Original subtitles

Hi, this is Chris Carter, the writer and director of this episode - Triangle.

This was an overly ambitious episode actually,

and one that took a tremendous amount of extra planning

and extra care and extra work for everyone involved.

It was filmed in long takes, oners,

that were put together artfully and made to look like real time.

So what you're seeing is actually edited film

that pretends to be in one continuous, long take through each act.

You can see where some of the edits are if you pay very careful attention,

but our attempt was to disguise them.

We begin here in the Sargasso Sea with the wreckage of a ship.

This was actually filmed in a tank.

And here's Agent Mulder lying face first in the water.

This was filmed in a tank that was used on the movie Titanic,

among other movies.

We're actually in the middle of a sort of desert here

but you wouldn't know that,

because we never actually rise...

the camera never rises above the water level.

This is stock footage of a stormy, stormy ocean

with Mulder - David Duchovny - being pulled out of the sea.

We're actually filming right off the edge of the Queen Mary here.

Just to give a little background, when I told the actors what we were doing,

they were game and they wanted to do it,

but they knew they'd have to learn their lines very well

because they'd be doing long takes as you see in this first take.

This is all continuous action. There is an edit in here.

But Mulder is hauled aboard the Queen Anne, which is the Queen Mary.

He is being brutalised by the British sailors who have found him in the sea

who believe he's a German spy, calling him Jerry.

There's an edit in this little area here

to get Mulder upright to answer the questions.

Now he's going to be hauled roughly

into the interior of the ship where, once again, we cut.

But this is all long, long single takes that took a lot of rehearsal

and, ultimately, a lot of very careful camerawork and focus pulling.

Dave LiJckenbach really was, for me, a kind of codirector on this whole episode.

He, as the Steadicam operator,

had the job of keeping the action framed in an interesting way.

As you're coming in this hallway, there was an edit in the darkness.

Another edit there on the swing pan.

Mulder brought into the hallway

and taken to Captain Yip Harburg's room, the British captain.

Some of these actors were British, and some were affecting British accents.

I think the lead actor here, Trevor, is actually Australian.

Madison Mason, who plays Yip Harburg, is an American affecting an English accent.

This was a really difficult scene for Bill Roe.

This one in particular, because we're 360° around the room,

and he's got to light it, and light it interestingly.

He lit it and then I questioned his lighting.

I thought it was too flat and I thought it wasn't what I was looking for.

He tore the lighting out and we started again.

It was very nervous-making because this was our first scene of the day

and I think it took us until about lunchtime to actually get a shot off,

That's very nervous-making in episodic television,

because you've really gotta be putting film in the camera

and getting prints if you want to get your work done.

So this was all a very anxiety-producing situation.

David Duchovny was spot-on.

He had his dialogue down perfectly and had to do this scene...

I think we ended up shooting this scene a half-dozen times

before we got it exactly right.

The camera needs to be a character here, looking back and forth,

anticipating the dialogue, pushing in, keeping the framing interesting.

There's a little cheap joke here about the White House.

This was during the Clinton scandal, the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

It's a cheap joke that probably doesn't work now.

David is left alone in the room

and all of a sudden...

He's confused about the time or the others are confused

because they're in the Devil's Triangle.

Suddenly he hears a message over the radio,

which is Neville Chamberlain declaring war against Germany.

ln hearing this, he realises that it's not that he has come onto the ship in 1998,

but that he has come onto the ship in 1939.

There's a whip pan here when Mulder hears something at the door

and all of a sudden, for the first time, we see that the characters...

There's a nice light change there too, which was very difficult to do.

This is continuous action.

We're going to see that people in The X-Files are actually showing up now

as characters, Nazi characters,

very similar to the characters that they play, in terms of their villainy, in the series.

This is a very edgy shot here.

Very, very dark.

Done with a double, actually.

Both Mulder and Spender here are doubled for this fight sequence.

Through some tricky camerawork here, in silhouette.

There's a cut right there. I have Mulder finding that indeed it's Jeffrey Spender

dressed as a Nazi.

I got a chance to use some of my favourite '40s music here too, or '30s and '40s music,

to transition scenes and it was kind of a thrill.

This was actually one of the less effective shots I did.

I had to sort of span time here a little bit, so it's a little bit of a pan across nothing,

while I get Mulder dressed or re-dressed

and bring in the Nazis coming down the corridors.

Beautifully lit and shot corridors.

Mulder enters in his Nazi uniform now, in disguise.

Corey Kaplan did such an amazing job - our production designer - on this episode.

She was able to take what was already there, which was quite beautiful,

and authenticate it, make it look as if it were a completely period ship.

It was not quite. There were some things, additions - lights, carpeting and so forth -

that actually made it look less like an actual period ship.

There are little visual references to The Wizard of 02 throughout,

including that billboard you saw, the poster board you saw behind Mulder.

Here he ducks in to the ballroom

as the Nazis... just eluding the Nazis who run past.

The camera as a character, Dave LiJckenbach pushing in through the curtains, a cut,

and we're in the ballroom. Still as if it's continuous time.

This was a very expensive scene, because there's so many extras.

Lighting took so much time, and costumes...

There are dancers here, but I had actually only about eight real expert dancers.

Everybody else had to be taught how to dance in the sort of period style.

Mulder sees this singer on stage and recognises her, as we'll recognise her later.

Oh, now who does he bump into? He bumps into Scully.

Now Mulder, dressed in a Nazi uniform,

running into the Scully lookalike who's never seen him before in her life.

This was very fun to shoot.

You can imagine, after five years of shooting Mulder and Scully as Mulder and Scully,

the chance to make them somebody else and to use that conceit

was a lot of fun, I think, for everybody.

The man who we will come later to realise is Thor's Hammer,

the scientist who knows about building an atomic weapon,

we'll see him later on in the X-Files office.

Mulder is once again challenged...

David is challenged physically here, in these scenes,

roughhoused, handled roughly.

Taken outside... above decks and hauled through the rain.

The cameraman actually got up onto...

I had him rise up onto a platform here,

so we got a nice high angle that we wouldn't have achieved othenNise.

So every time we see this angle change, you'll see that there's another cut.

It requires some piece of machinery, piece of expertise,

that's all done in continuous action.

We hired some actual German actors for the Nazi roles,

so that their voices sounded authentic.

They spoke in that thick German accent.

We are actually in the wheelhouse of the Queen Mary right here

and the water pouring off the sides is ourwater.

We've created it with giant sprinkler systems.

What you're looking at, really, is take two of a very complicated sequence.

and the camera had to work just so.

I would have probably done this a few more times to get itjust the way I wanted it.

l have to say it turned out amazingly well, in spite of the fact I only got to do it twice,

because the wheelhouse started to leak with all the water we were pumping down on it.

The folks at the Queen Mary actually forced us to shut down.

So this was a stroke ofjust tremendous luck that we got what we got here.

You'll see in a moment the appearance of another X—Files...

Here's the Cigarette-Smoking Man, Bill Davis,

as the head Nazi here,

and the appearance of another man who we last expect to see in Nazi dress,

that being AD Skinner, who I thought was somewhat less recognisable with his hat on.

But we loved the gla... We gave him the little sort of Colonel Klink glasses.

This brings us to the end of an act.

Moving the episode now into the FBI.

For a lot of people this is their favourite act.

I think it moves really well.

There's the man Scully was dancing with, working at the FBI,

so everyone plays a dual role, or most everyone.

I think that the way the action moved here is... It worked.

The concept actually of keeping this moving as one continuous take worked,

and it worked because the Lone Gunmen knew their lines.

They'd spent the night before having a few beers and going over their lines,

so they were word-perfect.

Along with Scully, who had to move the action,

notjust by knowing her lines, but she actually marches...

She does a lot of very physical marching in and out of offices here

and has to maintain a tone and keep her energy up through each piece of the film,

which all has to match, tonally, in an ever-rising and escalating sense of urgency.

Mulder and Scully are actually out of the X-Files during the larger story arc here,

so this is Scully's office for now, which is why we're not in the X-Files office.

The X-Files office is being manned by Agent Spender, who's Mulder's half-brother,

and a villain.

You've already seen him dressed in a Nazi uniform.

This is Arlene Pileggi, Mitch Pileggi's wife, playing Skinner's secretary.

Scully going to get help from Skinner, who we'vejust seen in Nazi dress,

who offers her no help at all.

Similarly as he's done, he seems like a villain here,

as he appeared to us on the ship with Mulder when we saw him at the end of the last act.

As we'll come to see, he is...

Well, he seems like he is an obstacle here. He will end up becoming an ally.

Janet Reno on the wall.

Dates the picture. She's no longer in herjob.

l have saved at home these notes.

Just kind of funny little memorabilia.

You'll see that Gillian writes a note in Spender's office - the X-Files office - later on.

I don't know why, ljust...

She had to write it on camera, so when we wrapped the scene I took the note

and I've kept it as one of my little pieces of the show.

That was a tricky camera move there.

The cameraman needed to get out of the office behind Gillian and get in front of her,

so we needed to create some obstacles which we made human obstacles.

Now, these elevator scenes are very tricky,

because the cameraman has to get inside with Scully, in the elevator,

so he's gotta squeeze in, keeping his framing.

The focus puller here...

He is... If the...

This is a trick. There was a out there and I chose to have Scully step on the woman's toe

to hide the fact that she is now completely separated from that last scene that she did.

So, being in the elevator and getting out of it were shot as two different scenes.

The focus puller has a really difficultjob here,

because each time the camera moves in and out

and the subject matter changes its focus plane,

the focus puller has to be exact.

If he's not, we get out-of-focus shots and we can't use those.

So not only do the actors and the cameraman have to be great

but the focus puller here has to be perfect,

and he was an incredible amount of the time.

Scully can get help from no one.

She sees that now she has even betrayed Mulder's whereabouts

and his plan, or what he has done,

to her superior and her arch nemesis, the Cigarette-Smoking Man,

who we've already seen as the evillest of the Nazis on board the Queen Anne...

in World War II.

Scully going to the cellphone.

Running for the elevator and...

For the first time in a long time, (chuckles)

she can't get out on her cellphone.

Seems like that cellphone works everywhere but in the FBI elevator of all places.

There's a out here.

Every time Scully gets in and out of the elevator we have to cut,

because we've gotta be in a new place.

We're in the X-Files basement here, the X-Files office,

with Spender, who's proven himself to be a weasel, as Scully says.

He's no help at all but she browbeats him.

This is a nice moment that Chris Owens created, looking off, creating a moment,

so he's notjust watching Scully's action but he's thinking.

It was nice to be able to come off Scully to Chris Owens.

He makes a moment of something that was really not a moment at all,

which was important when the camera is always watching.

There's no editorial, no chance to cut around anything.

There's only what the camera sees in linear time.

In the elevator scenes coming up, Scully moving in and out...

Here will be another out As the camera focuses on the doors, we hold on the split

and there... you can see a slight move there if you notice it,

a slight camera adjustment which is another cut.

We're in another scene.

The elevator's actually stationary. It does not move, although it appears to move.

So while Scully's inside, often when the doors are opening,

or at least twice while the doors are opening, Scully comes out, pops back in.

Then when the doors close, we're still in real time.

Now the crew is out, scrambling like crazy.

Set Dec is out re-dressing the same hallway as another hallway

and this, actually, was really funny.

We're in the same hallway now.

Different extras, different furniture, different everything.

Often we went too fast and we caught the crew with pictures in their hand,

moving furniture.

It was like a farce.

That hallway changed three times during the course of that scene,

all running in continuous time.

This was, coming up, one of the most difficult scenes for the cameraman,

when we jump out into the FBI parking garage

and the Lone Gunmen pull up in their van.

The cameraman actually has to get in the van with them,

sit down,

and we see Agent Spender running behind.

The choreography of this, the timing,

and the camera difficulty are...

ltjust was a superior effort by everyone to actually make this work in the time we had.

You're now in the bowels of the Queen Maiy,

being led along, Mulder being pushed along with the British soldiers,

being led by the Nazi soldiers into the engine room.

This was really a tight squeeze for Dave LuCkenbach.

It was one of the first scenes that we shot, maybe actually the first scene,

and the difficulty scared us all.

Getting this scene, making sure the camera functioned as a character here,

pushed into the action, made it feel alive and interesting throughout,

in such close quarters, was daunting.

And when we didn't get a shot off until lunch...

Everyone having to get their lines right, the camerawork being right,

the lighting being right, the introduction of new characters into the scene,

the timing of that,

it all was, for television, bucking the odds

that we could actually do what we wanted to do in the time that we had to do it.

We couldn't fail. We couldn't make...

We could make mistakes, but only very few, because we needed to get the work done.

Now the plot thickens

as the traitor is revealed.

Mulder has now given the Nazis the information they need.

Mulder has a trick up his sleeve, he believes,

knowing where they are, in the Devil's Triangle.

He was going to try to speak...

You'll see another out there, through the steam.

He's going to try to speak, or talk sense to, the man at the wheel,

who we'll recognise as AD Kersh, James Pickens,

giving me his best Rastafarian accent.

This was a really fun scene to shoot -

these angry mob crowd scenes -

because it always felt like it filled the frame and it kept everything intense,

but it also felt at the same time, when you got into these tight corners,

like you couldn't move the camera as much as you wanted to.

Mulder here, trying to intervene.

The Queen Mary was this incredible resource.

We had moved from Vancouver where we had been for five years.

We were all very nervous about the look of the show,

and if it could still be scary enough,

if we'd have enough atmosphere, which Vancouver had so much of.

What we found and what we learned real quickly

was that there were so many resources available that we didn't have in Vancouver,

in terms of location and things like the Queen Mary.

So this was one of the first episodes we did coming back from Vancouver to Los Angeles.

It was just a treat to be able to get all this production value.

Something we couldn't have gotten in Vancouver.

See those whip pans and the cuts that are hidden there.

Tight corners again for the cameraman,

having to scoot down very, very narrow passageways.

Using the darkness here as places to cut.

Through the first three acts there were 17 edits.

So there were only really 17 shots through the first three-quarters of the picture,

and then there were more in the last act,

because there are some camera tricks and things that required extra cuts.

But I think there were a total of...

There may have been... It's either 34 cuts in the whole picture, or 17 plus 34.

Back in the ballroom here,

with Agent Spender, or his Nazi counterpart.

And the Cigarette-Smoking Man speaking his best German,

which he practised very hard for me.

Holding his cigarette...

as he always does. Smoking a cigarette.

These scenes are shot with very wide-angle lenses.

The camera is actually very, very close to the actors' faces,

because you wanna encompass in these shots as much of this ballroom as possible,

which had been dressed so beautifully.

This man who is shot here, a stuntman,

was the boyfriend of one of the assistant editors on the show,

who just happened to fit the bill for a white-haired gent,

who is the first passenger to be killed by the merciless Nazis.

This is just... The amazing effort and attention to detail

that the production folks, the art people on the show -

Sandy Getzler, in this case, the art director -

were able to accomplish on a limited budget with limited time.

This ballroom will actually change over and become a decrepit version of itself

in a later scene.

Spender and Scully in a sort of allusion

to the earlier scene where Scully had told Spender what to do.

Now Spender, as the Nazi, not bending to Scully's browbeating.

Mulder, here, in a little lift from one of my favourite movies, Schindler's List,

points to the dead man as the person the Nazis were looking for,

but it doesn't work.

Nice try.

This was an evening shot of the Queen Mary

which turned out so beautiful.

We just lucked out with the clouds and the sky.

We're on a boat running beside...

actually running beside the Queen Mary and having it all lit up, as you see.

We weren't able to empty the Queen Mary,

so if you look carefully you can see that there are tourists or diners on board,

eating in the restaurants there.

Now the use of split screen, which actually are cuts in themselves,

but they make the action appear continuous with the sliding wipes.

It's a very effective use of an optical to continue the sense of real time.

All the extras here are in period costume.

Period jewellery, if possible.

The makeup and wardrobe and hair departments all worked overtime

and had extra staff, extra personnel in to make sure everyone looked authentic.

These are actually some of the most beautiful scenes in the picture,

as you get a chance to see not just the environment,

but the extras so clearly.

There was a out there, one of the more clunky cuts in the picture, with the Nazis crossing.

There were framing problems. It was one of the too-obvious tricks, for me.

They actually had a spotlight in the ballroom which came in handy for this scene.

It actually gave it an atmosphere that I had not imagined,

so we lucked into that.

It was a great thrill to stage these fight scenes, to figure how to put the cuts in them,

and get the woman hitting the man over the head with the bottle.

To keep the fighting interesting it had to look realistic,

and yet it was all staged fighting which sometimes doesn't look realistic.

Once again, the use of the wipe here - the optical wipe across -

to get us back to Scully and the Lone Gunmen

who have now boarded the Queen Anne.

We are imagining this is in... that they have boarded the same ship as Mulder.

It looks in every way like the same ship as the one Mulder has boarded.

But we'll see that they've actually boarded a ghost ship.

Mulder's nowhere to be found.

l'd imagined Mulder and Scully crawling on the floor with a lot more action around them.

| just couldn't figure out how to stage it because I didn't have the extras or scope.

So it actually turned out a little bit briefer

and not quite as effective as I had imagined it.

Now the tricks will start.

Mulder and Scully are here in '39 trying to elude the Nazis

and it looks like they are dead meat here.

Until a shot is fired, but no one's been hit but the Nazi.

And now Skinner, who's helped Scully in the FBI,

has revealed himself as a traitor to the Nazis, helping Mulder and Scully get away.

Gillian's dress was specially designed, actually,

an original design by Christine Peters, who was the wardrobe designer on the episode.

I'd seen an MTV video by the band Semisonic.

It was a clever use of split screen with people moving through the split screens.

So that was, for me, an inspiration for this scene

where both Scullys pass by one another and have a sense of one another,

but how could they when they seem to be in two different time periods?

All the staging and the switching here from period to period

is done by stopping the camera, starting the camera,

holding, freezing the frame. Optical tricks.

Scully and the Lone Gunmen go to the ballroom

which we recognise from the hallway, hopefully...

Thinking we're going to walk into the ongoing fight.

But slowly revealing...

that... it is 1998 and this is indeed a ghost ship.

The changeover from the ballroom you've just seen, with the fight going on -

a beautifully-appointed ballroom to this -

that had to take place in the course of hours while we did other work that night.

That was the art department's hardest challenge on the show... doing things...

It's almost like we were producing a play and needed to move the scenery around

while the actors were on stage.

This was a really fun scene to shoot.

Both David and Gillian were excellent in it, and Gillian has to...

Not only do they kiss, which Mulder and Scully have never done to this point,

but Scully's got to land a punch on Mulder.

When she threw that punch, I actually thought she had hit him.

It seemed so effective.

And it looks very effective here, on film.

Whoa.

What a lot of people have been waiting for here.

Camera swings over and finds the stuntman.

We've switched out Mulder to the stuntman, jumping 70-odd feet

into the water beside the Queen Mary.

The split screen now - we are in the tank where we began the picture.

That same tank.

With a camera now, slowly, with bubbles that we've added into the tank,

slowly rising to the surface

to find the same floating body that we saw in the beginning.

And the boat that we've added to the tank and the crew aboard that boat -

that we are on... actually in the tank or afloat on the tank -

pulling Mulder out of the water.

This is the only time cut in the picture...

where we cut from one time to another.

This leads us to a long oner.

A single take in Mulder's hospital room

where there's a few more allusions to The Wizard of Oz.

And the reintroduction of the players.

This is one of the few shots that was not operated by Dave LuCkenbach.

This was actually done off a crane.

Mulder and Scully have not the most tender exchange, but sweet.

As we come around to Mulder...

he delivers his line

that we may have always imagined he'd speak one day, but he has never spoken.

lt's met with rolling eyes.

As we come around, though,

we see that he's got the black eye to prove it was all true.

The episode was nominated for several awards.

It won an Emmy for sound editing.

It was nominated for a writing Emmy and for a directing Emmy.