Chris Carter Explains How He Got a Second Shot at ‘The X Files’ Film

On today’s episode of “Daily Variety” podcast, “The X-Files” creator Chris Carter explains to Variety’s Michael Schneider how he got the chance to do a director’s cut of his 2008 “The X-Files: I Want to Believe” feature film. The new cut dubbed “The X-Files: I Want to Believe: Vrach Frankenshteyn” debuted Aug. 14 on Hulu and Disney+ outside the U.S.

Carter points out that his preferred cut is actually shorter than the original release, which ran 144 minutes, per IMDB.

“I always felt like people didn’t see the movie I intended to make,” Carter says, noting that 20th Century Studios executive Steve Asbell helped get the director’s cut project off the ground. “I asked him, ‘Have you ever thought about doing a director’s cut?’ And it was really just offhand. And he said, ‘Why? Would you like to do one?’ I said, ‘I’d love to do one.’ I can tell you, though, the reason for doing the director’s cut for me is not to put all the stuff that was taken out, but to put the right stuff in that was taken out.”

Carter discloses that for the original release in 2008, he was under a lot of pressure to ensure that the film would secure at PG-13 rating.

“When we showed them our first cut, the studio freaked out. They said, ‘This is torture porn. And you can’t do this for a PG-13 movie.’ So we cut it back and we satisfied them. And then we gave it to the motion picture folks, and they said, this isn’t a PG-13 movie. And we cut it back even further,” Carter says. “So the movie you’re seeing is, by and large, the movie that my partner in crime, [writer-producer] Frank Spotnitz, and I set out to make. And we always set out to make a very scary movie on a very limited budget, which is kind of the way we made ‘The X Files‘ TV series.”

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