DD on Charlie Rose

---

6/18/98

Charlie Rose: The X-files has been quietly revolutionizing prime time television for five years. It follows the paranormal investigations of FBI special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Now one of television's hottest series, it makes the jump to the big screen. The plot is as shrouded in secrecy as any conspiracy Mulder and Scully have ever faced. Here is the trailer from the film. [The usual trailer that we've seen countless times]

CR: Joining me now, X-files star David Duchovny. I just love "trust no one".

David Duchovny: Yeah. Yeah.

CR: Welcome to this broadcast. It's great to have you here.

DD: Thank you for having me.

CR: What is it about X-files that has captured the imagination, affection, curiosity of an American television audience and, you hope, an American movie audience.

DD: Well, I think, I think first and foremost I always answer that question by saying it's a good show and that people wouldn't watch, no matter if you have theories about the American love of conspiracy theories or American paranoia or whatever sociological perspective you want to bring to bear on the show's popularity, I think it's a well-made, entertaining show that has aspects of all different kinds of TV dramas in it. I mean, it's a cop drama. It's a medical drama from time to time. It's a soap opera. It's funny. It's well shot, so it has all that going for it. Now, aside from that, (sighs) you can discuss forever about "trust no one" as you said, whether or not that's a truly American sentiment, and it probably is.

CR: It also has - we'll come back to that - but it also has the notion of the two characters. I mean, in the end you can have all the other things, but you have two characters that you like and has this huge attraction but they're not together and ...

DD: Yeah, I think that people respond to the restraint that the characters have, not just emotionally. I think you can read the emotions but they're not displayed. But I think also that physical restraint that the two characters have for each other. They haven't, it's been five years and they haven't kissed and yet they have some kind of deep love for one another.

CR: Chemistry. Love and chemistry.

DD: Yeah. So I think people are really stimulated by that - by that, I guess restraint is the only word I can come up with - and it kind of harkens back to another time in a way, when people didn't just jump into the sack in the films immediately and then fall in love or out of love or whatever.

CR: It also has, they're equals.

DD: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they're equals and in a way they've kind of switched gender stereotypes, because the character I play, Mulder, is the intuitive one, goes with his instinct. Woman's intuition, he has that and Scully is the rationalist, the doctor ...

CR: The scientist.

DD: ... the scientist, the one who's always putting the brakes on the flighty man, so I think people also enjoy that criss-crossing.

CR: How is the movie different from the television series other than the fact that it's longer and took longer to make and more goes into - what is it, a two and a half hour movie?

DD: It's a two hour movie.

CR: A two-hour movie.

DD: It may seem two and a half hours. (laughs) I think that the struggle was to make it big enough to exist on the big screen. I mean, a movie-going experience is just so quantitatively and qualitatively different from a TV experience. I mean, it's a small box, the TV, you can treat it with disrespect if you want to. You can mute it. You can walk out of the room. A movie, you go to a theater, it's like you pay homage to the movie. You pay your money, you sit in the dark with strangers and you're assaulted by this huge screen, so we had to come up with a story and a look that would pay service to that nature of it. And I think it does. I mean, we have a lot more just in terms of special effects and explosiveness and just the beauty of the film. It's much more intense than on the TV show.

CR: You go into the weekend of June 19th with the fact that you've got a huge television audience that's gonna be interested. I mean, that's a leg up.

DD: Yeah.

CR: And characters that they've already said they like.

DD: Yeah, this is the reasoning behind Fox putting up the money to make this film. But what, the challenge facing the filmmakers was to not only satisfy a very picky and devoted following of our TV show but to also to satisfy people that know nothing about the TV show. So that you could walk into this film ...

CR: Having never seen the X-files and never even heard the name.

DD: Yeah. And, I don't know how it's possible not to have heard the name at this point, but having never seen it - in fact, having escaped it somehow, willfully escaped it probably - and then to understand the characters, to understand the kind of byzantine plots that we have going throughout it, to understand all the inside jokes. And I think that what I'm most proud of in the film is that I think it really does work on both those levels.

CR: Do you do things that you wanted to do in the television series but couldn't?

DD: Well, there was some adjustment ...

CR: In terms of the plot, not in terms of just pyrotechnics.

DD: Right. Not so much in terms of plot, but in terms of characterization. The challenge facing me was [that] Chris Carter, the creator of the show, had come to me and said what you don't know - when we're filming the show last year, what I didn't know - was the full year of the TV show leading up to this. So he said, what you don't know - we're going to shoot next year - is by the end of the year you've been shut down. All your cases have been taken away from you and your office has been burned down, so you're at the low point in your life and your career when this movie starts. You're very depressed. And I said, well, that may be but I don't think, if we're also going for a new audience, we don't want to introduce them to a brooding, moping character. Now in the TV show, they allow me to brood and mope because they know me and they know that it's cyclical. This week I'm moping and next week I'm OK. (CR laughs) But on the film, if you walk in and there's this mopey guy you're gonna walk out. So the choice that I made was, the response to having everything taken away, is either you can mope and brood and be depressed, or you can become angry and kind of irreverent. And so the beginning of the movie is much more humorous, the humor coming out of that anger and irreverence, rather than the brooding Mulder that you may know on television.

CR: As a young actor who came out of Yale to find this career, is this what you wanted to do and be when you thought about becoming an actor.

DD: Well, I was at Yale for English literature ...

CR: I know. (they both laugh)

DD: ... so I wasn't coming out to do this at all. No, I had always envisioned going through college and graduate school that I would teach and write - that I would teach in order to pay the bills and take 3 or 4 months off, as teachers get wonderful vacation time, and try to write in that time. So I never thought about acting, envisioned acting in any way.

CR: So how did it end up that you're here talking to me about a feature film and a very successful television series.

DD: In a way, it's just life that happens day-by-day, and then you look back. Ten years have passed and it seems to have been this momentous decision that you made, and I wish that I could take credit for having made an instinctual and wonderful decision back then, but I never did. I was interested in writing plays, maybe screenplays, and I thought it would be smart to learn something about acting, so I started hanging out at Yale with the actors - because they're more fun anyway - and enjoyed the acting that I did, started auditioning in New York, got an agent, this kind of thing, you know, just step-by-step. So in retrospect I think I was pretty smart but if you had asked me on a daily basis back in 1986 when I wasn't writing my dissertation, and I wasn't getting any acting jobs, then I would have said that I'm an idiot.

CR: What was the subject of your dissertation?

DD: It was called "Magic and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction and Poetry." (CR laughs hard) And that's the whole dissertation, right there, that's 200 pages, a 200-page title.

CR: You finished it?

DD: Oh, no. No. (he laughs)

CR: I didn't think so.

DD: No, I wrote probably a chapter. I sat through my orals, I passed my orals.

CR: Your orals for your PhD.

DD: For my PhD.

CR: Yeah. And all you had to do then was to write the dissertation.

DD: Yeah, all you had to do was write this, all you have to do is scale Everest, that's all. It's just a little hill we have here for you. And, I don't think I ever will, but I was interested in it. I just ... I'd been writing critically, writing about other people's works for a good 8 years through Princeton and Yale, and I just felt the need to do my own thing. I felt like my critical writing, although I think it was pretty good, it was always, I was using other people's works as an excuse to voice my own ... voice.

CR: What difference do you think it made that you have this background, either in terms of how you approach acting or the perception of you?

DD: I can't speak to the perception of me. I know that in the beginning, when I used to go on auditions, I would have agents that would say don't mention that you went to Yale, (CR laughs) because, for some reason people, it's not that people like their actors dumb, because I certainly met many dumb people along the way in these wonderful schools. You can find dumb ...

CR: And you met some very bright actors.

DD: Absolutely. But it's almost as if we have this prejudice that, in this country that actors are instinctual and animalistic in this way, that education hurts actors. So in that sense, people would say don't intimidate them by saying that you went to Yale, and don't let them have an out, which is "he thinks too much" or "he's not impulsive enough" ...

CR: "He's too intellectual."

DD: "He doesn't have the energy, he's not bouncing around the room." So there was that, and then in terms of my own approach, I think it helps ... the discipline that I needed, because it wasn't like I was any kind of natural at what I did in academia. I mean, I was good, but it wasn't like they were crowning me the next Harold Bloom in any way.

CR: You were not to be America's intellectual superstar.

DD: No, I don't think that I was. So I worked really hard, and I think that that discipline and that kind of critical discipline was good, was good for me. I've always had strong discipline and that's helped and I got that from being an academic.

CR: Much is made about these two facts: the difference between you and your character and her and her character, number one and the point you just pointed out in part. And the difference between the two of you. Speak to that.

DD: The difference between Mulder and Scully and the difference between Duchovny and Anderson?

CR: Right.

DD: Well, I think I spoke a little about the difference between Mulder and Scully.

CR: No, between Mulder and Duchovny.

DD: Oh, Mulder and Duchovny. Well, extremely different superficially. I mean, I'm not obsessed with aliens. I'm not obsessed with the paranormal. I mean, I'm interested, if you showed me an alien I'd be stunned like anybody else, and I believe if I had to make a wager and say that there is or there isn't other life in the universe, I'd probably wager that there is. I don't believe that we've been contacted by them.

CR: Or that they've come down on spaceships and observed us.

DD: That's possible, but we haven't observed them. And I find it amusing to think that all the alien encounters always have to do with body probes and things like that. (CR laughs) If they're out there, they only seem to be interested in certain body cavities, which I find ... disturbing. But you do a character for five years, every day, 14 hours a day, 10 months out of a year, and the walls that you've built up between yourself and this character necessarily come down. Like I bleed through into Mulder all the time, just because I can't be as vigilant as I was in the beginning. In the beginning, I really had a sense of who Mulder was and who I was, but you get so damned tired, and eventually bits of David creep in that I don't necessarily want to be in, but there they are because I wasn't watching.

CR: And how about Gillian and Scully?

DD: Well, Gillian is, I'm sure, is the same. Gillian is obviously is more impulsive than Scully, I think anybody on this planet is, but ...

CR: (laughing) You think anybody on the planet is more impulsive than Scully?

DD: (also laughs) Than Scully. Yeah. But I think that Gillian is, she has a certain cautiousness about her that informs Scully in every sense, and that they share that. As to whether or not pieces of Gillian bleed through into Scully, as I was describing myself, that, she would have to answer that.

CR: Well, are you two close?

DD: Not personally. We're close professionally, as can be.

CR: There's respect and admiration as colleagues would have ...

DD: She's the other one holding the other side of the rope. I mean, I rely on her, I trust her, and she does me. We don't ...

CR: Why haven't you bonded?

DD: Well we have bonded in that way.

CR: In a professional way. But you're not friends, you don't go out to dinner, you're not ...

DD: No. No, because it's enough. (CR laughs) We spend so much time together. And in fact ...

CR: Plus you have something very engaging to go home to.

DD: Well, (he laughs) yes, but even if I didn't, I would just have my own solitude that I would want after a day on the set of the X-files. But it's funny cause Tea and I, my wife, just had a little party in our new house, and it's my first party that I've ever given really in my life, and Gillian came. I invited Gillian and she came. And when she came, I said, you know, this is really screwed up because I can't, any longer, say that we don't socialize.

CR: Why do you think you were chosen? What is it about you that made you ...

DD: Most casting is done the moment the person walks in the door. Actors hate to realize that. In one way, it lets you off the hook because it doesn't matter what you did in the audition. It's rare that you can sway somebody that I am this guy if he or she didn't think so when you walked in the room. So obviously when I walked in the room, I had something of his conception of Mulder ...

CR: What was that?

DD: Probably just some kind of intelligence and humor, I think, a combination. I don't really know, I just remember I wanted to bring out the humanity in the character. I didn't want him to be a mad scientist. I didn't want him to be Dr. Who. I wanted him to be somebody, if you were going to believe these things that we were going to be doing in the show, I wanted to have somebody as seemingly trustworthy and not kooky in any way, so I just played him straight.

CR: What's the appeal, do you think, there's a certain appeal because those two characters are viewed as bright, interesting?

DD: Yeah. I think it's very different. I mean, nothing wrong with Beavis and Butthead, but that's, we've come to love characters on sitcoms, animated characters, who are either proud of their ignorance and their stupidity, or else just smart like foxes, smart in stupid ways, you know what I mean, like Beavis and Butthead are. So I think people like to watch characters who think of themselves as intelligent, occasionally, and we don't condescend so much to people.

CR: Roll tape. This is a clip from X-files, the film. [the rooftop scene]

CR: Does the audience for the television series, do they want these two people to get together? Do they want them in bed?

DD: They do and they don't. They really want them to be in love, I think, and they want a natural expression of that or a continuation of that, for them to be physical with one another but, I think there's also this great sense in which people realize that once you have physical intimacy, you can't go backwards and does it .., I think they love the friendship and the tension so much ...

CR: Yeah, I think the word tension I was thinking about. The tension's always there. When I said to you as I watched that clip, what was she saying, the way she looked at him, and you said that she never laughs at his jokes.

DD: Right. Yeah. And it's this kind of, once there become romantic stakes involved between two people then, aside from it kind of complicating the relationship between Mulder and Scully to an extent, it would also throw the show off, I think, because then you have Mulder and Scully investigating these cases and yet talking about their relationship. I mean, what are they gonna do, like they're hiding down, chasing some kind of paranormal freak and yet talking about, you know ...

CR: Last night.

DD: ... what was the way you looked at me last night? I didn't like that. Nagging each other. So it's not going to become 'Moonlighting'. It can't. The show's about the stories and it's about the quest. It's not about the love between the characters.

CR: Has this show heightened your interest in all these things? We've talked about intelligent life somewhere else in the universe ...

DD: No, it hasn't.

CR: Parapsychology is another subject.

DD: I mean, I believe in the metaphysical, whatever that means. I believe, like Samuel Johnson, I don't refute it (bangs table) thus. That this table doesn't exist really. And he said, well, I refute that (bangs table) thus. I believe there's more than just the physical, but I wouldn't put a label on it, I wouldn't put a 'God' label on it. I just believe there's so much energy in this world that it can't die with the body, but I don't think it retains any kind of particular personality.

CR: But it can't die with the body.

DD: It doesn't, in my heart I believe, that there's too much in myself, too much in you, too much in all of us, it can't be contained in this (gestures to his chest), and when this dies it must go somewhere. I don't think, like I said, it doesn't retain any of me, but it goes back to the big pot, it gets served as leftovers again. (pauses) I think.

CR: How about conspiracy ... the notion that they're out there ... conspiratorial people who want to change the government.

DD: Yeah. Well, my father wrote a play called 'The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald'. So he was obviously a conspiracy buff. It was on Broadway for all of three days in 1967. So I guess it's in my blood, but in my experience of human nature, I have never watched or seen two or three people keep a secret for more than three or four days. The idea that there could be a conspiracy about the assasination of JFK, say, or a conspiracy to hide the existence of extra-terrestrials, and that somebody wouldn't crack, somebody wouldn't come forward and say I need to tell you the truth, I'm on my deathbed, I need to clear my soul, clear my conscience, it just doesn't ring true of human nature. I think human nature, it's got plenty of lying in it, it's got plenty of will to conspiracy, it's got plenty of plot making, but to be able to hide it that well so that it would take all the forces of the public to uncover it, I just don't believe that people are that good at it.

CR: Roll tape. This is another clip from the X-files film.

DD: (says this to CR as they fade to the clip) What do you think? [the scene in the field with the door-to-door salemen line]

CR: How long does ... what does this movie change about your career in terms of ...

DD: (laughs) I don't know. I don't really think of it that way. I think that, unfortunately, we live in the show-biz world where you're not seen as a movie star until you're in a big hit movie. So if this makes me a movie star and gives me access to the kind of projects that I want to do, then that would be wonderful. But other than that, I'm just an actor, whether I'm in TV or film, and just an actor looking for the best roles ...

CR: And what makes a difference in the choices that you have. And if this, movie stardom, gives you more choices, the better it is.

DD: Absolutely.

CR: It gives you more power and more money and all of that.

DD: Aside from making a good film, that's what I would want out of this film.

CR: Is there any, would you look at yourself among other actors. Because of your background and say, you know, I'm here and I'm acting and I love it and it's fun to do, I'm the last person I would have imagined me being here. And yet I know other actors and I'm sort of different, I'm just, there's nobody, you know, I feel like I'm an alien among actors, because it's not ... Any of that? [Transcriber's note: Blame CR, not me, for that last question.]

DD: Yeah, but I'm not sure it's because of my background. I just think I've always felt a little alien anyway, but I think that ...

CR: (laughing) You are perfect for this role.

DD: (also laughs) ... I just think, when you get into those kind of discussions, it's almost as if we have this machine of Hollywood that is, that looks superficial - Tinseltown and all that crap - and yet you have a lot of really talented, non-superficial people working and existing within that system. I'm not saying you don't have superficial people in Hollywood, but you've got wonderfully deep and talented people and smart, in many different ways. And you gravitate, hopefully I gravitate towards the people that "get" me and that I "get".

CR: Come back to this program any time, David. I've enjoyed it very much.

DD: I've enjoyed it, too. Thank you. I will come back.

Transcribed by Dave on alt.tv.x-files