If the truth is indeed out there, judging by the crowd response in Leicester Square on Wednesday night, plenty of X-philes are still looking for it.
With a fanbase rivalling that of The Dark Knight, the UK premiere of The X-Files: I Want To Believe, the second spin-off from the TV phenomenon was a gloriously geek-ridden affair (one devoted female fan even had a dyed-green ‘X’ shaved into her hair) and stars Duchovny and Gillian Anderson director/creator Chris Carter were lapping up the love.
“This is the biggest premiere we’ve had so far,” said Carter. “In America the fans were sat on bleachers, this is more of a free-for-all.”
“It’s amazing that people still love the show so much,” said Duchovny, aka former FBI alien hunter Fox Mulder. “I don’t know what to say, I guess there’s something in it that just really resonates with people.”
Strangely for a summer blockbuster, very little is known about the story and a cagey Carter sure ain’t spilling the beans.
“I can tell you that it’s a stand-alone story,” said the director. “It doesn’t involve aliens or any of the show’s mythology. It’s a cold conspiracy story that we’ve been holding on to for many years. It’s a case that Mulder and Scully stumble on after they leave the FBI and it’s a good creepy story about the characters and their life and their story.
"It’s about faith, faith in your relationship, faith in a higher power but it’s also about the limits of science and the limits of faith – or not!”
So why so secretive?
“Well, in the age of the internet everybody knows everything so I thought it would be nice to keep this plot heavily under wraps. You know keeping everybody in the dark is so much fun. The fans made us want to come back. Every time David and Gillian would go off and do another project they would be asked, ‘When’s the next X-Files movie?’.”
So, will this be the last hoorah for Mulder and his cynical partner Dana Scully?
“Well, we’ve done this one so it could be the last one but if it does well I’m sure we could do another one,” said Carter. “We’d have to have a conversation about that but right now we consider this to be a goodbye. We’ve actually got something right at the end of the movie which will make you understand what we’re saying.”
Duchovny, for one, would certainly return to his most popular role.
“Yeah I would, in a heartbeat,” he said. “I think it would probably have to be all about the aliens, we’d have to go back to that kind of mythology and get back to the heart of what Mulder is looking for in his life.”