When The X-Files: I Want to Believe hit movie theaters in July 2008, director-writer-producer Chris Carter poked fun at then-President George W. Bush by having ex-FBI Special Agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) glance skeptically at Dubya’s portrait as the show’s theme song played. Notably, the moment doesn’t make Carter’s director’s cut, released Friday on Disney+ and Hulu under the new title The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn. Why?
“It felt dated to me,” he tells Gold Derby in an exclusive interview. “That’s many presidencies ago.”
Nowadays, Carter continues, Bush is “only referred to by what he said at [Donald] Trump’s first inauguration, which is, ‘That was some weird s–t.'” He shrugs, “Otherwise, we don’t know much about him except that he’s painting pictures. He certainly isn’t relevant in the way he was to this new cut.”
Watch the original scene:
The 2008 film’s 104-minute running time has been trimmed to a tighter, spookier, 98-minutes. And Bush isn’t the only thing to get axed in the director’s cut. Carter confirms what Mulder-Scully shippers will notice immediately: their romance has been put on the back-burner.
“I went light on the Mulder and Scully relationship,” he explains. “People know they’ve slept together. Scully’s pregnant at the end of Season 11. So, I didn’t think I needed to monkey around with that.” Avid fans of the TV show know they had a child, William, in Season 8, who later appeared in Fox’s revived Seasons 10 and 11.
Because the restoration focuses more on the “scary” Frankenstein story that Carter always wanted to tell, he made the main characters’ love story “kind of secondary.” Scully is, however, still shown in bed with a shirtless Mulder in one scene. And their collective drive to make sure they each “don’t give up” fits the movie’s overall theme.
By centering the project on criminal dismemberment and appending Vrach Frankenshteyn to the title, “the entry into the movie is cleaner and more relevant when Father Joe [Billy Connolly] finds that arm in the snow,” Carter notes. “If you know it’s a Frankenstein story, that makes much more sense to you than if you didn’t know that.”
Carter says Mulder and Scully were created in 1993 to have a “Holmes and Watson relationship,” and he was inspired by the 1979 film Murder by Decree. “That was a movie that I loved growing up, and I probably saw it when I was 18,” he recalls. “It was a Sherlock Holmes movie about Jack the Ripper, and I loved it.”
That’s why Carter has no hard feelings for modern-day shows like Lost and Widow’s Bay that seem to have The X-Files in their DNA. “Well, I drew on shows,” he readily admits. “I drew on Murder by Decree and I drew on Kolchak: The Night Stalker and I drew on Twilight Zone and I drew on Outer Limits and I drew on Night Gallery. So, everyone draws on something.”
But still, he’s “appreciative” whenever he gets a shout-out. “I don’t think anybody’s ripping us off, even though [Lost showrunner] Damon Lindelof told me that, in fact, they were, when I saw him once at a film festival,” Carter chuckles. “Everyone has the anxiety of influence. You can’t help but be influenced by things.”
David Fincher’s Mindhunter gave fans of The X-Files some major déjà vu in the late-2010s, and Carter feels the same way. “My wife and I were just watching it, and we loved that series. We’ve watched it twice now,” he tells us. “The behavioral profilers are both in the basement, and I can’t remember if John E. Douglas, who wrote the original Mindhunter book, had his characters in a basement. Because I read that book, that may have been where the Mulder and Scully basement came from, but I wonder if it’s the other way around. I can’t remember!”
The TV show’s main villain, the Cigarette-Smoking Man, played by William B. Davis, was not in the original film version of I Want to Believe, so he doesn’t appear in the Vrach Frankenshteyn reimagining. Carter is finally ready to explains why:
“I wanted to do it as a stand-alone story. He’s really more involved in the mythology, keeping the government’s above-top-level secrets. We had what looked like killed him off in the series finale in 2002. Revisiting that with him would’ve put weight on the wrong foot, and so we didn’t. But we leaned heavily into his character and his story in the Season 10 and Season 11 reboots.”
Speaking of reboots, Carter has thoughts on Ryan Coogler’s take on The X-Files: read what he told Gold Derby about the Sinners director’s highly anticipated upcoming project.
