’s so small but it doubles perfectly for, especially, night photography.

Max Fenig was a really popular character from the first season of the TV series and we had always wanted to do something with him but couldn’t figure out how. So when we came up with this idea to do a plane crash it seemed a perfect chance to bring back Max as the object of the aliens’ abduction plans and he was a character that Mulder had some kind of emotional connection to, a stake in, they sort of believed in the same thing. Scully makes a comment that she thinks that Max and Mulder are kindred spirits because they both live very meagre, small lives.

They have a desire to believe in the unexplained, so when Max is lost in this episode, it has an emotional stake and resonance for Mulder which I think is a good part of the story.

The mystery to be solved in this movie is what brought down flight 549 and it is Mulder’s reconstruction of certain undeniable facts that are also unbelievable to the FAA and to others that makes for the unravelling and the believability of the mystery.

The movie ends with Mulder as close as he’s possibly ever been to gathering physical evidence to prove the existence of extraterrestrials on the planet, and it is an energy source that he has in his possession. And he has it on a flight with him and it looks like he’s going to be delivering it to Agent Scully but there is a man on board who wants to take it away from him.

Mulder once again is left without physical evidence of the truth, of aliens, the existence of extraterrestrial life or alien abduction.

Behind the Scenes