The X-Files 7x21

1. Hi, this is Vince Gilligan, executive producer of The X-Files,

2. and you are watching "Je Souhaite", my directorial debut,

3. my first episode directed for the show.

4. "Je souhaite" in French means "I wish", or so they tell me. I don't speak French myself.

5. But this show is one that I wrote and directed,

6. the first one I ever got the privilege to direct,

7. and I was nervous as hell going into this.

8. I directed stuff in college and directed short films as a teenager,

9. but this was the first time I had 300 people, all my responsibility.

10. And it was pretty nerve-racking,

11. but I was very lucky to get to do it.

12. The story came about, as most do, in a very sort of roundabout way.

13. I had an idea originally about a self-storage place, which is what you're seeing here.

14. This one, in fact, I think was shot down in Carson, an area just south of Los Angeles.

15. And the original idea was,

16. I had this weird image of this long-locked-up self-storage locker,

17. and it gets cut open and rolled up

18. and the person looking into it finds a person standing inside

19. someone wide awake and just sort of standing there.

20. And the original version, that original idea, was not in any way comedic.

21. It was gonna be something... I can't remember. Something weird.

22. It was gonna be somebody'd built some sort of android or robot.

23. That's what the person standing there would have been.

24. Then that went by the wayside cos I didn't feel an android seemed like X-Files.

25. It seemed more to me like Star Trek or something.

26. And then I had some even weirder idea

27. where inside the storage facility there was this... like a black hole or something,

28. some weird kind of maelstrom

29. that separated our world from some other world.

30. And I had this weird image in my head of human teeth falling through it.

31. That gives you an insight into how we come up with these things,

32. cos where the hell did human teeth come from?

33. I didn't know what to do with that, so with the help of Frank Spotnitz and John Shiban,

34. some of these ideas I had wound up being what you see here,

35. and wound up being comedic.

36. The idea of a genie rolled up in a rug

37. came later than these other ideas just mentioned.

38. But that's sort of the roundabout way we come up with these things.

39. This actor, Paul Hayes... a real trouper.

40. Coming up here you'll see why.

41. We put a little makeup on him to make it look like he had no mouth.

42. Our makeup guys did a really great job with this.

43. I think it took a couple of hours to do this makeup effect on him, during which time

44. he couldn't open his mouth, and luckily he breathed well out of his nose.

45. That would have been problematic if he couldn't do that.

46. Here's the title sequence, which I also directed.

47. No, I'm just kidding. That's not true. I didn't do this, obviously.

48. The episode is set in Missouri.

49. That was the teaser you just saw, in Creve Coeur, Missouri.

50. I'm not sure why, except that I knew at this point we'd set a lot of episodes in California.

51. Because of course, at this point, season seven,

52. we were shooting the series in Southern California,

53. here in the beautiful city of Los Angeles.

54. And it just seemed like we should mix it up a bit,

55. so I thought Missouri would be a good place to set something.

56. I loved Gillian Anderson's reaction, by the way, in that bit with the mouth.

57. That mouth was so nauseating to look at.

58. Again, Paul Hayes put up with a long makeup ordeal to get into that.

59. And Gillian's reaction when she first sees that mouth was...

60. I got a chuckle out of it on the set.

61. So this was my first opportunity directing David and Gillian, of course,

62. being my first episode as director, and it was a real treat.

63. They're both troupers and they both are excellent actors,

64. and I'm very fortunate not only that I got to direct,

65. but that I got to direct an episode before David left the show,

66. because he was a lot of fun to work with.

67. It goes without saying that David and Gillian

68. know their characters better than any other people,

69. having played them for nine years - seven when this episode was made.

70. So they were a dream to direct as well

71. because they don't need to be told how to play their characters.

72. They know full well how to do that.

73. So now we're in a real mobile home park.

74. This was shot in Carson, which is a little suburb south of Los Angeles,

75. maybe about 35, 40 miles south of LA.

76. I have to say the people in this mobile home park were so nice.

77. The actual residents of the place were really a sweet bunch of people,

78. and they would come out to watch us shoot.

79. They particularly came out in droves the day we blew up the trailer,

80. which is a scene coming up later in the episode.

81. Here you see how grey and cloudy it looks.

82. I think it was actually raining on and off that day, and we had to stop a little for the rain.

83. The thing about rain, though, is that it doesn't actually read on film,

84. so it might have been sprinkling.

85. You can't tell, because unless you light rain, specifically backlight it, you won't see it.

86. Now we're on stage. The magic of film, huh?

87. It looks like we're in a trailer, but that inside stuff is on a sound stage

88. at the Fox lot, in Los Angeles.

89. And this shot's on location, this shot's on a stage.

90. I'm always surprised. I mean, even having directed this, you know, it's easy to forget

91. that these are two different physical locations, one indoors and one outdoors,

92. and we're bridging them together, just cutting back and forth between 'em.

93. This actor I was so happy to get to work with.

94. His name is Will Sasso, the guy in the motorised scooter,

95. and you'll probably recognise him if you watch the TV show MAD TV on Fox.

96. He has been on it for several years now, four or five years.

97. Very funny guy, as is everybody on that show.

98. We wound up reading just about every cast member,

99. current and former, from the TV show MAD TV,

100. cos I'm a big fan of it, and we read a bunch of folks from it - everybody was great.

101. But Will in particular was a guy I had in mind for this part.

102. lwrote the part with him in mind, and luckily he was available.

103. His schedule permitted him to do this role, and he was funny as hell.

104. just enjoyed working with him.

105. And I think David and Gillian liked him a lot, too.

106. And that was Paula Sorge you just saw, briefly, the genie in our episode.

107. I can't say enough good things about her.

108. She was wonderful to work with.

109. To be honest, I wrote the part for Janeane Garofalo.

110. I had her in mind. I thought "Gee, maybe we can get her."

111. And it turns out she was unavailable. She was locked up doing some HBO stuff.

112. And as wonderful as Janeane is,

113. I am very fortunate to have been able to work with Paula Sorge.

114. Paula was a pleasure to work with. Everybody was.

115. I sound like I'm just blowing smoke here,

116. but this was a wonderful experience

117. because everybody made it easy - all the actors.

118. Kevin Weisman, who you also saw in that previous scene, plays the part of Anson.

119. He's the other brother. He and Leslie, the two brothers.

120. Everybody was a lot of fun to work with.

121. So now we're back in... This is, again, location work.

122. We actually shut down this U-Store-It place.

123. It's really neat to work on a show with as big a reputation as The X-Files,

124. because everyone sort of knows when you come in what the show is,

125. and most of them are fans or at least friendly

126. toward the idea of you shooting there.

127. And this was a working operation

128. that closed down for us, which was nice.

129. That boat, by the way, was a big hassle to get loaded into that trailer park,

130. the boat outside.

131. It was a big deal to get that trucked in,

132. and we had to shift a few trailers around and sort of shoehorn it in there.

133. Check out the remote control, by the way, that Paula's holding in her hand.

134. It's a girl in a bikini kind of a thing.

135. I was surprised our broadcast standards people let us get it on the air.

136. It's a little bit... Kind of thing you pick up at Spencer Gifts, I guess.

137. A little risque, but I don't guess they noticed.

138. Directing-wise this was a tricky scene for me, being a neophyte,

139. because this is, again, on the sound stage of the Fox lot.

140. This is not an actual trailer interior,

141. but it is about the size of a real mobile home,

142. maybe a little wider - we fudged a few feet here and there.

143. We raised the ceiling a bit, and we made it a bit wider than a single wide mobile home.

144. But it was tight inside, and this scene,

145. with three characters talking for a prolonged period,

146. logistically was a bit tricky

147. because when you shoot a scene like this, you want coverage,

148. which is to say you want different shot sizes

149. and compositions on each actor in the scene.

150. And so a scene like this with three people, it probably...

151. It probably took three, four hours to shoot this scene.

152. It probably took a good half a day

153. and wound up being a bunch of angles on every actor.

154. It wound up being four or five different shots on each actor,

155. so four times three... 12, plus a master.

156. It was probably 13, 14 setups, individual camera positions.

157. There's also something in directing I don't want to get into, delve into too deeply,

158. called "the line", which is...

159. For instance, in this shot Kevin is looking basically screen right.

160. Everyone else is looking screen left to him,

161. except now, just then, he crossed the line. I'm confusing myself trying to explain this!

162. You want everybody looking in a consistent direction.

163. Now they're looking left, he's looking right.

164. if suddenly you were to pop on the other side

165. of the line dividing Kevin from Paula and Will,

166. you could confuse the audience

167. cos suddenly he's looking left and they'd be looking right,

168. and a better director than I would know how to make that work.

169. But I stuck to it pretty religiously,

170. cos I didn't want to confuse myself, and least of all the audience.

171. I didn't want to confuse them, either. This was fun to shoot.

172. These guys were real troupers.

173. This shot originally was going to be a very fancy, very expensive special effect

174. with Kevin fading away and his clothes still being on him

175. walking around a lathe Invisible Man, his empty clothes walking around

176. still on his invisible body.

177. We learned pretty quickly that would be exorbitantly expensive and hard to shoot,

178. so I went back in and changed the script and made him get naked.

179. We changed the line so he says "Wait. Are my clothes going to go invisible too?"

180. It worked out better. It's one of those nice moments

181. where it's better not to shoot what you originally had planned,

182. that what you change for logistics

183. and to save money actually makes for a better story.

184. So I'm glad that worked out the way it did.

185. I think we shot here with a 10mm lens,

186. stuck way up in the corner of the set, very wide.

187. This was a fun day.

188. This take here I think took something like 10 or 11 tries to get it just perfect.

189. And then this scene here...

190. I think this was about my last day of shooting.

191. Of course, we shoot out of chronological order,

192. and this was I think the last day, on the schedule of about 11 days -

193. eight days first unit, three days second.

194. This shot here was fun, coming up.

195. Boom.

196. That was done... lwish I'd made that go a little bit longer,

197. but that was done with that actual truck hitting a giant mirror.

198. We set up a mirror in the street and drove a truck through it at 50 miles an hour

199. and just obliterated this giant tempered glass mirror.

200. And there's a cut hidden, from the girl, on the other side of the street.

201. When we pan the camera to the right, there's a cut hidden in there.

202. So we panned off her and then edited

203. to panning onto this mirror with a truck just about to hit it.

204. That was fun to do. We did two takes on that,

205. did $3-4,000 worth of damage to the truck.

206. It wound up leaking radiator fluid by the time we did the second take

207. cos hitting that heavy mirror was definitely not what GM designed it for,

208. or whoever built it.

209. That's a piece of glass Scullyjust touched,

210. to make it look like she's touching the invisible guy's head.

211. You probably already figured that out.

212. But, I tell you, the old-time tricks that they've been doing since time began

213. are often the most effective and, of course, it helps to have a great actress.

214. We had one with Gillian Anderson. She did a wonderful job.

215. I think we did this in one take, and she just nailed it.

216. We had two cameras going, two or three cameras,

217. and when you have two or three cameras, what we call A and B camera,

218. you can shoot things much quicker

219. because you're getting two different shot sizes on the same performance,

220. and you know you're not gonna have a problem

221. editing from one shot to the other.

222. I think this was the A camera and then...

223. then a B... No, this is a whole different deal.

224. This was a big-deal special-effect thing.

225. The way this is done is our makeup guys cast Kevin Weisman's head in plaster,

226. and then painted it blue.

227. So what Gillian Anderson in real life was doing

228. was spreading yellow makeup dust onto a blue plaster head of Kevin Weisman.

229. And then Bill Millar, our special-effects wizard,

230. basically erased out all the blue...

231. There's probably a better technical word for it,

232. but that's essentially what he did.

233. And in place of the blue he put in Scully's coat and the background behind it

234. to make it look like he's invisible.

235. That was a very effective trick.

236. Kevin Weisman, on day two of our shooting, had to get into his makeup for the first time

237. and we ran into a snag early on that day

238. when he had an allergic reaction

239. to the yellow makeup that you see on him there.

240. That was kind of a bummer that put us back,

241. knocked us off schedule by a few hours.

242. But he was a trouper, and he wound upjust sort of cowboying up,

243. and I don't think we, at the end of the day, changed the makeup.

244. We were using pretty gentle stuff, but unfortunately he was having a reaction.

245. But he was a trouper and sort of dealt with it, which I appreciate him doing.

246. These kind of scenes you see a lot in X-Files, where there's a dead guy lying on a table,

247. and I wanted him to be completely nude - not the actor,

248. but I wanted the scene to play like he didn't have a sheet on him,

249. because often we have a sheet on top and there's nothing wrong with that.

250. But in real life, when someone is doing an autopsy, there's no sheet on the body.

251. It's just basically a nude cadaver lying there, and I wanted to stick to reality.

252. I think we had him in a pair of bicycle pants, and I placed Scully around his midsection

253. so we could frame out the "naughty bits", as Monty Python says.

254. But in these scenes it's always tough for the actor

255. to have to lie there for a long time and hold his breath.

256. And Kevin, again, was a trouper.

257. I think it's a lot harder than it seems, because these takes go on for minutes,

258. and you can't stop breathing for a minute straight,

259. so you have to breathe carefully so we can't see you breathing.

260. The "You suck" on the boat here...

261. I don't know why I put that on. just thought it'd be funny.

262. I figured the neighbours would get a bitjealous

263. of some guy suddenly having a giant yacht,

264. and maybe the neighbour kids put that on there.

265. This was a fun scene to shoot, particularly the part coming up here

266. when Agent Mulder does the Dream of Jeannie bit.

267. He does the theme song from I Dream of Jeannie.

268. That was fun to shoot.

269. The I Dream of Jeannie bit that Mulder does, that was fun to shoot. And, by the way,

270. whenever you have your actor even so much as hum a few bars from a published song,

271. in this case the Dream of Jeannie theme song, you have to pay,

272. sometimes through the nose.

273. It's a good deal for the music publishing people and the folks who wrote the song.

274. They get paid, sometimes thousands.

275. I think in this case several thousand dollars exchanged hands,

276. maybe way more than that.

277. But that's as it should be.

278. As a writer, I don't write music, I write screenplays and TV teleplays,

279. and I think it's good when someone who works their butt off

280. gets paid for what they do.

281. But it's always interesting to me how much it is just for a guy humming a few bars.

282. The T-shirt Leslie is wearing, by the way, is one of my favourite bands, Lynyrd Skynyrd.

283. He has several costume changes in the episode,

284. but in nearly every one it's a different incarnation of the Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt.

285. There's different versions.

286. I felt, character-wise, it'd be something he'd be into.

287. And I like it myself a lot.

288. Actually, I wound up keeping a bunch of the shirts, I got five or six of 'em.

289. This scene coming up here...

290. brings back somewhat sad memories for me,

291. and I'll tell you why.

292. This episode, when it was first out together, I had it to my liking,

293. and yet it was 11 minutes long, as in overlong.

294. As in The X-Files, without credits and title sequence,

295. needs to be something like 42 minutes 56 seconds long.

296. And this was... I can't do the math on the fly here.

297. 53 minutes long and change, and that can't be.

298. TV is sort of a Procrustean bed.

299. Procrustes being the old king in mythology

300. who'd strap you to a bed six feet long, and if you were too short, he'd stretch you,

301. and if you were too long, he'd lop you off at the ankles. TV is sort of like that.

302. I think it was Harlan Ellison, the science fiction writer, who first called TV that,

303. and to me it is that way, because if you're too short in an episode you gotta pad it out.

304. On The X-Files we're always long,

305. but then that's where the heartbreak comes in

306. of having to cut scenes that you like,

307. and that last one was a prime example.

308. In it, originally, Mulder showed three examples

309. of the genie being in past lives, Mussolini and Nixon,

310. and then a fun one with her standing next to old newsreel footage

311. of this guy taking a cannonball shot to the stomach, and that had to get cut.

312. A lot of little bits like that throughout this episode had to get cut.

313. My favourite one of all, and the hardest one to cut, is coming up,

314. which was a scene where Leslie here

315. winds up sitting on the couch watching TV, next to his deceased brother,

316. and watching The Dukes of Hazzard, one of my all-time favourite TV shows.

317. And that had to get cut.

318. That was the act-out that you just saw.

319. The original act-out was he makes the wish,

320. and then the dead body comes to his house

321. and they sit and watch The Dukes of Hazzard together,

322. in a very brotherly sort of a way.

323. The guy standing on the right of the frame in the bow tie and glasses is Harry Bring,

324. one of the producers on The X-Files, and a wonderful guy.

325. We call him Uncle Harry, and he is a real character.

326. He and Michelle MacLaren

327. run the production end of our show and do a great job.

328. He's a wonderful guy, and I was so glad to get to give him a little cameo in the episode.

329. The fly buzzing around that you see in this scene

330. is completely computer-animated.

331. This kitchen scene, by the way, is again on the sound stage,

332. and the way these sets are built...

333. Our wonderful production designer, Corey Kaplan,

334. and Duke Tomasick, our construction coordinator,

335. do a wonderful job designing and building them.

336. And that trailer set is built with what we call "wild walls", or "wildable walls",

337. which is to say you can yank out a wall...

338. Our grip crew can grab a wall and yank it out

339. and get it out within minutes so that we have room to get the camera in there.

340. And that last scene was a scene where we had to shoot them

341. in a fairly wide shot at the breakfast table,

342. the dead yellow brother and his brother who's just brought him back to life.

343. And I was nervous that we were wide enough... Here it is again.

344. .. wide enough that we could tell we were outside of the set,

345. because at that point we were.

346. We had pulled the wall immediately to...

347. For instance, Leslie's left shoulder, we had pulled the wall out.

348. But I guess it plays when you watch it. There was some concern when we shot it

349. that the audience would feel like we were outside of the trailer.

350. As far as coming up with these shots goes,

351. there was a little bit of storyboarding done, early on, mainly for the action scenes.

352. For scenes like the one you just saw with three people talking

353. there's sort of a... I don't wanna say a standard way,

354. but there is a time-established way of shooting them.

355. There's only so many places you can put the camera,

356. so scenes like that I didn't storyboard.

357. But other scenes with action in them, for instance what's coming up,

358. the trailer blowing up, that kind of stuff got storyboarded.

359. I had a wonderful storyboard artist who helped me visualise what was in my head

360. and wound up helping me put it into paper.

361. There's a shot coming up here I was so proud of when we shot it.

362. I don't know how well it reads on camera,

363. but I wanted to have heat going in the foreground.

364. It's a shot through the back of the stove.

365. I wanted all this ripply sort of heat haze coming up past Anson's yellow knees.

366. Here it is. You can see a bit of it there. And, man, that was hard to get right.

367. I think our special-effects guys

368. wound up burning big casserole pans full of alcohol, right underneath the lens,

369. to get that heat haze rising.

370. Here, finally, Leslie gets it.

371. Coming up here, he finally realises... Legs.

372. Ka-boom.

373. This was so much fun to be on the set for.

374. We had eight cameras going, one inside that car.

375. They had something called a false knee underneath the car,

376. a little hydraulicjoint that popped out and made the car fall,

377. to make it look like some big concussion hit the car.

378. Those were a stunt man and woman doubling for Mulder and Scully.

379. There's no way we would put our two stars of our show

380. that close to an actual explosion.

381. And I have to say, I was there on the set probably 60, 70 feet back,

382. with the special-effects guys behind a Plexiglas screen,

383. and I could feel the heat off that explosion.

384. It felt like opening up a giant pizza oven, right in your face.

385. It was pretty impressive.

386. Although oddly enough, I will say, as impressive as it was,

387. those kind of things almost always look better on film.

388. They're impressive in real life but look 10 times bigger on film,

389. especially when you shoot them in slow motion and whatnot.

390. This scene was shot on location and I was very happy we got to do that.

391. Out the window, at the top of the scene especially, behind Paula Sorge,

392. you can see the trailer park, and that's exactly where that is.

393. It was some abandoned building. I'm still not sure what it was.

394. But it was some sort of small tower, sort of two- or three-storey office building.

395. And that room we were shooting in was so tiny

396. that we shot with nothing but wide lenses, because we were jammed in like sardines.

397. Obviously it's meant to play like there's just three people in there,

398. but in reality, shooting it, it was probably about 15, 16 people,

399. jammed in so tight that I was sitting back by the monitor, watching.

400. There's a video monitor that the director gets to watch.

401. It's hooked to the lP, to the cameraman's Panavision camera,

402. and it shows exactly on a video,

403. called a video tap, what the camera operator is seeing.

404. So I'm sitting back, watching on the monitor,

405. and I either had to yell to the actors...

406. I was just around the corner in another room.

407. .. ask them to do things differently, faster, slower or whatever, or another take,

408. because I couldn't actually step over all the huddled bodies of our crew

409. to get in there to talk to people. It was that tight.

410. But very, very fun, nonetheless.

411. There's a fun sort of camaraderie that I felt.

412. I gotta say, this crew...

413. Again, it sounds like I'm blowing smoke, but the best damn crew working.

414. We had a wonderful crew in Vancouver, and now we have a wonderful crew in LA,

415. and these guys take the cake, they're just fantastic.

416. Everybody from Bill Roe, the director of photography,

417. on down just gave 110 per cent,

418. and made this directorial debut of mine such a pleasure,

419. and also made me realise from day one through day 11

420. that I knew basically nothing.

421. I say that in the sense that

422. I was always aware just how little I knew and how much I was being helped along,

423. being carried on the shoulders of all these wonderful actors and crew people

424. who knew theirjobs inside and out,

425. and feel proud of this, the job I did on this.

426. There's many things I'd like to have done differently,

427. but I realise this thing moves like a freight train or a supertanker.

428. And even if the director's not all there, you know, mentally,

429. the train moves on without him, and the shots get set up and the show goes on.

430. And it takes a strong director to stay on top of it,

431. because something will get shot one way or the other, and it'll most likely be good.

432. But when you're directing you have to sort of stay ahead of the supertanker.

433. Kim Manners does,

434. and Rob Bowman and David Nutter before them.

435. All our great directors, and I just tried to learn from them

436. and do a job I thought they would be proud of.

437. But, boy, there's a lot to know directing, and there's so much more I need to learn,

438. but this episode was a great start for me.

439. So now we're in Agent Mulder's apartment,

440. and as I recall, that aquarium shot at the top of the act

441. was one that took a bit of setting up, and I wanted to show more of it.

442. But again, this was one of the scenes, as with just about every scene...

443. 11 minutes we had to cut out of this thing, and that is a lot of time.

444. What is that? Again, I'm not a math whiz, but that's, like, one fifth of the running time,

445. between one quarter and one fifth, we had to chop off this thing.

446. And as great an experience as directing this episode was,

447. that was one of my least favourite experiences, editing it.

448. Not because I didn't have a wonderful editor helping me,

449. but just because we sat there trying to figure out, day in and day out,

450. what we could lose, and still tell the story we needed to tell.

451. Louise lnnes, my editor, really helped me there, helped make the story make sense.

452. Because there's so much we had to lose,

453. that Procrustean bed of TV has to be adhered to,

454. and we had no choice but to chop stuff right and left

455. to make it fit on between the Coca-Cola commercials and whatnot.

456. This was one of my favourite scenes of Paula's, this scene coming up.

457. I'm glad we could keep it nearly in its entirety.

458. She is so funny, and she's got a lot of charisma.

459. I haven't seen her in anything since this episode.

460. I hope she's working and doing great things, cos she deserves to.

461. She's a wonderful actress - she's funny,

462. and yet in this scene, at the tail end of the scene,

463. she... I'm sorry, it's not this scene.

464. But you'll see coming up,

465. she can turn on a dime and play nice emotion.

466. This shot, I gotta say, you don't see stuff like this on TV every day.

467. This was shot on a Sunday morning.

468. That's pretty amazing, because The X-Files shoots Monday through Friday.

469. David Duchovny and our crew,

470. and Michelle MacLaren, our coexecutive producer who runs our production,

471. were all nice enough to figure out a way to make us able to shoot this on a Sunday.

472. And this is downtown Los Angeles, and that one shot you just saw,

473. that oner, that one camera shot, cost well over $50,000 to shoot

474. because we had off-duty police officers, we had 20 or 30 production assistants,

475. all blocking off downtown LA to make it look like there was nobody down there.

476. And if you've seen Vanilla Sky since then...

477. I haven't, but I understand there's a great opening sequence

478. where it's Tom Cruise running around Times Square, with nobody in sight.

479. And my hat's off to those guys, cos I know just that one little shot we got for this show

480. was a logistical nightmare, and I can't imagine how they did that in Times Square.

481. Sunday morning, by the way, is of course the best time for downtown Los Angeles

482. because the fewest people are there at, like, 7.30 in the morning on a Sunday.

483. There's not that many people you have to ask to step out of the shot to begin with.

484. There was a little hand-off in this scene that I was sort of proud of.

485. A hand-off meaning Mulder walks in and Skinner's chair is empty,

486. and then the camera swings around and Paula's sitting in Mitch Pileggi's chair.

487. Here's another hand-off.

488. In the background of the previous shot

489. there's nobody there, and then the camera cranes up

490. and you see AD Skinner and all his staff in the background.

491. sort of wanted that to be a theme throughout the show.

492. I didn't wanna see anybody magically... There's another one. Now Paula's gone.

493. I didn't wanna see anybody magically appear or disappear on camera,

494. certainly not the genie herself. I wanted to do it with cuts

495. and make it more subtle. There's another one coming up here.

496. As I do this commentary

497. I'm putting finishing touches on the second X-File episode I've written and directed.

498. It's called "Sunshine Days",

499. and it will be the last one-hour episode of The X-Files ever.

500. As I'm recording this, we're deep into season nine,

501. what we now know to be the last season of The X-Files.

502. And "Sunshine Days" is really the last stand-alone episode,

503. and I had a great time directing it too.

504. It's funny.

505. I think just pure enjoyment-wise

506. I enjoyed directing this one, "Je Souhaite", even more,

507. mainly because I was not as aware on this one of the tightness of the schedule.

508. I was much more painfully aware

509. of how tight the shooting schedule is, this time around.

510. And I had a hard time making my days, as we say.

511. In other words, I had a hard time getting everything shot in a day on "Sunshine Days"

512. than I did on "Je Souhaite".

513. So I guess the first time is always the most fun,

514. and then it becomes a real job from there.

515. But I hope you guys like that one when you see it.

516. Probably by the time this is on DVD, you probably already will have.

517. But it's been a great run, The X-Files. It's the best job I've ever had.

518. It's been like going to film school, except getting paid to be in attendance.

519. And I feel very fortunate to have been able to direct two episodes,

520. and to have written...

521. I counted it up the other day.

522. Something like 30-some episodes have my name on 'em as a writer or cowriter.

523. It's been an honour and a privilege to work with people like Frank Spotnitz

524. and John Shiban and Kim Manners, Michelle MacLaren, Harry Bring,

525. Bill Roe - the list goes on and on. Hope I'm not leaving anybody out.

526. But of course, Chris Carter, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson,

527. not to leave out Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish,

528. who are just absolutely wonderful,

529. whom I wish could've gotten a longer run at it, because they are great folks,

530. great to work with, do a wonderful job.

531. But this has been a great job. I've learned so much, and I'll never forget it.

532. This is Mulder's big decision, this scene here,

533. where he decides to do the right thing

534. and try... to not save the world and potentially screw it up.

535. He decides to make a very simple wish instead.

536. This scene was fun to shoot.

537. I will say, though, as fun as this scene was to shoot, this was second unit.

538. We have two different crews, a first unit, main unit, and a second unit crew.

539. They're basically two completely staffed crews,

540. both run by a bunch of people who really know theirjobs inside and out.

541. But here on second unit, we had to get this scene in very short order

542. because Kim Manners, with first unit, was literally standing by...

543. It was, like, 100 people standing by with their arms folded,

544. waiting to get onto the stage we were on, Mulder's apartment.

545. They needed to shoot in Mulder's apartment that day for a whole other episode.

546. And that was a little taste of pressure

547. that was, for me, a good learning experience,

548. in that when you shoot a television show or a movie,

549. or a commercial or anything, I guess,

550. but especially TV with its supertight schedules,

551. you have to learn to get what you need to get first and foremost.

552. But you need to do it in a very timely manner,

553. and with a minimum of BS and fuss,

554. and you need to not shoot any more than you absolutely have to.

555. This is the last shot of the show.

556. This was done in Westwood Village, right around the outskirts of the UCLA campus.

557. This was in a little French bakery called Elysee.

558. And this was actually shot the first day of production.

559. And, of course, it's the last shot and, as I said, fun to do.

560. Thank you very much.