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The Vancouver Move: Chris Carter's and the Crew's Perspectives

It's undeniable: the Vancouver weather was a character of its own.

I was surprised, however, that the Vancouver crew not only understood why the show relocated but were almost... relieved by its exit.

I was also surprised by the candid discussions of the positives and negatives of the move: while the producers lost a larger budget, they gained more locations; while they lost the Vancouver workers, they gained new Californians; and while they struggled with a stray palm tree or two, they were rejuvenated with a larger pool of actors, fresh material, and a bit more freedom for everyone.

Part 3 of the Vancouver Move 'series.'

TL;DR

March 30, 1998: In an interview by phone from Los Angeles Sunday, Carter admitted that he had promised Duchovny and Anderson that the show would not stay in Vancouver indefinitely....

“I had hoped that we might find a way to keep the show in Vancouver,” Carter said. “And while I wanted to respect what I was hearing from David and Gillian about doing the show in Los Angeles, I thought there might be a way to convince everyone to keep the show in Vancouver.... I don’t mean to take anything away from David or Gillian, but I’ve always felt that Vancouver was one of the stars of the show.”

May 1997: There is a joke on the X-Files set that crew members don't have lives, they have The X-Files. Dark humor abounds when you work 16-hour days, 10 months a year in Vancouver, British Columbia.

THE OFFICIAL GUIDE TO THE X-FILES, Volume 4: “In the end, I think everyone basically was relieved,” recalls a Vancouver-based producer J.P. Finn. “Because now that we had the word officially, we could all of go on and plan our lives. In fact, in a way we were sort of elated because the end was in sight, and it was still okay, and in a little while we could relax and relish all our good work.” With much of the tension eased, work continued on the remaining episodes of the season. Even before their X-Files tenure was over, many crew members had jobs lined up on other productions, frequently-befitting the X-Files’s status as Vancouver’s most prestigious TV series-at a higher level than they had occupied previously.

June 1998: True to form, Lea is equally candid on the subject of THE X-FILES’ imminent move to Los Angeles. “I think the show will lose something,” he says frankly. “They’ve worked for five years to accumulate the crew they’ve got now, and it’s like a well-oiled machine. People have fun but the job gets done. Plus Vancouver, as Chris has said in the past, is the perfect location for the show because of the rain, the way the sun has angled at particular times of the year, there’s forest, there’s a Chinatown, there are mountains, and prairie – it can really double as almost anyplace. So, I completely and utterly support David and Gillian’s decision to go to Los Angeles, but I think that Vancouver is the perfect location for the show.”

January 1999: “Things are more expensive,” adds Spotnitz. “That’s been the real pressure, the financial. The cost of moving from Vancouver to LA was extremely high, higher than anyone anticipated. So we really were between a rock and a hard place. As producers and writers, we were trying to protect the quality of the show; on the other hand, as employees of the studio, we were trying to be responsible in terms of what the show cost....”

At the start of season 6, the production took advantage of the fact that Los Angeles locations offered opportunities not available in Vancouver....

Once the temptation to film in the desert was satisfied, things settled down considerably. “We’re still doing what we’ve always done,” maintains Shiban about the story locations....

There is a catch, though: ”The only problem is that there are so many palm trees you’re always shooting with a palm tree just out of range,” laughs Spotnitz.

Having production housed on the same lot as the production facilities has had its benefits, too. “It used to be we’d fly up [to Vancouver] two to three days before a show would begin and we’d prep our own episode. You’d see [the crew] for two days,” Spotnitz remembers. “The nice part about having the show down here is that we’re all together every day. You can walk over to the prop guy and say, ‘Hey, Tommy, what about this? It looks great.’ And we’re in meetings that we would see only the results of. Now, we’re often designing the storyboards or a special effects sequence or something. And we can walk over to the stage and say hello to David and Gillian or Bill Davis. That’s been great.”

The Complete X-Files: Kim Manners felt the move helped him creatively. “I actually think that the show grew by leaps and bounds once it got to L.A.,” the director says....

Gillian Anderson recalls that the producers would have to make adjustments for the climate. “There was a lot more material that was shot inside, because shooting outside was prohibitive to the mood of the series,” Anderson says. However, there was one immediate benefit to shooting in Los Angeles: “I don’t know whether they just brought in more characters, or whether it was because less time was taken redoing material due to rain and snow days, but it seemed like we had more time off once we moved down south,” the actress states. “In the first year in California, I think I had more days off than I ever had in the five years of the show combined. In Vancouver we never had days off. Everything felt like it lightened up a bit. It all felt a bit easier.”

CHRIS CARTER: PROMISES AND HEARTBREAK

Chris Carter fell in love with Vancouver (so much so that, after The X-Files relocated, he kept taking other projects up north.)

It was CC who asked his actors to fly up during the pilot; and CC who further requested they stay one, three, then five good years in order to maintain that uniquely dark, shadowy look which gave the series its flavor. And, to his credit, it was CC who sided with David Duchovny (and Gillian Anderson) when the former wanted to return home (and waited until both were off set before telling the crew.)

THE PROMISE OF "FIVE GOOD YEARS"

As explained by everyone who was asked at Ten Thirteen (including Gillian Anderson, post here, and other actors and directors, here), Chris approached David with a deal: if he stuck it out in Vancouver, the production to California (post here.)

A deal which Duchovny delayed for the good of the show-- in spite of depression, anxiety-induced alopecia (post here), and a failed long-distance relationship-- until his marriage in 1997.

To CC's credit, he kept his word (though he had hoped to convince the actors "otherwise.")

July 25, 1996: Carter said both David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson are good friends, and “David and Gillian both renegotiated their contracts last year, so that’s out of the way.

“I have told them — and I think they are party to this — that I just want to do five really good years of The X-Files, five years where one day we can look back and say honestly that we did our best work. That’s why I haven’t left the show. If they’re willing to devote five years of their lives to it, so will I. Anything past that is gravy.”

January 1998: It’s also a move that has considerably brightened the dispositions of Anderson and Duchovny, who had been commuting to Vancouver since the show’s debut. Duchovny, who got married last year to actress Tea Leoni, had said repeatedly that he would leave the series if it did not move to Los Angeles so he could spend more time with his wife. (Duchovny declined to be interviewed for this story.) Carter took other considerations into account, but noted that all involved seem pleased with the new home base.

“Both David and Gillian are very happy to be able to go home after work,” Carter said. “There’s a certain entropic effect that you fight against, but we’re certainly not feeling it right now. Both of them have really risen to the challenge of what we’re doing.”

He added, “Now that we’re in a mostly urban environment, we’re going to have to tell stories using the landscape that is presented to us now. Before, we had rain and misty conditions. Now we’ll have to make them, without it looking forced. Directors are using angles to create the atmosphere that will keep the show what it is. And you can do good, scary stories anywhere if you do it right.”

March 27, 1998: “Shooting [Harsh Realm] in Vancouver has just been a dream, which is why I am back here again,” Carter said. But he points out that working here does have a personal cost.

“The most difficult thing about making The X-Files had to do with keeping the actors away from home for 10 months a year, for five years running. I think that is what was most under-appreciated by those Vancouverites who saw our leaving as some kind of betrayal or treachery. David and Gillian were working away from home, their friends and their family, for five years, and I think that was a huge sacrifice on their part.

“I fly back and forth all the time, and that has been a sacrifice for me. I’ve given up a huge amount of my life. But that’s been by choice.”

March 30, 1998: Carter said that, in the end, he owed it to his two stars, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, to allow them to return to their homes after five years of working abroad.

In an interview by phone from Los Angeles Sunday, Carter admitted that he had promised Duchovny and Anderson that the show would not stay in Vancouver indefinitely.

Duchovny told several U.S. talk-show hosts late last year that he would sooner quit The X-Files than spend another year away from his wife, Naked Truth actress Tea Leoni, but Carter denied the actor had forced his hand.

“It’s important to remember that we originally intended to film the pilot [in March 1993] in Los Angeles,” Carter said. “When we couldn’t find a good forest, we made a quick decision to come to Vancouver. As it turned out, it was three weeks that turned into five years. The benefits of being in Vancouver were tremendous, and now, five years later, it is my home away from home.”

March 30, 1998: The creator and executive-producer of The X-Files says it was a wrenching decision to move the popular television series to its new home in Los Angeles.

Chris Carter says he was nearly overcome with emotion when he broke the news late Friday night to his Vancouver crew, which was shooting one of the few remaining episodes of the season at a Kingsway Street motel.

Carter said that, in the end, he owed it to his two stars, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, to allow them to return to their homes after five years of working abroad.

In an interview by phone from Los Angeles Sunday, Carter admitted that he had promised Duchovny and Anderson that the show would not stay in Vancouver indefinitely.

Duchovny told several U.S. talk-show hosts late last year that he would sooner quit The X-Files than spend another year away from his wife, Naked Truth actress Tea Leoni, but Carter denied the actor had forced his hand.

“It’s important to remember that we originally intended to film the pilot [in March 1993] in Los Angeles,” Carter said. “When we couldn’t find a good forest, we made a quick decision to come to Vancouver. As it turned out, it was three weeks that turned into five years. The benefits of being in Vancouver were tremendous, and now, five years later, it is my home away from home....”

Carter said he had come to rely heavily on his Vancouver-based crew, describing it as an integral part of the show and one of the main reasons the series has become successful.

In the past several years, X-Files’ Vancouver crew members have won Emmy Awards for their work. They include art directors Graeme Murray, Shirley Inget, Gary Allen and sound mixer Michael Williamson.

Carter said that he will continue to work in Vancouver and will do his best to hire X-Files crew for any future projects he produces in the city. “I had hoped that we might find a way to keep the show in Vancouver,” Carter said. “And while I wanted to respect what I was hearing from David and Gillian about doing the show in Los Angeles, I thought there might be a way to convince everyone to keep the show in Vancouver.

“I don’t know if it will be any better or worse in Los Angeles, but I know that I liked doing it in Vancouver, for any number of reasons. The most important was that we had a winning team, a great crew. To have to give up that winning team is, for me, the toughest thing to have to deal with.

“Secondly, Vancouver was critical to the look of the show. I don’t mean to take anything away from David or Gillian, but I’ve always felt that Vancouver was one of the stars of the show.”

Carter said that while no official decision has been made by 20th Century Fox Television about renewal of his other Vancouver-based show, Millennium, a third season looks “99-per-cent certain.” If Millennium is renewed, it will remain in Vancouver, Carter said.

The X-Files feature film, which will be released in theatres in June, was filmed last summer in California, and will ease the transition from one locale to another. The popular series, one of the 10 most-watched shows in both Canada and the U.S., is the highest-profile of some 18 series currently shooting in the Lower Mainland.

June 1998: Duchovny's more immediate goal has just been realized. As of next season the show will move to Los Angeles. Its creator, Chris Carter, made the decision reluctantly, since the Canadian exchange rate and lower costs mean higher profits. But both Duchovny and Anderson keenly wanted to bring the Vancouver years to an end. "I could've kept the show there," Carter says. "There was never an ultimatum." The movie just seemed to cap an era, and as Carter concedes, "You want to keep the actors in a good environment." For Duchovny, L.A. was home well before May 1997, when he married Téa Leoni, the lithe, fine-boned actress who starred in 1996's Flirting with Disaster and the recently released Deep Impact. Now the pull is that much greater.

June 14, 1998: Carter hopes that moving The X-Files production base from Vancouver to Los Angeles will help ease whatever tensions were there [between the actors.]

Duchovny has been insisting on the move for three years and announced that if the show stayed in Vancouver, he would terminate his contract.

“I think the move will rejuvenate all of us. It may even feel like a new experience.”

July 3, 1998: Well, we’ve told a lot of forest stories, and now I suspect we’ll begin telling desert stories, he says with a laugh. Then he quickly turns serious. There was a lot of terrain we couldn’t cover in Vancouver. But the show was never really meant to be located there, and, as Duchovny had frequently put it, and Carter agreed, it was a three-week shoot that turned into five years.

His other show, Millennium, will remain in B.C. For The X-Files, however, he says he’ll miss the way Vancouver embraced the show and allowed more license than other productions would enjoy.

November 1998: An interesting fact is that "The X-Files" was never intended to be produced abroad. The pilot was to be filmed in Hollywood, but a suitable forest could not be found to support the plot line so off to Vancouver they went.

Paraphrasing Duchovny, Carter says, "Two weeks turned into five years."

THE HARDSHIPS OF LEAVING

Although Ten Thirteen Productions had Duchovny's (and Anderson's) back, Chris Carter still struggled with the move.

October 30, 1998: K: Oh I see. Okay. Hey thanks for the call. By the way, we talked to Gillian a, uh, couple of weeks ago. She seems real happy about being back here in Los Angeles.

B: yeah

K: She sounds like she was just having the time of her life.

CC: Both Dave and Gillian, I think, are very happy to be close to home.

B: How has it been for you, uh, envisioning the show, here in Southern California.

CC: It was a lot of work for me because we came back here and I had to hire a whole new crew and figure out how to do the show in Los Angeles. I’m still figuring it out and we’re in episode–doing episode nine....

B: You’re just, uh, you’re just, uh, you just have to look at everything a little bit differently. I mean, that’s what Gillian said[.]

CC: yeah

November 21, 1998: One former X-Files technician recalls that when Carter had to announce to the crew that the show was leaving, on a rain-soaked night earlier this year at a Kingsway Street motel, he deliberately waited until David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were off the set before breaking the news. Carter wanted to spare his actors the embarrassment of seeing him break down and cry in front of the crew, the technician recalled....

For his part, Carter has never withheld praise for his Vancouver workers, who he often refers to as “my Canadian colleagues.”

March 10, 2001: For [The Lone Gunmen], being back home is a good thing, as it is for creator Carter, despite the ill will amoung some of the local press and fan base who took it as a personal insult when The X-Files moved to L.A. “I just think people really thought of The X-Files as a Vancouver show, and so when it left, it was hard,” he says. “It was hard for me, very hard for me. But I think all has been forgiven. I’d worked so long in Vancouver and I knew a lot of the crew. And we have three Canadian actors, so it just seemed a natural for us to go back, where we’d established a sort of winning formula. Vancouver could double as anywhere in America, it has so many great looks.”

ON REFLECTION

Between the original run ending and the Revival kicking back into gear, Chris Carter willingly shared what touched him during the Vancouver years: the pros, the cons, the ups and downs.

August 2002: XFM: Some people think the spirit of the show changed when the production relocated from Vancouver to Los Angeles. What are your thoughts on that issue?

CC: I disagree. We actually had more resources in Los Angeles, resources we didn’t have in Vancouver. I thought we had more to work with, but you can look at it as pre-movie and post-movie. I look at it that way, but I think there was so much good work done after the movie on this show that it’s hard for me to look at it that way. It changed, but I don’t think it actually meant that it changed for the worse. And every show has its season. You know, every show is built on a curve, unless you’re The Simpsons, which seems to have a never-ending curve.

April 28, 2015: The Canadian Press: You’re credited with building so much of the Vancouver film and TV industry, do you feel a kinship with the Canadian scene as well?

Carter: Definitely. I had a place up in Vancouver for a long time, friends in Vancouver, I loved to work there.

CP: What does shooting in Vancouver lend to the series?

Carter: It gives you a tremendous natural environment to shoot in and also a free atmosphere…. You get long, dark nights in the wintertime. “X-Files” is a show that a lot of it is night-time work, you get a moodiness, you get oftentimes a greycast that really helps the look of the show.

CP: I gather that tone will be back for the reboot?

Carter: It’s funny because we’ll be shooting in the summertime so what we get is the beautiful Vancouver summer for this shoot.

May 9, 2016: Q: Do you have a favourite episode of The X-Files?

CC: Oh, I’m always asked this question, I don’t have a favourite episode!

CC: I always point to the black and white episode in season five, The Post-Modern Prometheus. It was an episode that we did when we were leaving Vancouver, which was a bittersweet time; it was an episode we did while we were making the first X-Files movie, which was a very stressful time.... It was one of these episodes that [the fact] that it came together so beautifully was a miracle, and that it would end on a kind of miraculous improvised note with Mulder and Scully dancing in each other’s arms was, for me, the icing on the cake of a moment in time I’ll forever cherish.

December 20, 2017: Along with the fresh batch of episodes, 2018 will usher in another milestone for The X-Files—the 25th anniversary of its premiere. “It’s surreal; it feels like I never left Vancouver,” Carter says. “I’m not transported back [while] filming this because it doesn’t feel like nostalgia or a reboot. It feels like original X-Files.”

THE VANCOUVER CREW: NEW BEGINNINGS

The X-Files was a grueling project: one which Vancouverites were both proud of and burnt out from.

Generally, the Ten Thirteen crew members, though saddened to see the show go, were ready to branch off when the announcement finally came. Further, they understood and stood with Duchovny (and Anderson and others) when the '97-'98 tabloids raged, a respect which DD (and others) gave in return.

"ALL-CONSUMING" CONDITIONS

May 1997: What they can be, however, is omnipresent. There is a joke on the X-Files set that crew members don't have lives, they have The X-Files. Dark humor abounds when you work 16-hour days, 10 months a year in Vancouver, British Columbia. It's tough to tell, however, whether Duchovny and co-star Gillian Anderson find such things funny. Life is different when you're the poster children for the most scrutinized television series in recent memory...."The success of a one hour series is different from any other success in film or television," says Anderson, who plays Dana Scully to Duchovny's Fox Mulder. "It is all-consuming. It's not this way on half-hour television; it's not this way when you do features. When you're in the midst of it, you can think, oh, I can't do this anymore."

Mostly it's the hours--another crew truism holds that if an episode doesn't hurt, then things just aren't working--but there's more. With fame has come not only tabloid scrutiny, which has plagued Anderson in particular this season, but a developing apprehension for both stars that while The X-Files is the acting break of a lifetime, its phenomenon threatens to obscure them as individuals for the rest of their careers.

October 23, 1997: DD: But you know...another thing that was insulting about this whole thing was to our crew which is wonderful and works harder than me, they work in the rain. I get to go back to my trailer when it's raining and come out and do five minutes and they are actually out in the rain all day long, and I don't know how they do that. But, um, it's actually a great place to work and I don't want people to lose sight of that, and I don't want that to be ascribed to me. The only reason I'm leaving is because I have a family. I've lived five years here.....

Interestingly, not every Canadian vacated the show--

January 1998: Some veteran members of the Vancouver crew who have moved with the show say they also notice a difference.

“My job has become a lot easier,” said Anji Bemben, a lifelong Vancouver resident who does hair for Duchovny and Anderson and has been with the show for three years. “We’re not shooting in the rain, so I don’t have to work as hard. It makes it more enjoyable.”

Laverne Basham, who does makeup for the two stars, said: “Before, I would always have to worry about keeping David and Gillian dry. Now I have to mop the sweat off them.”

Paul Rabwin, one of the drama’s producers who specializes in post-production on the series, said: “The colors here have a whole different hue. We’re accustomed to a gloomy, dark look, so this presents many challenges for creating atmospheric conditions. The camera department is using different film stock, and we’re also using different cameras. We’re looking forward to creating a whole new look for the show without destroying its integrity.”

THE FINAL DAYS: QUIET PRIDE AND RELIEF

I would be remiss if I didn't include the perspectives below, although some of the passages, in their entirety, are quite long. Please bear with the length.

June 1998: True to form, Lea is equally candid on the subject of THE X-FILES’ imminent move to Los Angeles. “I think the show will lose something,” he says frankly. “They’ve worked for five years to accumulate the crew they’ve got now, and it’s like a well-oiled machine. People have fun but the job gets done. Plus Vancouver, as Chris has said in the past, is the perfect location for the show because of the rain, the way the sun has angled at particular times of the year, there’s forest, there’s a Chinatown, there are mountains, and prairie – it can really double as almost anyplace. So, I completely and utterly support David and Gillian’s decision to go to Los Angeles, but I think that Vancouver is the perfect location for the show.”

July 15, 1998: Still, matrimony didn't ease the long-distance commute caused by Duchovny's Vancouver workdays -- or the flak he took while asking for the show's relocation to L.A. next season. "It was hard on him," says actor Nick Lea. "He was handed the key to the city and ended with eggs being thrown at his house. People just didn't see that he wanted to be with his wife."

March 2, 2001: At the time, many people in Vancouver felt insulted and slammed the actor for being unappreciative, though Harwood thinks Duchovny may have gotten a bit of a bad rap. “Poor David,” he says. “After those remarks, there was a sense that everyone in Vancouver just turned on him for slagging a town that helped produce a successful show. I don’t think the move made people angry but I will tell you this: Nearly everyone I know [there] stopped watching after it left.”

Braidwood agrees somewhat, pointing out that many cities tend to claim hit series as their town. “In a really broad sense, the city sees it as theirs,” he explains. “And then all of sudden it leaves and they’re asking, ‘How could you do that?'”

Season 8 DVD Commentary: Kim Manners said that while he was enjoying the "new" mythology, and "bad-guy" characters like Knowle Rohrer, he really missed working with the "syndicate" and the actors who played its members. "John Neville, Bill Davis, Don Williams. I really miss them all," he said. "I loved shooting those scenes. Rob [Bowman] set the tone for the way we did that. A big face in the foreground and shady faces in the background. When the show moved from Vancouver, the syndicate took on a different look and it was never the same after that."

In 1997, Andy Meisler published an account of the timeline leading up to the final day of filming--

THE OFFICIAL GUIDE TO THE X-FILES, Volume 4 In 1993-partly for reasons of economics, partly because of the variety of exterior locations available there-Chris Carter and Fox Television shot the X-Files pilot in Vancouver, British Columbia. When the series was picked up, all subsequent episodes and seasons were filmed there even as the show continued to be written and edited on the Fox movie lot in Los Angeles.

The advantages to this arrangement: magnificent scenery and an “interesting” climate that helped to give The X-Files a “look” all its own; a depressed Canadian dollar that stretched farther for U.S.-based productions; and-most importantly-a magnificently talented and hard-working crew that quickly proved to be the cream of Vancouver’s burgeoning film and television community.

The disadvantages: sometimes-unwieldy communications between north and south; an international commute between Los Angeles and Vancouver; and the fact that the show’s American stars were required to live in Vancouver ten months of the year, far away from their homes and from the main focus of the U.S. entertainment industry.

When The X-Files became an international hit for Fox, Vancouver’s cost savings became less important. After completing filming for Season Four, and marrying Los Angeles-based actress Tea Leoni, David Duchovny began expressing publicly (as to a lesser extent, did his co-star Gillian Anderson) a desire that the show be filmed, as was the X-Files movie, in Southern California.

Before the start of Season Five, Duchovny renewed his contract for two additional years with the provision that if the series continued to be filmed in Vancouver beyond 1997-1998 he could opt to appear in only eight episodes per season. It was announced that the situation was being reevaluated. And that was how the fifth season-with plans to produce 22 ambitious episodes-began.

“It’s been a very demanding year so far,” said Vancouver-based executive producer Robert Goodwin, on a rainy day (with “sunny breaks,” say the local TV weatherman) in February 1998. “The most difficult year, I think, from a production point of view...."

Most of the longtimers had developed a quiet pride in their series’s groundbreaking tradition, and by Season Five were accustomed to making the impossible look routine.

To the experienced eye, there were some subtle changes-the show’s North Vancouver headquarters, for instance, had for some obscure business reason, changed its name from North Shore Studios to Lion’s Gate Studios-but since Season Four there had been little staff turnover.…

The Fox Studio’s multi-million dollar expansion and renovation project-now in its second full year- continued to have no effect whatsoever on X-Files working conditions, except to make visitor parking more difficult and increase the ambient noise level considerably. …

By late winter, even the individuals most intimately involved appeared to grow weary of the speculation. “To tell you the truth,” said a prominent member of the Vancouver crew, “I’ve worked so hard here and given so much to this great show-done things I could never even imagine doing before I started-that sometimes I feel used up. If the show leaves for L.A., it may be the best chance I’ll get to stop and reflect; to relax and do other things for a while.”

On Friday, March 28, Chris Carter flew to Vancouver; talked to each department head individually, and told him or her, sadly, that he had hoped there would be some alternative but that The X-Files would be moving to Los Angeles for the star of its sixth season.

Afterward, Carter walked the short distance to the sound stage where the show was being filmed. He gathered the cast and crew around him, and started to read a prepared announcement giving the financial and logistical reasons for the move. He started to thank the Vancouver-based crew for their five years of effort. But before he could finish getting the words out he was overwhelmed by emotion-as were many of the talented artists and technicians listening to him. The X-Files’s creator could not go on. Everyone silently let the news sink in.

“In the end, I think everyone basically was relieved,” recalls a Vancouver-based producer J.P. Finn. “Because now that we had the word officially, we could all of go on and plan our lives. In fact, in a way we were sort of elated because the end was in sight, and it was still okay, and in a little while we could relax and relish all our good work.” With much of the tension eased, work continued on the remaining episodes of the season. Even before their X-Files tenure was over, many crew members had jobs lined up on other productions, frequently-befitting the X-Files’s status as Vancouver’s most prestigious TV series-at a higher level than they had occupied previously. On Saturday, April 25, the X-Files’s Vancouver wrap party-one of the hottest tickets in town-was held at the Pacific Space Center, Vancouver’s main planetarium and science center, and was a mammoth, rollicking success. Dancing, imbibing, and high-decibel recollecting continued well into the morning.

Lastly, in 2008, Chris Knowles and Matt Hurwitz gathered statements from David, Gillian, Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz, Mitch Pileggi, Kim Manners, and Tom Braidwood for their first edition publication.

The Complete X-Files: “I had never expected that the show would run five years,” David Duchovny explains. “And at some point in the middle of the third year, Chris and I were complaining to one another about how tired we were. We were saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to do give. We’ll get out of here at five.’ And then five came around, and no one was going anywhere.

“David loved the Vancouver crew as did everybody else,” Kim Manners recalls. “But after five years being away from home, it gets a little old, so he just wanted to move the show back to Los Angeles for no other reason than to be in the comfort of his own home and environment. I could have kissed him because I was in the same boat. I was tired of being away from home. It’s difficult to sacrifice not only home, but your family, your friends, and everything else, to isolate yourself on location 1,200 miles away.”

“It was a really hard thing to do; it was a very emotional thing to do,” Chris Carter said. “A lot of these people had become my friends and everyone’s friends. It wasn’t fair in a way because they had helped put us on the map, and we had helped put them on the map, too, showing you could do a quality show up in Vancouver.”

“They were really proud of what we were doing, Frank Spotnitz explains. “They couldn’t believe what we were able to pull off on a television schedule. They’d never done anything like it before. A lot of them will never do anything like it again because it was just so insanely ambitious for television. So you can imagine how heartbreaking it was for all of us when we had to leave because we really felt like we’d been partners in the show’s success.”

“It was sad to see it go-it had been a great ride-but we understood why it was going, and that was fine,” Tom Braidwood says. “It was interesting to step away from that part of it and then simply go down to L.A. as an actor.”

“We’re very much a family and everybody was really close and played together and worked together. When we left, it was really hard saying goodbye to them,” Mitch Pileggi says ruefully.

“It worked; it felt like home for that period of time,” Gillian Anderson says. “Saying goodbye to the crew was really sad. I didn’t expect to be as emotional about it as I was. I just could not stop crying all day long. They were good people.”

Kim Manners says that the Vancouver period of The X-Files is now a distant memory. “Back then there were wonderful places to shoot, great locations with great character, old docks, old buildings, abandoned this, abandoned that, and the gray skies. For a show like The X-Files, it was custom made. Today, all the great spots we shot are gone, and they’re all replaced with condominiums and office buildings.”

L.A.: HIGHER COSTS, MORE OPPORTUNITIES

To no one's shock, filming a tv series in California was expensive.

However, one might be surprised to learn that (other than the financial squeeze) moving south was appreciated in the long haul. Moreover, the writers, actors, and crew embraced the change with spirit, eager to take full advantage of their new circumstances.

(Who would've thought having the actors closer to home almost meant closer to the main production, which would then afford everyone a little freedom?)

January 1998: Thekmaster: How will the show change, now that it’s moving to Los Angeles from Vancouver?

Spotnitz: The honest answer is no one really knows. I think the movie will prove that the X-Files works no matter where you film it, because the movie was not shot in Vancouver. But we’d loved the look of the show in Vancouver and want to keep it as dark and moody and atmospheric as it’s always been, even though we are filming in L.A. And while none of the producers wanted to leave Vancouver, the truth is filming here in L.A. gives us the opportunity to tell stories in different parts of the country that we could never have done in Vancouver. So I think fans can expect to see things like Area 51 popping up in the X-Files now that we’re in this part of the country....

Logan_666: What changes have been made because of the change from British Columbia to California?

Spotnitz: The biggest change is the loss of our crew in Vancouver who were hugely important to the success of the show. These people worked night and day on this show and were incredibly proud of it. And to a large degree they carried the standard of excellence that was set. So the biggest difference and the greatest challenge in moving to Los Angeles is finding a new crew who can not only uphold the standard that has been set but surpass it. Because all of us want to see the show continue to get better even as it gets older....

_spiffeYgurL_: Is it cool working with Gillian and David?

Spotnitz: It is! One thing people probably don’t think about is that for the past five years, they’ve been in Vancouver and we’ve been in L.A. So most of our contact has been electronically, watching them in dailies, or talking to them on the phone. But the best part about working with David and Gillian is that they invariably make the work better than any of us imagined it would be. And as writers, we are all incredibly grateful for that! Now that we’ll be shooting in Los Angeles we’re all looking forward to seeing more of David and Gillian.

February 10, 1998: Duchovny is under contract for another two years, and will appear in The X-Files movie this summer. He has said, however, that he would rather leave the show than spend any more time away from his wife, actress Tea Leoni, who works in Los Angeles.

A move may not be as imminent as once believed. For one thing, the costs — $2.6 million per episode — could balloon to $4 million if the show is produced in L.A. Multiply the difference by 24 — the number of episodes in a standard TV season — and the cost of a move becomes prohibitive.

Tom Crowe, community affairs manager for the B.C. Film Commission, says Carter is clearly trying to be as diplomatic as possible under the circumstances.

“I think that Chris Carter has been nothing but very gracious throughout this whole process — with everybody,” Crowe said. “He has worked very hard to try and create a win-win situation for all parties, whether that be David Duchovny or his crew.

“He’s in a tight situation. We’re hearing a lot of rumours about The X-Files, too, but nobody will know for sure until next year, obviously.”

October 13, 1998: The X-Files Official Magazine: Are you settling into the L.A. Set?

Spotnitz: We’ve met the challenge of being here head on. We’re not pretending we’re somewhere else. We’re writing, at least in the beginning, to this part of the country. It’s been a little startling. There’ve been some shots where it’s like, “My God, sunlight!” We’re making it part of the story and part of what’s scary about the story. I think it’s been successful so far. I must say it’s been nice having David and Gillian and Bill Davis and all the other actors a stone’s throw away. Walking over to the set, we’ve been able to talk to them about stories and actors and things like that.

November 1998: [Duchovny says] "(The move) became a public issue discussed by 99 percent of people who have no idea what they were talking about, and the 1 percent, myself, the crew -- the people I've worked with for five years understood me completely that my motives weren't capricious or whimsical."

Returning to L.A. was endorsed by his co-star. "Overall it's easier to do the show here," say Anderson. "I am a person who is affected very strongly by the weather. Vancouver is a beautiful, beautiful city, but it is dark when you get up in the morning. It makes you depressed . . . I felt very cooped-up there...."

All the sets had to be rebuilt on a soundstage on the Fox lot. All that remains from the Vancouver set are a few props. Even the smoke machine is new.

An entirely new crew -- with the exceptions of Duchovny's and Anderson's hair and makeup artists -- had to be hired, and it costs more to film a show in Los Angeles. Though Carter wouldn't say how much, the phrase an "arm and a leg" came up.

"The standards of quality have been maintained," Carter said, "L.A. gives it a different look, but that's a virtue...."

Being in town also has helped land a new crop of guest stars. Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin will play ghosts in the Christmas episode. Michael McKeon, Victoria Jackson and Nora Dunn will also show up in roles.

"It got to a point in Vancouver," Carter said, "that we started to use the fine, but shallow, pool of actors three, four and five times. Now we have a much larger pool of actors."

January 1999: Initially, X-Files’ much-hyped production move from Vancouver to Los Angeles at the start of season 6 proved a “tough adjustment,” according to Spotnitz. “We’ve been so lucky because we’ve found really great people. We sort of had our pick of the town.”

Concerns that the show’s rich, dark cinematography would be irreparably affected by the move faded quickly. “By episode five last year, I didn’t hear that anymore, about whether the show looked the same or not,” recalls Spotnitz. “Even though we do some night shooting, from most of the show, it’s really the way the interiors are lit. And I thought [director of photography] Bill Roe did a superb job of maintaining the atmospheric and cinematic look of the show.”

Fiscal and practical realities have proved the greatest challenges the producers have had to face since relocating. “Here in Los Angeles, it’s harder to get around the city than it was in Vancouver,” notes Shiban. “We do a tech scout, for example, where the department heads and a producer all get into a bus and we drive to every location we’re shooting in, going over what the director is going to do here and where they’ll need a crane over there. We had one [scout] that was 12 hours on a bus, because to find the right look, we had to go 200 miles all around Los Angeles, all the way up to Ventura County. In Vancouver you could have done that in half the time because there’s no traffic, and it’s all [right there].”

“Things are more expensive,” adds Spotnitz. “That’s been the real pressure, the financial. The cost of moving from Vancouver to LA was extremely high, higher than anyone anticipated. So we really were between a rock and a hard place. As producers and writers, we were trying to protect the quality of the show; on the other hand, as employees of the studio, we were trying to be responsible in terms of what the show cost.”

In order to save money, the producers came up with some creative solutions. “We ended up trying to devise stories that could be shot economically using existing sets,” reveals Spotnitz. And that’s a challenge on a show were you are out in different parts of the country every week, investigating completely different [cases].” Relatively self-contained episodes included “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas” and “Milagro”.

At the start of season 6, the production took advantage of the fact that Los Angeles locations offered opportunities not available in Vancouver. Desert locations, bright locations, even unique shipboard locations-The Queen Mary ocean liner docked in Long Beach, California-became the norm for the first five episodes or so that it suddenly became a running joke, “so often were they shooting out of Los Angeles,” Spotnitz chuckles. After completing the two part ‘Dreamland,’ the trio made up crew t-shirts bearing the line, “When is The X-Files moving to Los Angeles?”

Once the temptation to film in the desert was satisfied, things settled down considerably. “We’re still doing what we’ve always done,” maintains Shiban about the story locations. “A Virginia story. And Arizona story. We’re all over. I think we’re successful at that.”

There is a catch, though: ”The only problem is that there are so many palm trees you’re always shooting with a palm tree just out of range,” laughs Spotnitz.

Having production housed on the same lot as the production facilities has had its benefits, too. “It used to be we’d fly up [to Vancouver] two to three days before a show would begin and we’d prep our own episode. You’d see [the crew] for two days,” Spotnitz remembers. “The nice part about having the show down here is that we’re all together every day. You can walk over to the prop guy and say, ‘Hey, Tommy, what about this? It looks great.’ And we’re in meetings that we would see only the results of. Now, we’re often designing the storyboards or a special effects sequence or something. And we can walk over to the stage and say hello to David and Gillian or Bill Davis. That’s been great.”

August 28, 1999: For Fox Corp., the cost of producing "The X-Files" increased considerably last year, when Duchovny insisted the show move from its base in Vancouver to Los Angeles so he could be closer to his wife, actress Téa Leoni. That meant losing out on the tax breaks and cheaper labor costs afforded productions in Canada.

November 3, 2000: When Duchovny wanted to be closer to his wife Tea Leoni, the show moved from Vancouver to Los Angeles two seasons ago with many fans thinking it would lose its look and feel....

“Nothing went wrong once we came to L.A.[,] though one of our editors said before we were ‘wet and dark’ and now we’re ‘dry and dark,'” says Spotnitz. “For us, the big change that came with L.A. is it costs more than it did in Vancouver so we have to be a lot more clever in how we tell our stories and have to manage to hide the fact we can’t do the things we did before. We used to have huge locations. One two-part episode had moving trains and train cars blowing up – stuff on bridges. It’s stuff like that which is huge to do on a TV schedule and budget and even though the budget of the show has increased quite a bit since we moved to L.A., it’s still not enough to allow us to do the same epic things we did in Vancouver frequently.”

THE PEOPLE'S THOUGHTS (TAKE TWO)

And, again, we return to Hurwitz and Knowles for The X-Files's rehoming in Los Angeles.

The Complete X-Files: Kim Manners felt the move helped him creatively. “I actually think that the show grew by leaps and bounds once it got to L.A.,” the director says. “Part of that is psychological because I was a happier human being. There were certain challenges in L.A. that had to be overcome, one of which being the sun. Chris and Frank were up to the task and wrote some very, very interesting story lines.”

Rob Bowman explains that the show’s popularity was a boon in status-conscious Hollywood: “What helped us was that we came to L.A. with an established show, a show that people liked, and certainly a show that filmmakers liked.” Nonetheless, Bowman was ambivalent about the move. “I’ve left behind all the people who helped birth the show,” the director laments.

Gillian Anderson recalls that the producers would have to make adjustments for the climate. “There was a lot more material that was shot inside, because shooting outside was prohibitive to the mood of the series,” Anderson says. However, there was one immediate benefit to shooting in Los Angeles: “I don’t know whether they just brought in more characters, or whether it was because less time was taken redoing material due to rain and snow days, but it seemed like we had more time off once we moved down south,” the actress states. “In the first year in California, I think I had more days off than I ever had in the five years of the show combined. In Vancouver we never had days off. Everything felt like it lightened up a bit. It all felt a bit easier.”

“The crew went through a big learning curve because they suddenly realized that they weren’t just doing a one-hour episode of television; they were doing features,” Kim Manners explains, adding that the new team “rose to the occasion brilliantly.”

“They did their best to make it as creepy,” Dean Haglund explains, “but Chris really had an appreciation for the drabness-days get dark around three of four o’clock (in Vancouver)-and they really utilized that kind of heavy atmosphere in the show unlike any other show up until then. So there was an abrupt mood shift when the show came down to L.A.”

The financial issues raised by working in Los Angeles would be extremely challenging. “At the time, the exchange rate between Canadian and U.S. dollars was pretty dramatic,” Bruce Harwood explains. “Somebody told me that the cost per episode doubled, even tripled, once they moved. So it knocked the show around a bit.”

“Everything in Los Angeles is more expensive across the board,” Vince Gilligan elaborates. “The deals with the unions are more expensive, and taxes are higher. It became apparent very quickly to me that we were no longer going to have things such as nuclear submarine descending through the ice and trains exploding in the middle of the woods.”

BONUS: TRIVIA AND OTHER JOKES

January 1998: The Well-Manicured Man's car's license plate reads "LA365," which may have been a reference to the controversy about moving the show from Vancouver to L.A. to film there all year long (as in 365 days equals a year).

June 7, 2000: Speaking of TV, The X-Files took a lot of heat, both from critics and fans, when it moved from Vancouver to Los Angeles this season. The fans bemoaned the lack of spooky, misty locales. The critics bemoaned a loss of purpose, alleging that the series had lost its impetus. Both factions overlooked the truth, which is that the X-Files has always been patchy, in the great way that only truly innovative, imaginative and risk-taking television can be.

July 28 2008: Filming [IWTB] began December 10 in Vancouver, where the series started so many years ago. We assembled as much of our old crew as we could; it felt like coming home. Although we’d written the movie specifically for Vancouver, much of the story takes place in the snowy countryside of West Virginia. So for three weeks, we filled up all the hotels and motels around Pemberton, a ruggedly beautiful valley north of Whistler, British Columbia.

Pemberton provided incredible scenery, but shooting in below-freezing temperatures 14 hours a day was hard on the crew and the actors, whose on-camera wardrobe wasn’t as warm as ours. “Next movie takes place in Hawaii,” became a common joke on set.

CONCLUSION