Original subtitles

Hello. This is Frank Spotnitz.

I wrote and directed this episode.

It's called "Alone". It was episode 18 of the eighth season of The X-Files.

And since this was the first episode | directed,

I gave a lot of thought as to what the story should be and how I'd go about it.

Just looking at all these shots puts me right back in the moment.

There's two schools of thought when you first direct an episode.

One is that you just try and come up with something very simple,

so that you get through it and don't screw it up.

The other is that you just go for it and give yourself a challenge

and show you can handle it.

I took the latter approach. This episode has guys in suits, and CG, and a rotating set,

and all the stuff that we'll talk about as the show goes on.

These are two good actors. That old man, who's not so old in real life, is James Otis,

and playing his son there is Tony Ketcham, a great guy, very funny guy.

And they made my first-time experience a really pleasant one.

There you go. There's an interesting shot.

When you're a writer, you imagine these great shots.

Then when you actually try and direct,

you realise what the camera can do and what lights can do.

And there are limits.

Not a lot of limits, but there are limits.

That shot of the fireplace, usually a shot like that, you would wait until later.

You'd have the second unit or the insert unit get a shot like that.

It doesn't require principal actors, and why take up your main unit's time

with something so simple, like a shot of the fireplace?

But I was determined to try and get all the inserts during main unit.

I gave up on that eventually, because it proved impossible.

This is a hard shot.

You imagine all these things, and when you actually direct it's difficult to achieve.

I had the camera rotating up and above this man's head.

And to have the camera do that, to stay close to his face, to stay in focus

and not have any shadows from the camera was a challenge.

Anyway...

Here's the son hearing something is wrong in the next room.

I had never directed before so I didn't know how to prepare as a director

for shooting my material.

So I sat with my script in my office,

and ljust went and literally designed every shot here in my head.

And then when I came to the set, I knew exactly what pieces I'd be shooting

and how they'd out together.

And more or less I followed that plan perfectly

through all the days of shooting for this episode.

And, really, what helped me the most in preparing to direct

was that I had spent years in editing rooms

watching how film cuts together and the problems you get

if the director hasn't anticipated the way film is supposed to go together properly.

Here | just wanted to show the audience a little bit of the monster,

enough to give your imagination something to latch onto.

And there you go. There was the teaser.

The first thing I saw was the teaser.

The editor of the episode, Lynne Willingham,

who's been with The X-Files since the fifth season, called me down.

She was excited for me to see it, because she thought it was so great.

That cut is basically the way she cut it from the very beginning.

And I was pleased with myself that I had not completely screwed up the show.

As a writer, it always helps to know exactly

why you wanna tell a story.

This was an episode that had a lot of special requirements.

It helped me focus very clearly on why I wanted to tell it.

It was the 18th episode of the eighth season,

and so I knew it would be the last stand-alone episode ever

for agents Mulder and Scully, that David Duchovny was leaving the series,

and so I wanted it to be special.

And I came upon the idea of having Scully leaving the X-Files office.

I knew if the show did go on, she would not be assigned to the X-Files office.

Agent Doggett and his new partner Agent Reyes would.

And it was a way to look back at the show and some of the fond memories

that we as writers and you as viewers had of the show over the past eight years,

the Mulder and Scully era.

And so I had Scully moving out and looking at these keepsakes

and came up specifically with the idea of her giving to Agent Doggett

this memento that Agent Mulder had given to her

in the two-part episode called "Tempus Fugit" and "Max".

Which I thought thematically was just perfect and made a lot of sense.

She's expressing my feelings for Robert Patrick

when she says to him how much she owes to him.

Robert Patrick really did get us through the eighth year of the show.

So it was easy for me to plug into the emotion Scully was feeling in this scene.

More obviously in this episode, | created a character

who could speak to the Mulder/Scully era very directly.

That is the person you'll meet in a few moments,

Agent Leyla Harrison, played by Jolie Jenkins.

And Leyla Harrison, as some of you may know if you're X-Files fans,

fans enough to have bought this DVD set, was a fan of the show who passed away,

and I'd managed to correspond with her once before she died.

I came up with the idea of a character who was a fan of the show.

Of course, this is a fictitious world and there wouldn't be a fan of the show.

I made her an accountant at the FBI who had followed Mulder and Scully's adventures.

ltjust seemed like a perfect tribute to her

to name the character after Leyla Harrison.

This is also nicely played.

These are just two wonderful actors.

Some people give wonderful performances on TV but they've been created editorially.

But these are two people who are just terrific all the time

and make myjob as a director incredibly easy.

l was moved shooting this scene. On the day it brought tears to my eyes.

Actually, I was more moved shooting it than lwas when it out together.

It was really just the power of the real-world ideas in this scene,

Robert Patrick and Gillian Anderson.

lt affected me.

So here's a nice ironic moment for the character of John Doggett.

How did he end up alone in the X-Files office,

this cop, sceptic, who never had any desire to be on this unit?

Now here he is, the standard-bearer for the X-Files.

That's a funny place for his character to end up.

This is very revealing. It tells you how much he likes Scully and how much he misses her.

And it's not Scully he sees. It's this very cute, young, eager agent.

I got lucky with the casting of Jolie Jenkins.

The casting director and his assistant brought her in

and I knew as soon as she came in she was perfect. And she was great from day one.

Really understood the character

and brought a lot of humour and humanity to her.

She brings out the Clint Eastwood in Robert Patrick here,

which is really what makes for so much of the comedy.

l was so charmed by her performance that I did something you don't normally do,

in a show like ours, which is | end the scene with her, with a guest character.

She has this nervous look at the end of the scene.

I really enjoyed that.

There's a lot of fluid camerawork in here,

which is inspired very consciously by so many of the fine directors

that we've had on the show - Kim Manners and Rob Bowman and David Nutter -

who were always moving the camera, finding interesting frames.

Notjust to be moving the camera but to help tell the story

and create a visual interest.

It's never too showy, I hope, or too self-conscious.

This is supposed to be Ellicott, New York, which is a real town,

near where a former assistant of mine, Michele Fazekas, grew up.

She grew up in Buffalo, and this was my little inside tribute to her.

As was the character of Leyla Harrison.

Some of the way she speaks is kind of like the way Michele speaks or spoke.

Actually, we're in Topanga Canyon.

This house is on stage six at 20th Century Fox in West Los Angeles.

But the exterior was Topanga Canyon,

which anybody who knows Los Angeles knows is near Malibu.

This is an exposition scene. lt's relaying the clues for the mystery here.

But I gotta say, to me, the monster was the least interesting part of this episode.

I came up, deliberately, with a very simple classic monster here,

just a guy who turns into a salamander man.

Because I wanted it to be about the X-Files, about Mulder and Scully leaving,

about Doggett taking their place but having to do so alone.

And I wanted the sort of elegiac quality to this episode. It was the end of an era.

Some complicated monster story

would've taken screen time away from my ability to express all those other ideas.

One thing viewers probably don't think about

is that these shows have to come in on time.

There's a format, and it must be adhered to, to the second.

My first cut of this episode was nine minutes longer

than the version you're watching here.

And, with help from some of my fellow producers, David Amann and John Shiban,

I got it down to two minutes over and was still fairly happy.

But the last two minutes I took out were painful.

There are things that l was sorry to take out.

I don't think they made it better, but you gotta do it.

Sometimes there are things explained in our scripts, but on the air it's not explained.

It's simply because we didn't have time to use all the footage we shot.

This is another Clint Eastwood moment

for Robert Patrick's character here, which I liked.

To me, the scariest ones work better if there's humour to offset the fear,

if there's lightness against the darkness.

And it's so easy to build empathy for Jolie Jenkins' character here

cos her heart is so clearly in the right place.

Again, we're in Topanga Canyon here.

Robert Patrick's gonna walk up the hill after seeing the Salamander Man

and magically end up in Encino, which is where the mansion exists,

where we shot the exteriors for the next part of the story.

This episode works on one level - if you've never seen The X-Files,

you gather that she's a follower of Mulder and Scully's adventures.

But if you are a die-hard fan, I think the rewards here are much richer

because you know all the things she's alluding to.

It makes you laugh, cos it rewards you for having followed the show.

There's a dry look from Robert.

He's an intense guy, I'll tell you. A great guy, but very intense.

This is, I will freely admit, a steal from Planet of the Apes.

There's that moment in Planet of the Apes when the astronauts are skinny-dipping

and their clothes disappear from the shore.

That's one of my favourite movies and I very self-consciously stole.

I think it's always a good thing to steal.

If something works, it's likely to work again. The context is so different,

I don't think it spoils anyone's enjoyment.

This man here, David Duchovny,

was also a big reason why I ended up directing this episode.

I had been reluctant to direct

because my duties as producer and writer were pretty demanding as it was,

and also I saw these amazing directors come in and barely make the schedule.

I wasn't sure I wanted that kind of hardship.

David encouraged me to direct before it was too late.

And I finally decided that I would be sorry if I didn't direct before he left the show.

And so ljust barely made it under the wire.

He is great to work with, because he's not only a fine actor,

but he really stimulates your thinking and challenges you to do better.

This scene was improved immeasurably

by some ad-libs that he came up with on the set.

Very funny and charming and very strange to see Mulder and Scully in this situation.

At this point we still had not revealed the paternity of Scully's baby.

Mulder and Scully presumably knew if they had consummated their relationship.

And so this scene is meant as a tease. Did they or didn't they?

It could well be that Mulder is just a good close friend helping her go to Lamaze

or it could be more.

Later we found out that it was more.

But for the actors, they had to play on that fine line.

l was always struck by the chemistry between Mulder and Scully.

And watching it now, as I am, with the sound off,

and see that chemistry.

Here we are no longer in Topanga Canyon but in Encino, and this is also in Encino.

We had to take very, very good care of this house.

We lost a lot of time taking good care of it

and making sure we didn't so much as scuff a hardwood floor.

This was a painful cut I made right here. That scene originally had much more to it.

There's a complicated camera move

that went up to the wall and found the creature there.

Now we're back on stage six, or five,

one of the two stages where we primarily filmed The X-Files on the Fox lot.

Our production designer, Corey Kaplan, did a beautiful job as usual.

And the set decorator, Tim Stepeck.

Here I got another insert from main unit.

Watch this.

As we open the book, there you go.

That's main unit. That's Robert Patrick's blurry head.

This shot is quite a shot.

It goes by really fast, but this was a big old deal.

We had a huge crane rushing down that hallway.

I'd say the crane was about 100 feet long.

And we had the whole camera crew running with that thing.

Had to practise it a few times to get itjust right, make it stop.

We were all really proud of ourselves for that shot. That was pretty cool.

There were more cuts in this scene as well.

Originally, we saw a blurry, out-of-focus monster behind Agent Doggett.

It wasn't just that camera point of view.

We literally saw there was a monster there.

It works just fine this way. But, again, the constraints of time.

And the suspense. It's not the monster.

"Agent Harrison."

Just love the lighting here. Bill Roe, director of photography.

I like the deep black on the right side of Agent Doggett's face.

Rim lighting around his eyes and nose.

This was late at night. This was like 2.30, 3am, the end of a long week.

These actors have gotta act like they're perfectly fresh and wide awake,

even though it's the fifth day of a 16-hour—a-day week.

A charming little moment here. She doesn't have her safety off.

Jolie Jenkins had never had to carry a gun before in any part she'd played.

l was struck by the reality of what a frightening thing a gun is to hold.

It was so heavy for her. But it actually worked great for the character.

And here's another shot that proved to be hard to achieve.

This, coming up to her face,

and then even more difficult was this, zooming down at her.

Watch this.

That. Because of the constraints placed on us

by the gentleman who owned this house in Encino,

we couldn't put a proper crane on that sidewalk.

He didn't want the weight of a crane on the pavement.

So we had to use a very short crane, which didn't really achieve my objective.

So I shrunk the image of Jolie Jenkins there,

and had John Wash and Mat Beck, our visual effects producers,

extend, paint additional scenery around the edges,

and then blow up the shot.

This was a big old deal.

We had to dig this hole here.

You can miss this. It's a blink, but there's a shot here, overhead, vertical,

of Agent Doggett falling into the trap.

It was actually shot on stage.

We got way high up into the permanents, they call them.

It just went by there.

Shot straight down so you could really see him going down.

A lot of little pieces when you have action like that make it exciting and convincing.

Cos the hole that we dug at the mansion was only a few feet deep.

You couldn't have actually fallen into it.

Back in Topanga Canyon, with Mitch Pileggi.

l was sorry I wasn't able to give him more to do in this episode.

ljust put him in cos I wanted to be able to work with Mitch, finally.

So I found things for him to do. It can't have been that demanding for him as an actor.

I didn't want to miss the opportunity cos I didn't know if I'd be directing again.

This scene with Gillian Anderson in her apartment was the first scene that I shot.

There's that moment when you direct for the first time

when you describe the camera move

and you just wonder, are they gonna buy it?

Are the actors and crew gonna say

"We're not gonna do that. You're out of your mind"?

l was very relieved that I got away with it.

And she's thinking.

Virtually all of the filming inside of this cave was done with the second-unit crew,

which is the smaller crew.

We have two units working on The X-Files:

the main unit, which shoots for eight days every episode,

and the second unit, which shoots the final three days and most of the inserts.

We had lost our usual second-unit crew at this point in the season.

Most of them had gone off to do a movie.

So I inherited an outside cinematographer, a talented gentleman named Robert Primes,

who did a greatjob with the stuff and was a big fan of the X-Files lighting style

that Bill Roe had practised so beautifully for so many years.

So I owe him a big debt for so much of this, which looks very much like our show.

There were a lot of challenges shooting in this set. First of all it was very constricted.

If you've ever seen what a camera crew looks like, it's a lot of people,

and it's very hard to shoot in a tight space like this and it slows you down quite a bit.

But also how do you light it?

There are some practical light sources there.

But Bob came up with a lot of clever ways to throw light on these walls

to give the scenes more depth and visual interest.

That shot you just saw of him looking up at the grate was actually CGI.

That was just a hole with green fabric.

And John and Mat extended it

to make it look like he was looking up at the grate that he had fallen through.

Here's David and Gillian.

lwished I could have given them more screen time in this episode.

There are so many objectives in a show like this and you can only achieve so many.

And, again, this is David,

such a smart actor, not wanting to play this sentimental.

And it gives tension to the scene.

He doesn't want her to be here. He wants her to go home.

And so he's gonna go out and help find out what happened to Agent Doggett.

These two actors play off each other so well.

Poor Jim Otis, having to play dead.

Lying half-naked on an aluminium table.

When you're shooting these things, they're completely out of sequence.

You're on a sound stage and you've gotta get interiors

of wherever you are in your episode on certain days,

and then other days you're all exterior or all nights or all days, so it's all mixed up.

So when you're preparing to shoot, you've gotta be very clear in your mind

about where the characters are at that point in the story

and what your transitions are going to be, visually, in and out of scenes.

I like this one.

I'm always very conscious of things like that, visual transitions.

This set is the main set,

and there were actually multiple versions of it,

because one of the challenges I mentioned I set up in this episode was a rotating set.

One version of this hallway rotated about 200 degrees.

And I'll show you the shots that made that necessary.

They're coming up very soon here.

Agent Doggett's looking around, hears something.

Look at the lighting here. This is what I was talking about with Bob Primes.

He had this pattern light shining.

I don't know where it came from, but it works, you buy it.

Now watch this.

Creature. Now this is the rotating set right there.

That's a guy in a suit and a wire. Right there, all that stuff.

The set was rotating. It's like the Fred Astaire dance routine in Easter Parade,

to make it look like he could walk up the side of the wall and onto the ceiling.

And I intercut between Salamander Man on the rotating set

and Robert Patrick on the real nonrotating set.

And then I also had a shot or two in there that were visual composites,

that seemed to put the Salamander Man and Robert Patrick in the same frame,

even though that's physically impossible.

You couldn't have a man moving like that, across a wall.

The set had to rotate because if I'd tried to pull him across the wall,

he wouldn't move naturally or quickly.

There's one shot there where it was just the tail and Robert Patrick.

It wasn't the whole thing.

Here's poor Tony again.

A little aside here is that I named this character, Gary Sacks,

after my oldest friend from Phoenix, Arizona.

Gary Sacks, who I've known since the second grade.

I thought it was a nice tribute to kill him in this episode.

I didn't think it would be nice to kill his father, so I named his father Arlen,

instead of Gary's real dad's name.

But I think Gary got a big kick out of dying in this episode.

In a number of episodes, over the years,

I've put the names of people I went to school with, former employers.

Just in-jokes that I myself know, and a few others do.

This is like a Vaseline thing on the lens.

There's another fancy director's shot.

Those are the things that eat up your time, of course, but they're fun.

Agent Mulder returning to Ellicott, New York.

Mulder's always such a troublemaker.

I enjoy seeing him go afoul of the bureaucracy and the protocol...

which he does with so little concern.

They timed this just right, this shot here.

Says his line, and then off camera.

You spend a lot of time when you're directing

trying to make things time outjust right.

This was a hard sequence.

This has a lot of pieces to it.

Climbing, climbing. And, again, shooting in a tight space is very hard.

And so I had to get angles up and down and across the stunt man and Robert Patrick.

Here's Mulder almost literally following in Doggett's footsteps.

There was a lot of wire removal from the visual effects team,

cos for safety reasons both Robert Patrick and the stunt man

had to be wired in that vertical tunnel for the climb.

Nice gunk falling down toward camera.

Back in Encino.

That's the moment when Agent Mulder discovers the Apollo medallion.

We don't know it yet. We'll realise later that's what he found there.

Now we introduce Herman Stites.

Another wonderful actor, with a great face.

And, again, I wasn't really interested in the mystery

and spending a lot of time talking about the monster.

I think you know from the moment you meet this guy, he's the bad guy

and he's got some connection to the monster,

whether you realise yet that he is the monster.

It's much more about Mulder and Scully one last time,

pursuing their investigation in an unorthodox manner,

and about Doggett and his inexperienced partner.

Again, here's one of my fancy transitions, which I was eager to do.

I guess the newer you are as a director, the fancier you wanna be,

to show people you know what you're doing.

We went magically from stage five back to Encino.

That was actually a piece, that grate,

and some sod that we lay down at an angle,

so the sod sort of rose up above the ground toward the set piece

and the camera could go right behind it.

But it looked like we were rising up out of the earth.

David, interestingly, doesn't like when Mulder is too smart or knows too much.

I remember our discussion that day

was how to make this interesting and not too easy for Mulder.

You won't hear that often from leading men,

that they don't want their character to be too smart.

I think that's part of what's made Mulder so appealing

and so lasting as a hero,

is his humanity and his frailty and his imperfections in so many ways.

He's not James Bond, although I love James Bond.

This is many different things.

lt's Robert Patrick on stage, it's somebody else's fingers in Encino,

it's Zach against a blue silk on stage, Zach actually at the house in Encino.

It's a very complicated piece.

And falling.

Lots of pieces.

We're halfway through the episode already.

So now we know for sure

that man and monster are together, or whatever's going on here.

I think we might have suspected that when Agent Doggett fell through the trap,

but now there can be no doubt.

I stole again, while I'm being honest...

I'm not sure whether it was Bill Roe's or one of the camera operators' idea,

or Steven Buck, the first assistant director, to have that manhole shot, which I liked.

Anyway, I stole again, as l was being honest about stealing.

The idea of Agent Doggett's fingers being stepped on

is taken directly from North By Northwest, which is a wonderful movie.

If you haven't seen it, you will definitely enjoy it.

If you like The X-Files, you'll love that.

This scene was much longer and it was all good, and it broke my heart to shorten it,

but time being what it is...

I felt very guilty throughout all these scenes

because poor Robert and Jolie had to wear these miserable contact lenses,

very uncomfortable, but they make their eyes look like they're screwed up.

They're made for the movie business by an ophthalmologist.

And neither one of them is a contact-lens wearer.

After shooting for hours, they became very uncomfortable,

and their eyes were bloodshot, and this went on for days and days.

Now the plot thickens.

Gary Sacks, my old friend, is missing. Where did he go?

Sunflower seeds. Another nod to those who know.

spitting out sunflower seeds.

l was trying to find as many of those things as I could for this episode.

I had another thing that ended up on the cutting room floor.

I had Scully call Danny in this episode,

and you gotta be a die-hard to know what that's about.

Mulder and Scully used to call Danny all the time for research and help in the FBI,

and we never once met Danny or saw him.

But no time.

This combination, we had David actually out in Encino at night,

but then this stuff, the close-ups, was actually on a sound stage.

I hate to spoil the illusion.

These scenes were much longer and more charming, funny stuff.

And here's an insert coming up that I also shot with main unit on location.

Very eager to hold up this medallion and see the real background out of focus behind.

I know. It sounds crazy. You're thinking "Who would ever know the difference?"

Lisa Kaseman played the pathology assistant here.

These scenes are the stock in trade of The X-Files, these tech explainer scenes.

It's always a challenge to make them somewhat interesting.

| always try to find - we all always try to find real scientific research and principles

to support the fiction we've created in the episode,

and this scene was no exception.

Everything I'm saying here is scientifically accurate.

I can't remember what I said,

but if you watch the episode again and check with a biologist,

they'll tell you at least in theory it was sound.

This is where Scully went off to call Danny,

but because you've seen the DVD, you know.

Here we go. The blind leading the blind.

This, to me, was a very important scene

in the shape of Doggett and Harrison's relationship.

Doggett's really come to care for her, and she has been so cheerful and...

can-do.

And this is the first point when you really sense she's afraid.

I always try and want characters to play against what they're feeling.

It creates a nice dynamic in the scene.

Somebody's afraid but doesn't want you to know,

or somebody loves you but doesn't want you to know they love you.

lt's two levels instead of one.

This monster stuff...

There you go. There's the rotating set again. That's how he was able to do that.

Monsters - you wanna see enough to have your imagination

latch onto something specific that's scary and creepy and icky.

But, on the other hand, if you see too much it's just cheesy and ridiculous.

It's always the fine line you walk, and hopefully I didn't cross it or fall off it here.

And that's what became of Gary Sacks,

his guts sucked out by the Salamander Man.

My crew gift to the crew for this episode was a bottle of wine,

real wine from Stites, a private reserve, harvest red, liquefied for easy digestion.

And it had a little salamander on it and a little X-Files logo.

Collector's items now on eBay.

You just look at that shot. The director of this episode tried to make it interesting,

of her picking up the file, and these angles, the verticality of them.

The second episode | directed, I took a completely different approach,

but here l was trying to goose it up to make it as interesting as possible.

Again, this is a classic example of how little you see.

You wanna capture the imagination of the audience, make them wanna see more.

And now Mulder is on the run.

And David is a very fast runner, very good athlete.

That night he was joking about how he could catch this guy, no problem.

And the truth is, he could.

That's a CGl monster, in case you couldn't tell.

That's a guy on a skateboard, I hate to tell you.

David jokingly called Salamander Man Lawnzilla.

That's CG, against the real house.

That's a set piece composite with David at the real place,

but the roof was on-stage, with our Salamander Man.

| just remember shooting this. It was cold and late on a Friday night.

So was this. And we were running out of time.

That's CG. That's amazing.

And then he changes mostly off-screen into Herman Stites.

Visual effects like this, you realise how quickly the art has evolved.

You couldn't have done this when we began The X-Files. Now we do it on a weekly basis.

This was Zach's idea, this little goop on the cheek.

Wipe it off, which was a nice detail to end the episode.

Whenever you can find specific details, it makes things so much more memorable.

That's the advantage people making features have.

They have more time to find details, to find little moments.

You're rushing sometimes on a television schedule just to get through the work.

Some of my favourite things in movies and TV shows are tiny, idiosyncratic details.

This is great Bill Roe lighting again.

He has the lights down low, which makes everything kind of creepy and scary.

You don't think about these things consciously, but itjust works.

So now it's Act Four. This was a very important moment to me.

Agent Harrison, the risk was that she was a lightweight character,

just a flake and a fan who really did nothing but get Agent Doggett into trouble.

And lwanted her to have the moment of realisation here.

In truth, I think she's solved the mystery before anyone,

which validates her character in a way.

You can really see the Bob Primes lighting here, the spray of light against the walls.

It really enhanced what was already a great set.

And now he's gone.

I haven't talked about Mark Snow, but let me say

what a greatjob he did on this episode,

and does virtually every week, always makes these things so much better.

It's my favourite part of the job,

going to his house and just hearing how much better the show gets,

without me having to do anything.

All of Mulder's points of view here of the Salamander Man are on the set that rotates.

I ran out of time here. I wanted to have more shots that were tie-ins.

Again, that's the trade-off you make, time and money.

A lot of ad-libbing went on here between David and Robert,

the only way to make it exciting.

You can't script this shouting back and forth and hope for the spontaneity that you need.

Here we go. Fire.

Interestingly, as I said, I was a little reluctant to direct

because of all my duties as a writer and producer.

In fact, I had no idea how it was gonna end.

I had not written Act Four, which you're watching now.

It was while I was prepping as a director that I figured out how to end this show.

I thought this climax was good,

because both Mulder and Doggett had to be heroic

and it played on the scary nature of this monster,

which was that it could come from anywhere, it could come from above you.

And there's a morph, accomplished by John and Mat.

And there you go.

But the episode's not quite over yet.

One more important note to play.

Again, I wanted the elegiac feeling

and the awareness that a baton was being passed.

We were leaving the Mulder and Scully era for the Doggett and question mark era.

One last allusion to Scully's pregnancy.

Doggett wondering if they are at the hospital because of the baby,

but they're not.

And this scene was longer, too. Had to be cut. Still plays fine.

This last scene with Leyla Harrison.

I think she plays it great. She's charming and winning.

It's an ad-lib. l'd scripted what they were gonna talk about,

this issue in the feature film that I had seen many people wonder about,

which was how did Mulder and Scully get back when his snowcat ran out of gas?

Thought it was fun and self-deprecating to bring it up here.

But I had Mulder and Scully, obviously, ad-lib

because they have wonderful comic timing and ljust thought it would play better,

rather than trying to script every word they said here.

So I had more than one camera running, so I could use different angles of their ad-libs.

But as it turned out, it played bestjust in a two shot.

And David gave me some great directing help here.

I had Jolie smiling and laughing while they bickered.

And he said "Do one where she doesn't smile,

where she's just wondering how to react to these people."

It was funnier, because you had that tension,

instead of releasing it by letting her smile and laugh along with us.

Some people said it was weird to watch them bicker

but I thought it was exactly right for where they were in the relationship,

Coming up on the final shot of the show and Robert Patrick,

and what a wonderful, empathetic actor he is.

And used a wide lens and tried to make that hallway look really big.

And that was the end.

I had a great time directing and I hope you enjoyed the show.

(child) I made this!

Visiontext Subtitles: Sally Lewis