Rob Bowman Interview

The X-Files film's director, Rob Bowman, has helmed 25 X-Files episodes since season one, including the classic mytharc episode End Game, and fifth season's Kill Switch and Pine Bluff Variant. In the series' second season, Bowman signed on as a producer for the show as well. Bowman will retain his producer status for the sixth season, and will be directing more episodes in the coming year.

Q: How was filming The X-Files movie different from shooting an episode for television?
RB: Originally I wanted to take the essence of what we did on the TV show and just put it on the big screen. [But] there are requirements for those two mediums that innately mean you do different things for television than you do for features. Obvious ones are the size of the image. You cannot shoot 43 minutes of close-ups or two hours of close-ups and expect to get away with it. The image size goes a lot further on a big screen. The pacing of the editing can be slower. Also, when you make a cut, it's not your little box that changes--the whole wall jumps. Cuts have more impact, and now you have to be judicious, even more so than we are on the TV show.

Your locations become very, very important because they're gargantuan now, and you get a lot more miles out of them. With the characterizations, you just take what we built, put it up on screen and try to make it look like movie stars. Make them fill in the screen. As for the story, you shoot a television show to tell a story. I didn't think we needed to do anything to [change] that, we just had to make it a longer story, with more interweaving elements than we're used to seeing. And that's mostly because we have more time [in the film]. There's so much more power in a movie, just because of the size and the sound of it.

Q: What are some of the scenes that were cut from the film?
RB: We don't go too far with Samantha. That was actually in the movie and we cut it because there is no visual dramatization of the Samantha story line. There's a lot of information in the movie and--like the TV show--you've got to pay attention. At one point it became too great a burden for the audience to take everything in and figure out what it means. It was actually a more fan-specific movie than it is now because we had started talking about things where, if you didn't intimately know the series, you would not know what the heck was being talked about. You've got to make [the movie] acceptable to more than just a TV audience. So, we trimmed some things out. Samantha was a painful cut, because I think people were waiting to hear that. But [it was made] on the promise that we will go further with it on down the road. And the movie you see is not that different without it.

"We all knew we were doing something that the audience has been waiting for years."

Q: How did you approach Mulder and Scully's emotional hallway scene and the near-kiss?
RB: We all knew we were doing something that the audience has been waiting for years. And I think we knew how to address it, but until you do it a few times, you don't know how it's going to come out. And the most important part is the building of that scene, the step by step, emotional ladder that I've got to get to so that you believe that when they're about to kiss, that they're there emotionally, the connection is true.

Q: Can you discuss the big special effects scene at the end of the film, in which Mulder and Scully escape to safety?
RB: Every centimeter of that frame is made. I shot that sequence in August, and I'm still working on it today [just one week prior to the premiere]. That sequence is 99 percent synthetic. Mulder and Scully crawl back up onto the ice, after they've come out of the space ship. We actually had a stage built with a huge snow platform with wind machines and snow. All of the shots of the ice station falling and whatnot are either a miniature with a photograph of the glacier or a composite with miniature steam effects.


Q: What was the film's budget, and what were the constraints that were called for by that budget?
RB: It started out at $35, went to $39, went to $42, bumped up, bumped up to $65, probably closer to $70 million. There used to be sequences in this movie that were incredible, but we couldn't shoot them and had to take them out. It seemed like the prep was full of obstacles, pot-holes and landmines between the studio wanting to make sure the money ws spent right and us wanting to make sure the script was right. I storyboarded the ice sequence eight times, because every shot had to be pre-thought, pre-edited. I usually like to go into a sequence and shoot various angles of coverage and then decide the sequence later, because you've got options. There were no options here. Every shot is $50-, $80-, maybe $100,000 dollars, so I can't have any extra shots.

Q: Given your reduced prep time, did it help that your actors were already familiar with your directing style?
RB: When you're doing budget work, you're not doing prep work. So my time to prep the actors' scenes--sitting and talking about characterizations, which is very important in the X-Files--was taken away. Luckily, we got away with under-prepping the actor scenes. I had a 57 day window with David and Gillian, and I wasn't that prepped on David and Gillian's scenes when I started shooting. For all of their scenes, I had to do it at home the night before and just go on my shorthand. This was a great advantage, though, because I would do a take, say cut, and they would look at me and just with a look they knew exactly what I wanted and would say, 'let's go again.' Boom.

Q: Were there ever any times that you Chris did not see eye-to-eye?
RB: Absolutely. I mean, it's a creative endeavor and Chris has an intensely visual mind. His scripts have a lot more camera direction than a lot of writers write. I don't find that offensive because I like the way he designs shots. He designs shots that I would like to see. I think my "marriage" with Chris started off on the right foot because we see things similarly--lens choice, how to be restrained, all of that stuff. We'll have other problems, but these won't be among them, and that's how to shoot the show.

Q: The look in the film is a bit different from the moody atmosphere of Vancouver.
RB: The look of the piece is dictated by the needs of the script. And this script is not a rainy night, wet, dank, sub-hopeful adventure into the unknown. I think Chris just wanted to do things that he couldn't do on the TV show, which is shoot day exteriors. It certainly was harder because a day exterior in the Mojave desert is about as hot a light as you can get and about as far from Vancouver as there is. But it can't all of a sudden look like another show. I had to make it look like The X-Files.

Q: Do you see The X-Files' future being on the big screen?
RB: Eventually the TV show is going to run out, but hopefully you've got 12 years of movies. Who knows.