‘The X-Files’: Chris Carter on Bringing Back the Landmark Sci-Fi Show
The first thing visitors notice upon entering the sun-drenched four-story Santa Monica office of X-Files creator Chris Carter is the artwork on the walls. Massive, imposing canvases and decorated surfboards loom overhead, each emblazoned with a unique phrase: Bullshit ain’t fertilizer. Rotten on the inside. God’s gift to women.
Ask Carter what those phrases mean, and he will tell you that they are about bad experiences he’s had – with sociopathic people, with the destructive force of nature, with 40 acres of farmland he bought. And so this golden temple of creativity is secretly a shrine to the dark side. This is the world of Chris Carter.
“I guess I’m looking for relevance again,” he explains when asked why he chose to immortalize bad memories as his art and office decor.
Relevance? It’s an oddly appropriate word to use for someone who hasn’t had a new series on television in nearly 14 years. This month, however, Carter is finally returning to Fox with a six-episode reprise of The X-Files. “It’s about looking for a personal relevance, a foggy window into me,” he elaborates.
At the height of his productivity in the late Nineties, he was running two network TV shows – The X-Files and Millennium – in addition to writing an X-Files movie. Not long before the series’ final episode, Carter decided that he needed a break.
“After 9/11, everything changed overnight,” he recalls, sitting at the large rectangular table in his office where he normally writes. A weathered, rubber-band-encircled Tiffany box rests atop, stuffed with thank-you notes he’s writing to the people who worked on the new episodes. A Murphy bed is pushed into the wall across from him, with two corkboards for storyboarding affixed to its bottom.
“All of a sudden, talk of government conspiracies wasn’t so interesting anymore,” Carter continues. “People were looking to the government to help them. And they were too scared of real-world things to be scared by a television show. It felt like a huge downbeat in the country and … reality TV started taking all the best time slots. So it seemed like a good time to bow out gracefully.”
When the series ended, Carter, as he puts it, “dropped out” of the TV business for 10 years. “I needed to get out of small dark rooms looking at small screens,” he says, blinking through piercing pale-blue eyes. “I just needed to live my life.” So he parted ways with an industry he compares to a train: “When you hop off of it, it just takes off without you.”
A row of framed pictures on a shelf in Carter’s office documents the result of this sabbatical. One shows him in a single-engine plane on his first solo flight; in another, he’s surfing a monster wave; in the adjacent frame, he’s heli-skiing; then he’s climbing a mountain. Carter, who began his career as an editor at Surfing magazine, didn’t really rest, it seems. He just found intensity outdoors instead of indoors.
“I hadn’t imagined that we would have a second run. There’s a bit of ‘been there, done that,’ but it’s got a whole new context, both politically and scientifically.”
To fill his remaining time, Carter accepted a fellowship at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at University of California-Santa Barbara.
When he noticed that television was having a renaissance in the form of shorter-run shows on cable with far fewer restrictions on language and imagery – many of them created by former members of his writing room, such as Breaking Bad’s Vince Gilligan – his enthusiasm for TV rekindled.