All language subtitles for The.X-Files.S07E21.1080p.BluRay.x264-ROVERS

Hi, this is Vince Gilligan,
executive producer of The X-Files,

and you are watching "Je Souhaite",
my directorial debut,

my first episode | directed for the show.

"Je souhaite" in French means "I wish", or
so they tell me. I don't speak French myself.

But this show is one that
I wrote and directed,

the first one I ever got
the privilege to direct,

and l was nervous as hell going into this.

l directed stuff in college
and directed short films as a teenager,

but this was the first time
I had 300 people, all my responsibility.

And it was pretty nerve-racking,

but I was very lucky to get to do it.

The story came about, as most do,
in a very sort of roundabout way.

I had an idea originally about a self-storage
place, which is what you're seeing here.

This one, in fact, I think was shot down
in Carson, an area just south of Los Angeles.

And the original idea was,

I had this weird image of this
long-locked-up self-storage locker,

and it gets cut open and rolled up

and the person looking into it finds
a person standing inside

someone wide awake
and just sort of standing there.

And the original version, that original
idea, was not in any way comedic.

It was gonna be something...
I can't remember. Something weird.

It was gonna be somebody'd built
some sort of android or robot.

That's what the person
standing there would have been.

Then that went by the wayside cos
I didn't feel an android seemed like X-Files.

It seemed more to me
like Star Trek or something.

And then I had some even weirder idea

where inside the storage facility there was
this... like a black hole or something,

some weird kind of maelstrom

that separated our world
from some other world.

And I had this weird image in my head
of human teeth falling through it.

That gives you an insight
into how we come up with these things,

cos where the hell
did human teeth come from?

I didn't know what to do with that, so with
the help of Frank Spotnitz and John Shiban,

some of these ideas I had
wound up being what you see here,

and wound up being comedic.

The idea of a genie rolled up in a rug

came later than these other ideas
| just mentioned.

But that's sort of the roundabout way
we come up with these things.

This actor, Paul Hayes... a real trouper.

Coming up here you'll see why.

We put a little makeup on him
to make it look like he had no mouth.

Our makeup guys
did a really greatjob with this.

I think it took a couple of hours to do this
makeup effect on him, during which time

he couldn't open his mouth,
and luckily he breathed well out of his nose.

That would have been problematic
if he couldn't do that.

Here's the title sequence,
which I also directed.

No, I'm just kidding. That's not true.
I didn't do this, obviously.

The episode is set in Missouri.

That was the teaser you just saw,
in Creve Coeur, Missouri.

I'm not sure why, except that I knew at this
point we'd set a lot of episodes in California.

Because of course,
at this point, season seven,

we were shooting the series
in Southern California,

here in the beautiful city of Los Angeles.

And itjust seemed like
we should mix it up a bit,

so I thought Missouri would be
a good place to set something.

I loved Gillian Anderson's reaction,
by the way, in that bit with the mouth.

That mouth was so nauseating to look at.

Again, Paul Hayes put up with
a long makeup ordeal to get into that.

And Gillian's reaction
when she first sees that mouth was...

I got a chuckle out of it on the set.

So this was my first opportunity
directing David and Gillian, of course,

being my first episode as director,
and it was a real treat.

They're both troupers
and they both are excellent actors,

and I'm very fortunate
not only that I got to direct,

but that I got to direct an episode
before David left the show,

because he was a lot of fun to work with.

It goes without saying that David and Gillian

know their characters better
than any other people,

having played them for nine years -
seven when this episode was made.

So they were a dream to direct as well

because they don't need to be told
how to play their characters.

They know full well how to do that.

So now we're in a real mobile home park.

This was shot in Carson, which is
a little suburb south of Los Angeles,

maybe about 35, 40 miles south of LA.

l have to say the people
in this mobile home park were so nice.

The actual residents of the place
were really a sweet bunch of people,

and they would come out to watch us shoot.

They particularly came out in droves
the day we blew up the trailer,

which is a scene
coming up later in the episode.

Here you see how grey and cloudy it looks.

I think it was actually raining on and off that
day, and we had to stop a little for the rain.

The thing about rain, though,
is that it doesn't actually read on film,

so it might have been sprinkling.

You can't tell, because unless you light rain,
specifically backlight it, you won't see it.

Now we're on stage. The magic of film, huh?

It looks like we're in a trailer,
but that inside stuff is on a sound stage

at the Fox lot, in Los Angeles.

And this shot's on location,
this shot's on a stage.

I'm always surprised. I mean, even having
directed this, you know, it's easy to forget

that these are two different physical
locations, one indoors and one outdoors,

and we're bridging them together,
just cutting back and forth between 'em.

This actor I was so happy
to get to work with.

His name is Will Sasso,
the guy in the motorised scooter,

and you'll probably recognise him
if you watch the TV show MAD TV on Fox.

He has been on it for several years now,
four or five years.

Very funny guy,
as is everybody on that show.

We wound up reading
just about every cast member,

current and former,
from the TV show MAD TV,

cos I'm a big fan of it, and we read a bunch
of folks from it - everybody was great.

But Will in particular was a guy
I had in mind for this part.

lwrote the part with him in mind,
and luckily he was available.

His schedule permitted him to do this role,
and he was funny as hell.

| just enjoyed working with him.

And I think
David and Gillian liked him a lot, too.

And that was Paula Sorge you just saw,
briefly, the genie in our episode.

I can't say enough good things about her.

She was wonderful to work with.

To be honest,
I wrote the part for Janeane Garofalo.

I had her in mind.
I thought "Gee, maybe we can get her."

And it turns out she was unavailable.
She was locked up doing some HBO stuff.

And as wonderful as Janeane is,

I am very fortunate to have been
able to work with Paula Sorge.

Paula was a pleasure to work with.
Everybody was.

I sound like I'm just blowing smoke here,

but this was a wonderful experience

because everybody made it easy
- all the actors.

Kevin Weisman, who you also saw in that
previous scene, plays the part of Anson.

He's the other brother.
He and Leslie, the two brothers.

Everybody was a lot of fun to work with.

So now we're back in...
This is, again, location work.

We actually shut down this U-Store-lt place.

It's really neat to work on a show
with as big a reputation as The X-Files,

because everyone sort of knows
when you come in what the show is,

and most of them are fans
or at least friendly

toward the idea of you shooting there.

And this was a working operation

that closed down for us, which was nice.

That boat, by the way, was a big hassle
to get loaded into that trailer park,

the boat outside.

It was a big deal to get that trucked in,

and we had to shift a few trailers around
and sort of shoehorn it in there.

Check out the remote control, by the way,
that Paula's holding in her hand.

It's a girl in a bikini kind of a thing.

l was surprised our broadcast standards
people let us get it on the air.

It's a little bit... Kind of thing
you pick up at Spencer Gifts, I guess.

A little risque,
but I don't guess they noticed.

Directing-wise this was a tricky scene
for me, being a neophyte,

because this is, again,
on the sound stage of the Fox lot.

This is not an actual trailer interior,

but it is about the size
of a real mobile home,

maybe a little wider -
we fudged a few feet here and there.

We raised the ceiling a bit, and we made it
a bit wider than a single wide mobile home.

But it was tight inside, and this scene,

with three characters
talking for a prolonged period,

logistically was a bit tricky

because when you shoot a scene like this,
you want coverage,

which is to say you want different shot sizes

and compositions on each actor
in the scene.

And so a scene like this with three people,
it probably...

It probably took three, four hours
to shoot this scene.

It probably took a good half a day

and wound up being
a bunch of angles on every actor.

It wound up being four or five
different shots on each actor,

so four times three... 12, plus a master.

It was probably 13, 14 setups,
individual camera positions.

There's also something in directing I don't
want to get into, delve into too deeply,

called "the line", which is...

For instance, in this shot
Kevin is looking basically screen right.

Everyone else is looking screen left to him,

except now, just then, he crossed the line.
I'm confusing myself trying to explain this!

You want everybody looking
in a consistent direction.

Now they're looking left,
he's looking right.

lf suddenly you were to
pop on the other side

of the line dividing
Kevin from Paula and Will,

you could confuse the audience

cos suddenly he's looking left
and they'd be looking right,

and a better director than I
would know how to make that work.

But I stuck to it pretty religiously,

cos I didn't want to confuse myself,
and least of all the audience.

I didn't want to confuse them, either.
This was fun to shoot.

These guys were real troupers.

This shot originally was going to be
a very fancy, very expensive special effect

with Kevin fading away
and his clothes still being on him

walking around a lathe Invisible Man,
his empty clothes walking around

still on his invisible body.

We learned pretty quickly that would be
exorbitantly expensive and hard to shoot,

so I went back in and changed the script
and made him get naked.

We changed the line so he says "Wait.
Are my clothes going to go invisible too?"

It worked out better.
It's one of those nice moments

where it's better not to shoot
what you originally had planned,

that what you change for logistics

and to save money
actually makes for a better story.

So I'm glad that worked out the way it did.

I think we shot here with a 10mm lens,

stuck way up in the corner of the set,
very wide.

This was a fun day.

This take here I think took something
like 10 or 11 tries to get itjust perfect.

And then this scene here...

I think this was about
my last day of shooting.

Of course, we shoot
out of chronological order,

and this was I think the last day,
on the schedule of about 11 days -

eight days first unit, three days second.

This shot here was fun, coming up.

Boom.

That was done... lwish
I'd made that go a little bit longer,

but that was done with that actual truck
hitting a giant mirror.

We set up a mirror in the street and drove
a truck through it at 50 miles an hour

and just obliterated
this giant tempered glass mirror.

And there's a cut hidden, from the girl,
on the other side of the street.

When we pan the camera to the right,
there's a cut hidden in there.

So we panned off her and then edited

to panning onto this mirror
with a truck just about to hit it.

That was fun to do.
We did two takes on that,

did $3-4,000 worth of damage to the truck.

It wound up leaking radiator fluid
by the time we did the second take

cos hitting that heavy mirror
was definitely not what GM designed it for,

or whoever built it.

That's a piece of glass Scullyjust touched,

to make it look like she's touching
the invisible guy's head.

You probably already figured that out.

But, I tell you, the old-time tricks
that they've been doing since time began

are often the most effective and,
of course, it helps to have a great actress.

We had one with Gillian Anderson.
She did a wonderful job.

I think we did this in one take,
and she just nailed it.

We had two cameras going,
two or three cameras,

and when you have two or three cameras,
what we call A and B camera,

you can shoot things much quicker

because you're getting two different
shot sizes on the same performance,

and you know you're not
gonna have a problem

editing from one shot to the other.

I think this was the A camera and then...

then a B...
No, this is a whole different deal.

This was a big-deal special-effect thing.

The way this is done is our makeup guys
cast Kevin Weisman's head in plaster,

and then painted it blue.

So what Gillian Anderson
in real life was doing

was spreading yellow makeup dust
onto a blue plaster head of Kevin Weisman.

And then Bill Millar,
our special-effects wizard,

basically erased out all the blue...

There's probably
a better technical word for it,

but that's essentially what he did.

And in place of the blue he put in
Scully's coat and the background behind it

to make it look like he's invisible.

That was a very effective trick.

Kevin Weisman, on day two of our shooting,
had to get into his makeup for the first time

and we ran into a snag early on that day

when he had an allergic reaction

to the yellow makeup
that you see on him there.

That was kind of a bummer that put us back,

knocked us off schedule by a few hours.

But he was a trouper,
and he wound upjust sort of cowboying up,

and I don't think we,
at the end of the day, changed the makeup.

We were using pretty gentle stuff,
but unfortunately he was having a reaction.

But he was a trouper and sort of
dealt with it, which I appreciate him doing.

These kind of scenes you see a lot in X-Files,
where there's a dead guy lying on a table,

and I wanted him to be completely nude -
not the actor,

but I wanted the scene to play
like he didn't have a sheet on him,

because often we have a sheet on top
and there's nothing wrong with that.

But in real life, when someone is doing
an autopsy, there's no sheet on the body.

It's just basically a nude cadaver lying
there, and I wanted to stick to reality.

I think we had him in a pair of bicycle pants,
and I placed Scully around his midsection

so we could frame out the "naughty bits",
as Monty Python says.

But in these scenes
it's always tough for the actor

to have to lie there for a long time
and hold his breath.

And Kevin, again, was a trouper.

I think it's a lot harder than it seems,
because these takes go on for minutes,

and you can't stop breathing
for a minute straight,

so you have to breathe carefully
so we can't see you breathing.

The "You suck" on the boat here...

I don't know why I put that on.
| just thought it'd be funny.

I figured the neighbours
would get a bitjealous

of some guy suddenly having a giant yacht,

and maybe the neighbour kids
put that on there.

This was a fun scene to shoot,
particularly the part coming up here

when Agent Mulder does
the | Dream of Jeannie bit.

He does the theme song
from I Dream of Jeannie.

That was fun to shoot.

The I Dream of Jeannie bit that Mulder does,
that was fun to shoot. And, by the way,

whenever you have your actor even so much
as hum a few bars from a published song,

in this case the | Dream of Jeannie
theme song, you have to pay,

sometimes through the nose.

It's a good deal for the music publishing
people and the folks who wrote the song.

They get paid, sometimes thousands.

I think in this case
several thousand dollars exchanged hands,

maybe way more than that.

But that's as it should be.

As a writer, I don't write music,
I write screenplays and TV teleplays,

and I think it's good
when someone who works their butt off

gets paid for what they do.

But it's always interesting to me how much
it is just for a guy humming a few bars.

The T-shirt Leslie is wearing, by the way, is
one of my favourite bands, Lynyrd Skynyrd.

He has several costume changes
in the episode,

but in nearly every one it's a different
incarnation of the Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt.

There's different versions.

I felt, character-wise,
it'd be something he'd be into.

And I like it myself a lot.

Actually, I wound up keeping a bunch
of the shirts, I got five or six of 'em.

This scene coming up here...

brings back somewhat
sad memories for me,

and I'll tell you why.

This episode, when it was first out together,
I had it to my liking,

and yet it was 11 minutes long,
as in overlong.

As in The X-Files,
without credits and title sequence,

needs to be something like
42 minutes 56 seconds long.

And this was...
I can't do the math on the fly here.

53 minutes long and change,
and that can't be.

TV is sort of a Procrustean bed.

Procrustes being the old king in mythology

who'd strap you to a bed six feet long,
and if you were too short, he'd stretch you,

and if you were too long, he'd lop you off
at the ankles. TV is sort of like that.

I think it was Harlan Ellison, the science
fiction writer, who first called TV that,

and to me it is that way, because if you're
too short in an episode you gotta pad it out.

On The X-Files we're always long,

but then that's where
the heartbreak comes in

of having to cut scenes that you like,

and that last one was a prime example.

In it, originally,
Mulder showed three examples

of the genie being in past lives,
Mussolini and Nixon,

and then a fun one with her standing
next to old newsreel footage

of this guy taking a cannonball shot
to the stomach, and that had to get cut.

A lot of little bits like that
throughout this episode had to get cut.

My favourite one of all,
and the hardest one to cut, is coming up,

which was a scene where Leslie here

winds up sitting on the couch watching TV,
next to his deceased brother,

and watching The Dukes of Hazzard,
one of my all-time favourite TV shows.

And that had to get cut.

That was the act-out that you just saw.

The original act-out was he makes the wish,

and then the dead body comes to his house

and they sit and watch
The Dukes of Hazzard together,

in a very brotherly sort of a way.

The guy standing on the right of the frame
in the bow tie and glasses is Harry Bring,

one of the producers on The X-Files,
and a wonderful guy.

We call him Uncle Harry,
and he is a real character.

He and Michelle MacLaren

run the production end of our show
and do a greatjob.

He's a wonderful guy, and l was so glad to
get to give him a little cameo in the episode.

The fly buzzing around
that you see in this scene

is completely computer-animated.

This kitchen scene, by the way,
is again on the sound stage,

and the way these sets are built...

Our wonderful production designer,
Corey Kaplan,

and Duke Tomasick,
our construction coordinator,

do a wonderful job
designing and building them.

And that trailer set is built with what
we call "wild walls", or "wildable walls",

which is to say you can yank out a wall...

Our grip crew can grab a wall
and yank it out

and get it out within minutes so that
we have room to get the camera in there.

And that last scene was a scene
where we had to shoot them

in a fairly wide shot at the breakfast table,

the dead yellow brother and his brother
who's just brought him back to life.

And I was nervous that we were
wide enough... Here it is again.

..wide enough that we could tell
we were outside of the set,

because at that point we were.

We had pulled the wall immediately to...

For instance, Leslie's left shoulder,
we had pulled the wall out.

But I guess it plays when you watch it.
There was some concern when we shot it

that the audience would feel
like we were outside of the trailer.

As far as coming up with these shots goes,

there was a little bit of storyboarding done,
early on, mainly for the action scenes.

For scenes like the one you just saw
with three people talking

there's sort of a...
I don't wanna say a standard way,

but there is a time-established way
of shooting them.

There's only so many places
you can put the camera,

so scenes like that I didn't storyboard.

But other scenes with action in them,
for instance what's coming up,

the trailer blowing up,
that kind of stuff got storyboarded.

I had a wonderful storyboard artist who
helped me visualise what was in my head

and wound up helping me put it into paper.

There's a shot coming up here
l was so proud of when we shot it.

I don't know how well it reads on camera,

but I wanted to have heat
going in the foreground.

It's a shot through the back of the stove.

I wanted all this ripply sort of heat haze
coming up past Anson's yellow knees.

Here it is. You can see a bit of it there.
And, man, that was hard to get right.

I think our special-effects guys

wound up burning big casserole pans
full of alcohol, right underneath the lens,

to get that heat haze rising.

Here, finally, Leslie gets it.

Coming up here, he finally realises... Legs.

Ka-boom.

This was so much fun to be on the set for.

We had eight cameras going,
one inside that car.

They had something called a false knee
underneath the car,

a little hydraulicjoint
that popped out and made the car fall,

to make it look like
some big concussion hit the car.

Those were a stunt man and woman
doubling for Mulder and Scully.

There's no way we would put
our two stars of our show

that close to an actual explosion.

And I have to say, l was there on the set
probably 60, 70 feet back,

with the special-effects guys
behind a Plexiglas screen,

and I could feel the heat off that explosion.

It felt like opening up
a giant pizza oven, right in your face.

It was pretty impressive.

Although oddly enough, I will say,
as impressive as it was,

those kind of things
almost always look better on film.

They're impressive in real life
but look 10 times bigger on film,

especially when you shoot them
in slow motion and whatnot.

This scene was shot on location
and l was very happy we got to do that.

Out the window, at the top of the scene
especially, behind Paula Sorge,

you can see the trailer park,
and that's exactly where that is.

It was some abandoned building.
I'm still not sure what it was.

But it was some sort of small tower,
sort of two- or three-storey office building.

And that room
we were shooting in was so tiny

that we shot with nothing but wide lenses,
because we were jammed in like sardines.

Obviously it's meant to play
like there's just three people in there,

but in reality, shooting it,
it was probably about 15, 16 people,

jammed in so tight that l was
sitting back by the monitor, watching.

There's a video monitor
that the director gets to watch.

It's hooked to the lP,
to the cameraman's Panavision camera,

and it shows exactly on a video,

called a video tap,
what the camera operator is seeing.

So I'm sitting back,
watching on the monitor,

and I either had to yell to the actors...

l was just around the corner
in another room.

..ask them to do things differently, faster,
slower or whatever, or another take,

because I couldn't actually step over
all the huddled bodies of our crew

to get in there to talk to people.
It was that tight.

But very, very fun, nonetheless.

There's a fun sort of camaraderie that I felt.

I gotta say, this crew...

Again, it sounds like I'm blowing smoke,
but the best damn crew working.

We had a wonderful crew in Vancouver,
and now we have a wonderful crew in LA,

and these guys take the cake,
they're just fantastic.

Everybody from Bill Roe,
the director of photography,

on down just gave 110 per cent,

and made this directorial debut of mine
such a pleasure,

and also made me realise
from day one through day 11

that I knew basically nothing.

I say that in the sense that

l was always aware just how little I knew
and how much I was being helped along,

being carried on the shoulders of
all these wonderful actors and crew people

who knew theirjobs inside and out,

and | feel proud of this,
the job I did on this.

There's many things I'd like
to have done differently,

but I realise this thing moves
like a freight train or a supertanker.

And even if the director's
not all there, you know, mentally,

the train moves on without him, and
the shots get set up and the show goes on.

And it takes a strong director
to stay on top of it,

because something will get shot one way
or the other, and it'll most likely be good.

But when you're directing you have to
sort of stay ahead of the supertanker.

Kim Manners does,

and Rob Bowman
and David Nutter before them.

All our great directors,
and ljust tried to learn from them

and do a job
I thought they would be proud of.

But, boy, there's a lot to know directing,
and there's so much more I need to learn,

but this episode was a great start for me.

So now we're in Agent Mulder's apartment,

and as I recall, that aquarium shot
at the top of the act

was one that took a bit of setting up,
and I wanted to show more of it.

But again, this was one of the scenes,
as with just about every scene...

11 minutes we had to cut out of
this thing, and that is a lot of time.

What is that? Again, I'm not a math whiz,
but that's, like, one fifth of the running time,

between one quarter and one fifth,
we had to chop off this thing.

And as great an experience
as directing this episode was,

that was one of my least favourite
experiences, editing it.

Not because I didn't have
a wonderful editor helping me,

but just because we sat there
trying to figure out, day in and day out,

what we could lose, and still tell
the story we needed to tell.

Louise lnnes, my editor, really helped me
there, helped make the story make sense.

Because there's so much we had to lose,

that Procrustean bed of TV
has to be adhered to,

and we had no choice
but to chop stuff right and left

to make it fit on between
the Coca-Cola commercials and whatnot.

This was one of my favourite scenes
of Paula's, this scene coming up.

I'm glad we could keep it
nearly in its entirety.

She is so funny,
and she's got a lot of charisma.

I haven't seen her in anything
since this episode.

I hope she's working and doing great things,
cos she deserves to.

She's a wonderful actress - she's funny,

and yet in this scene,
at the tail end of the scene,

she... I'm sorry, it's not this scene.

But you'll see coming up,

she can turn on a dime
and play nice emotion.

This shot, I gotta say, you don't
see stuff like this on TV every day.

This was shot on a Sunday morning.

That's pretty amazing, because The X-Files
shoots Monday through Friday.

David Duchovny and our crew,

and Michelle MacLaren, our coexecutive
producer who runs our production,

were all nice enough to figure out a way
to make us able to shoot this on a Sunday.

And this is downtown Los Angeles,
and that one shot you just saw,

that oner, that one camera shot,
cost well over $50,000 to shoot

because we had off-duty police officers,
we had 20 or 30 production assistants,

all blocking off downtown LA to make it
look like there was nobody down there.

And if you've seen Vanilla Sky since then...

I haven't, but I understand
there's a great opening sequence

where it's Tom Cruise running around
Times Square, with nobody in sight.

And my hat's off to those guys, cos I know
just that one little shot we got for this show

was a logistical nightmare, and I can't
imagine how they did that in Times Square.

Sunday morning, by the way, is of course
the best time for downtown Los Angeles

because the fewest people are there at,
like, 7.30 in the morning on a Sunday.

There's not that many people you have to
ask to step out of the shot to begin with.

There was a little hand-off
in this scene that l was sort of proud of.

A hand-off meaning Mulder walks in
and Skinner's chair is empty,

and then the camera swings around and
Paula's sitting in Mitch Pileggi's chair.

Here's another hand-off.

In the background of the previous shot

there's nobody there,
and then the camera cranes up

and you see AD Skinner
and all his staff in the background.

| sort of wanted that
to be a theme throughout the show.

I didn't wanna see anybody magically...
There's another one. Now Paula's gone.

I didn't wanna see anybody magically
appear or disappear on camera,

certainly not the genie herself.
I wanted to do it with cuts

and make it more subtle.
There's another one coming up here.

As I do this commentary

I'm putting finishing touches on the second
X-File episode I've written and directed.

It's called "Sunshine Days",

and it will be the last one-hour episode
of The X-Files ever.

As I'm recording this,
we're deep into season nine,

what we now know to be
the last season of The X-Files.

And "Sunshine Days" is really
the last stand-alone episode,

and I had a great time directing it too.

It's funny.

I think just pure enjoyment-wise

I enjoyed directing this one,
"Je Souhaite", even more,

mainly because I was not as aware on
this one of the tightness of the schedule.

l was much more painfully aware

of how tight the shooting schedule is,
this time around.

And I had a hard time
making my days, as we say.

In other words, I had a hard time getting
everything shot in a day on "Sunshine Days"

than I did on "Je Souhaite".

So I guess the first time
is always the most fun,

and then it becomes a real job from there.

But I hope you guys like that one
when you see it.

Probably by the time this is on DVD,
you probably already will have.

But it's been a great run, The X-Files.
It's the bestjob I've ever had.

It's been like going to film school,
except getting paid to be in attendance.

And I feel very fortunate
to have been able to direct two episodes,

and to have written...

I counted it up the other day.

Something like 30-some episodes have
my name on 'em as a writer or cowriter.

It's been an honour and a privilege to work
with people like Frank Spotnitz

and John Shiban and Kim Manners,
Michelle MacLaren, Harry Bring,

Bill Roe - the list goes on and on.
Hope I'm not leaving anybody out.

But of course, Chris Carter,
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson,

not to leave out
Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish,

who are just absolutely wonderful,

whom I wish could've gotten a longer run
at it, because they are great folks,

great to work with, do a wonderful job.

But this has been a greatjob.
I've learned so much, and I'll never forget it.

This is Mulder's big decision,
this scene here,

where he decides to do the right thing

and try... to not save the world
and potentially screw it up.

He decides to make
a very simple wish instead.

This scene was fun to shoot.

I will say, though, as fun as this scene
was to shoot, this was second unit.

We have two different crews, a first unit,
main unit, and a second unit crew.

They're basically
two completely staffed crews,

both run by a bunch of people
who really know theirjobs inside and out.

But here on second unit, we had
to get this scene in very short order

because Kim Manners, with first unit,
was literally standing by...

It was, like, 100 people standing by
with their arms folded,

waiting to get onto the stage we were on,
Mulder's apartment.

They needed to shoot in Mulder's apartment
that day for a whole other episode.

And that was a little taste of pressure

that was, for me,
a good learning experience,

in that when you shoot
a television show or a movie,

or a commercial or anything,
I guess,

but especially TV
with its supertight schedules,

you have to learn to get what you
need to get first and foremost.

But you need to do it
in a very timely manner,

and with a minimum of BS and fuss,

and you need to not shoot
any more than you absolutely have to.

This is the last shot of the show.

This was done in Westwood Village, right
around the outskirts of the UCLA campus.

This was in a little French bakery
called Elysee.

And this was actually shot
the first day of production.

And, of course, it's the last shot
and, as I said, fun to do.

Thank you very much.