Original subtitles

This is Kim Manners and | directed this episode of The X-Files called "Existence".

I love dripping water. I don't know if the fans will notice

but I use dripping water a lot in my episodes.

I think it creates great mood.

This is part two of a two-parter.

In this box is Billy Miles' body,

who fell off of a building into a garbage truck,

where he was ground to pieces, and this is his body.

This vertebra, which was really completely a|| CGI,

we took the one vertebra and we put it on a drill motor

and spun it a couple of times to give him a reference plate

and then he painted all the rest of it.

Really well done.

John Wash is a terrific visual effects guy.

He and Mat Beck have done some great work.

This is really one great gag coming up.

All that's left of Billy Miles.

We had to set this just so because of the effect that we had to create.

So that actor had to set that vertebra down just so and just in exactly the right spot

for the rest of the effect to work.

We had to hook it up to a drill motor and we only had one spot to do that.

We actually had a drill motor underneath the table, which would spin the vertebra.

So it had to be sat on its side like that.

It is totally seamless. We did the camera move and John Wash did the rest.

All we did was do a camera move on nothing, and he painted in the rest of it.

What's interesting now watching it, we had to set that thing down just so,

yet as it started to spin, it stood up.

So the element that we shot for John, he just used as a reference.

I shot these. David doing his own descender.

We dropped him out of the grids on stage 11, I believe.

We had him up 36 feet in the air on a wire

and dropped him backwards. He was a real trooper, cos there was no fall pads.

He was in a descender, which has got a brake.

It stops him just before he hits the floor.

This was shot up on Kanan Road in Malibu.

I don't know what state we're supposed to be in here. I think Georgia somewhere.

The girls are being towed here on an insert car. They're not driving at all.

They can't touch the wheel because if they turn the wheel, it'|| cross up the car.

And the whole crew is on the insert car.

I've got video monitors so I can see what the cameras are seeing.

The cinematographers are on there, the script supervisor, camera assistants.

We're all riding on the back of a wide open pick-up truck type thing.

This was shot with one camera.

We did overs and singles. You couldn't put two cameras side by side.

But often with a scene like this we'll go, say, over Scully to Monica Reyes,

which would be a raking two-shot,

and we might put a B camera on the hood and get a single of Monica at the same time.

This scene, however,

wasn't shot that way.

This is the kind of shot I like to do. I don't like to shoot masters.

I'd rather give the audience a geography shot,

which will do some pass-offs and hand-offs like that.

We racked from Skinner to Doggett and panned to Mulder,

which tells the audience where everybody is without doing a shot like this, a master.

Krycek's been trying to tell them all along about these supersoldiers.

He holds all the cards in this scene.

Agent Crane, who's actually a supersoldier. At this point we don't know that.

This is at Fox on stage five. This is Skinner's office.

There's Knowle Rohrer. Also a supersoldier.

This was shot at the old Paramount ranch.

This was originally written to be a farmhouse.

The girls were gonna drive to a farmhouse.

We were gonna play all of this sequence in one house.

I went to Chris and said "I'd really rather play this in an environment."

"There's so much work to be done here."

I said "There's an old Western town at the Paramount ranch."

He said "A Western town? How are we gonna justify that for the story?"

Sure enough, we call it Rock something.

I don't remember what we called the name of the town.

We just called it an abandoned ghost town.

It had a natural spring and the spring went dry. That's how we justified this.

But at least I had an opportunity to play in

an environment which spread my scenes out,

so that it's much scarier than just in one house, one farm.

And I love the way this photographed. We used a real...

Not steel blue. I can't remember. Billy Roe would know.

But there's a very unusual kind of a white blue

that almost makes these buildings in the background photograph black and white.

All the detail here on the set. All the spider webs that the effects department blew in.

She's very, very good at cleaning, which you'll come to see here.

Before she was an FBI agent she worked for Molly Maids, I think.

She's gonna go outside and have a cigarette.

There she goes, sneaking a smoke.

That star has great significance.

I don't know if anybody picked up on this when they first saw this episode

but that would be akin to the Star of Bethlehem.

This is the first time Doggett gets the information about the supersoldiers

and the secret government project to build a supersoldier.

And, of course, it's all a lie coming from Knowle Rohrer

because he in fact is a supersoldier.

I miss working with the Syndicate. They were great, great guys.

The actors themselves were wonderful.

I miss John Neville, and the scenes with Bill Davis and John Neville.

And we had an actor - Don. I can't think of Don's last name, but a big gentleman.

The Syndicate office was always such a rich environment.

Rob Bowman and I decided that... Actually Rob set the style for the Syndicate.

Big faces in the foreground and then shadowy figures in the background.

It was a real style choice and it worked well for all of those guys.

It made them all look very powerful.

Because they were so mysterious, you really never got a good look at 'em.

They were a sinister bunch.

When we moved the show from Vancouver

to LA, the Syndicate took on a different look.

We shot with them only a couple times but never

could capture the great character faces

that we had in Vancouver here in LA.

Krycek here sets up Skinner pretty bad.

He's gonna leave him for Billy Miles.

This was a very tough stunt that's coming up here.

We got Mitch in the elevator

and this was a steel arm that comes through and just misses Mitch's head.

It looked like it hit him, but it was solid steel.

If Mitch would have leaned to his left two inches, he could have been killed.

That was a very difficult stunt right there.

There was a great bit ofjoking, the day we shot that scene,

about the feminine napkin that Skinner was wearing on his forehead.

He took a lot of razzing.

I always marvel when I look at these episodes.

Here we have David Duchovny with stitches.

If we played an episode where we collectively saw the scars

of all of their wounds over the nine years,

these guys would look like the elephant man.

They sure heal good, don't they?

Robert's got a great face for the camera.

The camera loves photographing Robert and Gillian.

You can't put the wrong lens in their face.

Here we go. The house-cleaning scene.

You have to have a proper place to have a baby, now, don't you?

And this is the whale-song scene.

Annabeth now is gonna sing whale songs.

She suffered a lot of razzing doing this too.

I told her if acting doesn't work out,

she could always get work as a marine biologist.

We got a tape of

whale songs and we gave it to Annabeth and she thought we were crazy.

And I said "No, coming up in the next episode, you have to do some whale songs."

So she took the tape home and listened to it, and she was a trooper.

She really did do her best to recreate the sounds of a whale.

It was embarrassing for her cos she was standing in front of the whole crew,

sounding like a fool or making a fool of herself.

But that's what acting's all about, I guess.

Annabeth hadn't worked much with guns before this television series.

We actually got her with a retired LAPD guns expert.

He took her out to the range where she fired live ammunition,

so she knew what it was like.

She didn't know how to hold a gun.

When she was firing blanks, she'd squint and flinch.

So we had to give her special gun training.

This was shot with a ten-millimeter lens, this crane shot coming up.

Right here.

Bang. That car missed the lens by about six inches. That's a ten-millimeter lens.

And the stunt girl stepped out of the way at the last second.

We armed out of the sky and into the grill.

But that car was tied off. It was what we call a dead man.

It had a cable going from the rear axle to a gravel truck parked up around the corner,

and some chivs so it could only go so far,

but it kept stretching that cable and l was praying we didn't hit that lens

cos it would have cost probably $60,000 had we hit the camera.

At least.

This is the perfect scene that redefines the words "Trust no one".

This woman is actually an alien.

You just don't know who to trust on The X-Files.

This is the underground garage of the FBI headquarters, shot in Century City,

right across the street from the studio here at Fox.

And this is an interesting story because the entire end of this movie was my idea.

It was originally written as a foot chase inside the hallways of the FBI

between Knowle Rohrer and Agent Crane and Agent Doggett and AD Skinner.

And when I read it, I said "Guys, this is a little Keystone Kops."

I said "Why don't we do a big car chase?"

And Chris liked the idea and we worked together

on designing what you'll eventually see at the end is,

I think, a pretty spectacular car chase

and some pretty spectacular stunt work done by the actors themselves

and some great special effects explosions.

It was more exciting to intercut with the birth of the baby

than a foot chase down halls and staircases.

This show really was a work in progress.

As we were shooting it, we were still writing it.

It was actually very exciting because it was really working from the hip.

I think Chris and l were working together to make it as good as we could make it

and just continuously work on it while we were shooting it.

So there wasn't a lot of prep time, but I think we

came up with the best product possible.

This was David's swan song with the show. This was his last episode.

He had only done I think six episodes in season eight.

This was his last one and he wasn't coming back.

At the end I'll tell an interesting story about David and Gillian's last kiss.

We've got a real tough stunt coming up called a ratchet.

The stunt girl - her name is Laura Albert - right there.

And she's literally on a cable that's pulled pneumatically

and she's flying probably about 30 miles an hour.

Originally she was gonna hit the wall of that barn and I couldn't let her do it.

She was travelling too fast. So I had her hit some fall pads.

If you'll notice, I cut out of Laura flying to Annabeth hitting the wall.

Annabeth came from behind camera

and just threw herself into the wall with some back pads on and then slid down.

But it was Annabeth who was sold out. It was a painful little thing to do.

And this was not easy.

We drug this poor guy over and over and over again and the girls were getting tired.

To get a shot like this, over a guy laying on the ground up to Annabeth,

we actually put him on apple boxes and a half a sheet of plywood

and elevate him up off the ground,

and then use what we call a prism, which is a 45-degree mirror,

that we can get underneath his head.

But he's actually a foot off the ground and when Annabeth kneels down to him,

you can't tell the difference that he's a foot off the ground and she isn't.

I don't know why that is, but thank God it works.

There's a lot of cool stuff in this episode.

The killing of Krycek is one of the best scenes

l have seen in a long time on television.

This was shot downtown.

That staircase was shot downtown the day that we did the rooftop.

A 360-degree come-around with a Steadicam.

We lit the whole set.

This is back on stage five. This is the FBI hallways.

This is Doggett. He's eavesdropping here on a

late-night meeting between Agent Crane

and for those of you that don't know who he's been talking to,

he's been talking to Deputy Director Kersh, who's part of this as well.

Or so we're led to believe in this episode.

This was all shot in the same hallway.

We just changed the set dressing around so you think you're in different hallways.

We've got a gag coming up here

where this piece of glass next to David is going to explode.

We actually broke the glass but there's a piece of Lexan

between David and the real glass that protects him from the real flying glass

and then we had a mortar inside with rubber glass that we blow on him.

So it's a two-part effect.

This is one of my favorite scenes I've ever directed, the killing of Krycek.

Nick Lea is such a great actor and he and David work really well together.

And ljust love the way they played this scene.

Mark Snow, he adds so many wonderful layers to an episode of The X-Files.

I don't have any input.

Mark is a man who understands not only the series

but he understands the film and storytelling

and he can do things with his music that make an hour of my film

ten times better.

He brings the finishing magic to an hour of television.

He's a very talented man. The show would be nothing without him.

He does his music at his home.

It's all electronic.

This was my idea, to kill Alex with a CGI bullet.

It was an important moment.

We're taking out one of our main and most notable villains here

and I wanted to set it aside from just shooting a man in the head.

So we went ahead and spent the money and CGl'd this bullet

tracking toward camera.

It was an expensive shot but one that was well worth it.

I think of this as a very impactful moment.

Right here.

I love the way Mulder walks away from him here.

Oh, well, Krycek's dead. Moving along. Moving right along.

ljoked around with Gillian a lot during this whole pregnancy arc.

I'd say to her "OK, Gillian, in this scene you're pregnant."

(laughs)

She has a great laugh.

Now the fun begins.

This portion of this was shot on the stage.

They're gonna run into a door.

Now watch. He's got a gun in his hand, and he enters the staircase.

Watch what happens on the staircase. Doggett has no gun in his hand.

This was shot downtown. No gun.

There's Crane. Now he's head off at the pass.

And he'll come back out and he's got his gun.

Watch. You'll see it in his hand. There it is.

Just a little bit of a continuity mistake.

But you never would have seen it unless I told you it was there.

This shot you're about to see

when Annabeth throws the water in the ranger's face.

That water actually hits the lens, but you don't see it cos we use a spray deflector.

It's a wheel spinning in front of the lens

at I don't know how many revolutions per minute,

and it keeps the water from hitting the lens.

You can't tell that she's just thrown the water right in the lens.

One of Cheri Medcalf's amazing make-ups.

And now Monica is having a really bad day cos Billy Miles is not dead.

No sense playing with that shotgun any more, huh, Monica?

This is shot again in Century City.

There's a car hit about to come up and you'll notice the cement over the car is very low,

and the stunt man had to get up on top of the car.

See how low that cement is? He had to get up on top there without us killing him.

And that stunt man actually landed on top of that car.

We hit him at about 12 miles an hour.

Again, this is the same gag.

That's real glass that we break at Robert but he's protected by Lexan,

and we blow a charge of rubber glass on him

at the same time the other window breaks.

This was a very difficult scene for Gillian and Annabeth, for all of us.

This is actually the actor.

He's tied onto the car and he's doing about 40, 45 miles an hour.

This was shot off an insert car. We're doing probably 45 miles an hour.

And this, of course, is a dummy.

Ooh!

That has to hurt.

This explosion was shotjust as the sun was coming up outside. We barely got that off.

The sky's lighter. We shot in that garage for four days.

It was tough because we were breathing carbon monoxide constantly.

These people are all aliens, or supersoldiers, if you will.

They're all human replacements watching the birth of Scully's baby.

For this shot I had a crane clear up in the air

and I actually brought the chopper over the crane and then armed down with it.

That helicopter couldn't touch down on the ground,

so that's why it hovered and the stunt man crawled out of it.

lt's hovering. It's not touching the ground.

The state parks in California will not let a helicopter land on their soil,

but we could hover like that.

As long as it didn't touch down we were OK, but it could hover.

Kind of a strange law.

This scene is actually the birth of season nine.

This is the birth of the new series without David Duchovny.

And I tried to set it up with a real nice two-shot of Annabeth and Robert

who at the time we felt were gonna be

carrying the flame here for us in season nine,

which they did.

But it's a real series launching two-shot at the end of the scene here.

Here it is. This is the new series shot right here.

I don't know how many fans notice this when they watch this show,

but if you think of the three wise men, there they are.

Come to bear gifts.

This is the scene the fans waited eight years for.

This baby right here belongs to one of our co-executive producers, at the time,

our executive producer now, John Shiban.

This is his brand-new baby. His name is Jerry.

Only a few days old and John Shiban's already got his son working for a living.

Got his own trailer now.

Probably have his own series in another year.

It was interesting because we established Jerry as William Mulder here in this scene.

And when we came back for season nine

Jerry was a monster so we couldn't use him.

So we had to cast children, new babies that looked like Jerry.

Try doing that.

It's not true - all babies don't look alike.

This was David and Gillian's last scene together

and we shot it on the last day of the picture.

And as they come together to kiss, you'll see the camera will pull out the door.

That was the last shot with David and Gillian together.

And we wrapped and David and Gillian stood in that room together alone

They didn't talk or move. Theyjust held each other.

Little tears running down their faces.

It was a very touching moment, one I'll never forget.

I think we got the kiss in one take.

Thank you.

(child) I made this!