The X-Rated Files? Duchovny and Company Talks to TVGuide

“Even my wife [Tia Leoni] doesn’t know anything about the story,” says David Duchovny to TV Guide while on the Vancouver set of The X Files: I Want To Believe, which opens on July 25^thin movie theaters. “When she sees the movie she’ll be completely surprised.” He pauses, “Well, she does know one very important thing I can’t talk about, which nobody should know.”

For Duchovny, the initial script reading with co-star Gillian Anderson was more sentimental than our actual reunion.

“I realized that Gillian and I have changed over the years, but when you start reading these people, they haven’t. They are the same and they feel the same way about each other.”

What way is that exactly?

Duchovny grins. “There’s definitely some skin in this movie,” he reveals. “And not all of it is being flayed or ripped apart. There’s some Gillian skin, and some of mine. Maybe that’s the movie’s Big Secret. Maybe this time around, it’ll be more like The X-Rated Files.”

Everything seems so relaxed on the set, its easy to forget that this whole production of a movie is basically a covert operation.

Producer-director-writer Chris Carter explains to TV Guide, “We are using any tactic we can to keep things quiet. Nobody has been killed in the making of this movie. Yet.”

The tactics include requiring all but the two lead actors to turn in their scripts at the end of each day and allowing only a handful of crew members to read those pages (and even they had to do it in a room with video cameras on them).

“There was a day I thought I lost my script,” recalls Duchovny. “I thought, I’ve ruined it for everybody.”

The story is set in winter 2008, so its happening in real time, picking up with Mulder and Scully six years after we last saw them.

Gillian Anderson never doubted that Mulder and Scully would return for their second feature film, but those first few days at work felt unbelievably familiar and freakishly foreign, she tells TV Guide. “I had the worst first and second day. But I realized I’ve spent such a long time since the show trying not to do anything that resembled Scully.”

In the end, it took just a few minutes alongside her partner in crime fighting to bring Scully back. She and Duchovny stayed in touch via e-mail since the series ended. She recalls their first chance to catch up in person.

“It was the first time I’d seen David in ages,” she says. “It’s emotional. We have a lot of history. I spent more time with David than I have with most of my friends and some family members.”

“The emotional story of Mulder and Scully is really the heart of the movie,” says producer-writer Frank Spotnitz. “Its about their love story.”

Read more about “The X-Files” movie and get up-to-date on everything SciFi in the new issue of TV Guide, on newstands this Thursday.

Photo and story courtesy of TVGuide.