Province and city honour X-Files's Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz

Fans, media, and curious passersby gathered at the corner of Burrard and Smithe in front of the Scotiabank Theatre Vancouver yesterday (July 24) where a roped-off red carpet area had been created. The event was a private screening for the cast and crew of The X-Files: I Want To Believe movie.

Four female fans, who had found out about the event from the Web site Big Light, were amongst the media scrum and decked out in black shirts with X-Files catch phrases such as “The truth is out there”.

The four said they were hoping Mulder and Scully to kiss in this movie because there had been so much unresolved sexual tension.

“When I was watching it when I was a kid, I really never noticed because I was seven, right?” said fan Rochelle Leung. “But then I just started recently rewatching it and I would notice in season one and two how they’d be inappropriately close to each other as coworkers.”

“We really want this to be a really good movie for their relationship,” fellow fan Wednesday Laplante opined. “Just because it ended on a really sad note with the series so we want this to bring up their relationship again.”

Writer and director Chris Carter walked over from the Sutton Place Hotel across the street with cowriter Frank Spotnitz to the theatre, where they met with fans and signed autographs.

When asked how he felt about returning to the X-Files material after such a long break, Carter said he enjoyed it. “Coming back to them [the characters], it was sweet because I had gotten to spend a little bit of time away from them, and I got to come back to them fresh, and that’s the way the actors got to come back to them too, in a fresh way. It’s nice to come back to something and revisit it and appreciate it and come back and realize how much it has changed your life. It’s changed our lives in so many ways.”

Regarding the move from Vancouver to L.A. for the shooting of the series, Carter explained that they actually ended up staying much longer in Vancouver than originally planned. “The truth is we can here to do a TV pilot. And we ended up staying five years. David Duchovny says it was two weeks that turned into five years. And he’s right. We stayed five years longer than we ever imagined staying. So it was time to go home, the way I look at it. And we went home and made four more years of I think really good shows. But now we’ve come back. That’s the tale, that’s the lesson, is that you can come home again.”

However, Carter said he was glad to be back in Vancouver. “This is where we had made our mark and this is where it all started, and we wanted to come back and see if we could ”˜put the band back together’ so to speak.”

Secrecy was a big element for the film. Carter said “we worked hard to keep this story a secret because it was important. The element of surprise is something that we have and hold, and I think the fans like that. I think they want to be surprised with this movie. And I have to say Vancouverites helped us to keep it a secret by not pressuring us too much and not coming out with too many cameras and trying to spoil our fun.”

Taking a page from the X-Files cases themselves, Spotnitz added that they resorted to special strategies to keep the film secret. “We kept the script secret even from the crew. 90 percent of the crew never read the script, and they’d go to work each day not knowing what we were filming. We realized very early on that wasn’t to be enough to protect the secrecy of the movie. Because from the very first of filming on Homer Street, we had a guy parked in a hotel across the street taking pictures and video all night, and then people started stealing call sheets from trash cans and they could sort of figure out what the plot was. So we put out disinformation. We actually staged photographs, fake call sheets, fake script pages, and it so muddied the water out there that nobody knew what to believe. And we did it. We actually kept it a secret until the press finally saw it.”

The title had also been kept secret for a long time as well. Spotnitz said, however, that they knew what they wanted to call it early on. “We knew we wanted to call it I Want To Believe from the very beginning. And the studio understandably said well that’s kinda a mouthful for a movie title. But we knew that it would have resonance for fans of the series, and in fact when you see the movie it really is what the movie is about.”

On the red carpet, Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan and councillor Elizabeth Ball presented Chris Carter with a plaque to recognize his contributions to the Vancouver film industry.

Later inside, a more formal ceremony was held prior to the screening.

The ceremony included speeches by BC Film Commissioner Susan Croome and Minister of State for Intergovernmental Relations Joan McIntyre.

City of Vancouver commissioner Elizabeth Ball read out the plaque Sullivan had given Carter, which stated that July 24 was proclaimed X-Files Day.