David Duchovny touts the creatures of The X-Files movie as "A-list aliens," discusses the dynamic bonds of marriage, explains why Princess Di's death was not a tragedy and shares one of his poems.
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David Duchovny is sitting in his trailer on the 20th Century Fox lot wondering how much longer he's going to have to wait to do another pickup shot for The X-Files movie. Although the highly educated (Princeton, Yale) Duchovny once wrote a thesis about Samuel Beckett, the master of waiting, he still hasn't got the hang of hanging out. But The X-Files movie is high stakes for him, and he'll do what's necessary. The anticipation of this film is huge. The TV show, which has run now for five years and may go another two in its new Los Angeles setting, has made Duchovny a major international star, but becoming a genuine movie star would be a whole other game. "You struggle against people making you smaller than you are," he tells me of the fanatic attention he's drawn as FBI man Fox Mulder. "Sometimes I have an infantile reaction to people calling me Mulder--but it's my problem." He knows that playing Mulder on the big screen could make him bigger than he's ever been. And give him the freedom to be something different.
LAWRENCE GROBEL: Since The X-Files movie is coming out, let's talk about your last movie a minute. Playing God disappeared quickly. Do you think the problem with that one was the director?
DAVID DUCHOVNY: I think there was a problem with the direction of the film, but it wasn't the fault of the director. We never really had a script. We had a great idea that I thought would be done by the time we started shooting. If I were a movie actor, at this point I'd have said, "Hey, script's not ready, let's wait three months, send it off to Robert Towne to let him rewrite it." But I only had six weeks. I was itching to do a movie, and I said, "Let's plow ahead." So I'm as much to blame as anybody else. I wanted it to be a drama; the director wanted it to be more of a wacky Elmore Leonard-type caper. So it's mixed up. But I don't feel embarrassed or sad that I did it. I had a great time and I learned a lot.
Q: Is The X-Files movie better than any of the individual episodes?
A: It's better in the sense that we made sure every moment was right before we moved on, which we don't have the luxury of doing on the show. But the movie's not about the acting. A lot of what makes the show work has to do with the realistic and interesting portrayal of human beings. What makes a movie work is different. It's spectacle.
Q: Mulder and Scully have been dancing around the sexual question for five years now. In the movie do you finally do it?
A: It goes further in the movie than it ever did in the show.
Q: Are we going to see cool-looking aliens or will they be like the ones we've seen on the show?
A: [Laughs] Much cooler. We had more money to spend. These are A-list aliens.
Q: What alien movies have you enjoyed?
A: I liked Alien and Aliens. I loved E.T.
Q: Did you like Independence Day?
A: No, it was just toys. I'm not that interested in the genre really.
Q: Entertainment Weekly asked an appropriate question: what happens when a series based on unexplained phenomena starts explaining itself?
A: We'll see. We don't have a precedent for that, do we? But it's not like we're saying, "OK, here are all the answers that you've been wanting for five years." In true X-Files form, for every question answered, five more are raised.
Q: Your career has been so identified with this one character, what's your strategy for not becoming William Shatner?
A: I don't have one. I just have an abiding belief that talent will out. If I make it, then I have it; if I don't, then I didn't.
Q: With the freedom and opportunity to do a film unrelated to The X-Files, what director would you like to work with?
A: I love Coppola. In the documentary Hearts of Darkness, there's a bit where Martin Sheen's having a tough time doing the scene where he's going crazy in a hotel room in Saigon, and he tells Coppola he doesn't feel it's right. Coppola tells him, basically, "You are that guy. Whatever you do, that's right." And that's what you want from a director.
Q: What did you learn from Zalman King about acting when you were making Red Shoe Diaries?
A Zalman gave me a lot of confidence. He Eked me. He'd tell me I was great. You need that at some point in your life. Because it's so easy to lose that in this markety, gossipy Top 10 world. He told me to be still and trust that even in stillness something is going on. If the story is told well enough and I'm doing my work well enough, even doing nothing is going to work. Because doing nothing is actually something. I also let my dog teach me about acting.
Q: And what lessons has your dog taught you?
A: Just total focus. Total concentration. Maybe one ear goes back to figure something out.
Q: Before The X-Files you were in the film Kalifornia with Brad Pitt. Could you have foreseen that the two of you would become heartthrobs?
A: No, but Thelma & Louise had come out, so people were already saying he was going to be the next Brad Pitt. [Laughs] When I was auditioning for that movie it was set with Brad and Juliette Lewis. Michelle Forbes, who's on Homicide now, and I got cast opposite them. We were excited because we knew that people would see this movie because of Juliette and Brad. Juliette was really the hot one--she was shockingly good in Cape Fear. Brad and Michelle and I, we're good actors, but Juliette was like a savant. She was, like, channeling. It was weird to watch.
Q: Before you married, you were reportedly seeing Winona Ryder. What's your opinion of her as an actress?
A: She's a natural actor. I look around and see a lot of actors who are really good, but there are only some who were born to do it. I don't know what she'd do if she couldn't act. That's her calling.
Q: You also appeared with Robert Downey Jr. in Chaplin--did you get to know him?
A A little bit. He's another born actor, awesomely talented.
Q: What did you think of his going to jail?
A Sad. You break the law, doesn't matter who you are, you've got to serve. I hope he can recover.
Q: You've said fame is like perfume. Why?
A: It doesn't make your insides smell any better. And it's superficial--it covers a bad smell that you might want to take care of in a serious way.
Q: Why is fame, as you've said, like being Catholic?
A: Because you can't do anything without getting caught.
Q: Who are the celebrities who have been wise about how they've dealt with fame?
A: I'm beginning to think Warren Beatty is. I used to resent his taciturn facade, but now I think he's smart about editing the story as he's giving it. I don't think I could ever be that way, but I respect it. My first response to attention coming my way is that I've got to give back or else they're going to go away. I've got to tell them a new story or say something controversial or be funny. You can end up feeling drained that way. If you can somehow address the things that are important to you without boring yourself or hurting your family, then you're doing a good job. But it isn't easy. I have this fear deep inside which is, "If I was a better actor, I wouldn't have to sell myself like this. People would just come. Why am I doing this song and dance to get people to come see something that I think stands on its own?" When you start talking about your wife or childhood, it's like, "Oh my God, now what am I doing? I'm trotting out the family history to get people to go see my movie?!"
Q: So what's your take on entertainment journalism?
A: It seems to me that the tone of entertainment journalism is pretty glib and snide at this point. On the one hand, I agree: we are people who don't deserve the kind of scrutiny that we're getting. And we don't have that much to say. So to take us famous people down is right. It's a good point. But that's not why the point is being made. It's being made because there's a general mocking tone out there which is counterproductive to good work. The level of discourse is like high school. It's no fun. The pleasure that these magazines now display in seeing people fail... it's really great reading, to be honest. But it hurts individuals.
Q: You've said that people love you for the wrong reasons--because you're on a TV show. Does that make you feel resentful?
A: I'm married now and have someone who loves me for what I perceive to be the right reasons, so I don't have the need to find right love. Hearing those words of mine come back to me reminds me of an advisor in graduate school who said, "You're lucky if anyone loves you for any reason at all. Don't make them have to be the right reasons. Love is love."
Q: How long have you been married?
A: A year in May.
Q: Is marriage liberating?
A: Yeah, I find it to be. And challenging, because it makes you deal with yourself. You can't run off to a cave and be wounded alone, and you can't hide your pain with drugs or with women. You really have to deal with yourself with this person. It brings up all those trust issues and all those other therapized catch words.
Q: Do you feel you've completely bonded with your wife, Tea?
A: I feel we're bonding. The bond changes. Once you fall in love, that's not the end of it. There are all these walls--and when you hit one you can either go, "That's it, it's over," or you can bust through it and go, "Oh my God, this is better." And then you hit another wall. We have cycles like the planets. We come from these planets, these waves and cycles, why wouldn't we? I read this article that said men have periods as well as women. When I'm in a bad mood, sometimes I'll tell Tea, "I'm on my moon."
Q: Do you have a temper? Get angry?
A: Um-hmm. I'll yell, but I don't get violent.
Q: Ever throw anything?
A: Oh yeah, I've thrown things. I've never thrown a person. I once threw something near a person. [Laughs]
Q: In the past year, you've used adjectives like smart, funny, loyal, honest, kind, gentle--to describe Tea. When do you suppose words like nagging, demanding, possessive enter the relationship vocabulary?
A: The only negative adjective I would associate with Tea is "speculative." She has a very rich, speculative imagination. It's part of what makes her a really good actress. She will go off on these tangents that, by the time she's done, have very little to do with reality. It's kind of fun to watch. It's like free association, and if you're not paying attention you forget where it started. We both laugh at that. But no nagging, and she's not possessive.
Q: Biography magazine published a series of pictures of you and Tea at a basketball game soon after your wedding and analyzed your body language, concluding that the two of you were not getting along. You were touching her, she was leaning away. Did they get it right?
A: [Looks at the pictures] Absolutely not.
Q: Is it disturbing to see that?
A: No, it's very funny.
Q: Are you going to ask Tea to act differently in public?
A: Yeah, how about putting an arm around me? The funny thing is you could do that with anything. [Looks at some of the other couples shown] Without reading what they say, just from looking at this photograph, I'm predicting that they're saying there's trouble between Andre Agassi and Brooke Shields. [Reads it] Oh no, they like them. Oh wait, there's a great photo--look at Woody and Soon-Yi. Not too hard to read. [Woody stands apart from Soon-Yi, covering his face with one hand, as she looks the other way] Oh, they like them, too. Are we the only ones who get thumbs down? They should have a picture of Tommy Lee slugging Pamela ... "Well in this one we see that Tommy and Pamela are having a difficult time."
Q: Have you ever read any self-help books?
A: Oh yeah. One that I read that helped my self was called Healing the Shame That Binds You. Terrible title. It's by John Bradshaw, who's a famous family dynamics guru.
Q: How long ago did you read it?
A: Ten or twelve years ago. It was good for me.
Q: What were you ashamed of?
A: Everything. Of being a failure. Sex. Money. Anybody knowing my feelings. I was just very afraid to have anybody know what I really wanted or who I was.
Q: How spiritual is your spiritual side?
A: I don't know. I wouldn't know how to quantify the spirituality of it.
Q: Do you believe in an afterlife?
A: Not in the sense that I'm gonna be there. My feeling of who we are is tied to things like where we're born, how we're raised, what we look like, education. All these things mold a particular soul. I would hope that whenever you shed all of those things, the temporality of this life, you also get to go beyond that personality. My idea of hell would be, you go to heaven and you're yourself up there.
Q: Are you easily intimidated?
A: No.
Q: Do you believe in revenge?
A: I get little vendettas going, but I don't have any all-consuming need That takes a lot of energy.
Q: How competitive are you?
A: I was before I had some of my own. I'm less so now.
Q: Have you ever been conned?
A: Yeah. I'm fairly trusting, so I get conned. I've had long-term cons, like with friendship that was a con. Part of a con is that you have to be involved in it--they play on the lies that you tell yourself. A lie that I might have told myself in the past is that other people have my best interests at heart, when in fact other people always have their own best interests at heart. But not anymore.
Q: Your parents split up when you were 11, which had to have affected you. Is it possible to have a happy childhood?
A: It's not anybody's fault when we have an unhappy childhood. That's the nature of life--it's difficult and we get hurt. If we live to be this age we've been hurt many, many times. I used to have this therapist, and whenever I was depressed I'd say, "God, it's not ever going to end. I'm going to be sad forever." And he'd say, "Well, have you ever been happy?" And I'd go, "Yeah, from time to time." "Were you scared that that wasn't going to end?" "No." And he'd go, "Well, sad ends, happy ends, it's just a cycle."
Q: What kind of a kid were you?
A: I had to go to a psychologist, and he put me in a room to play by myself--I found out later they watched to see if I was beating things or whatever.
Q: What was the reason for that?
A: I was hyperactive and they didn't know what that was. I was hard to handle. My mother, bless her, stood up and said, "Just because you can't handle my son doesn't mean that he has a problem." That was strong of her to do then. She stood up for me.
Q: Who thought you should be tested?
A: The school. And the school was extremely progressive--Downtown Community School, which was founded by Pete Seeger. It was one big classroom and we all learned at our own pace. I was smarter then than I am now. I wrote a novel in second grade and I chose as my protagonist a penny called Abe, which meant he had many experiences, because a penny gets spent and goes from pocket to pocket.
Q: What happened to the penny at the end?
A: Abe ended up on a railroad track flattened.
Q: You also wrote a novel in college which you called Wherever There Are Two. Oliver Stone recently published his early novel. Do you have any interest in seeing yours published?
A: I would show it, but I know I wouldn't be interested in working on it. Did Oliver Stone go back and work on it?
Q: He did, but he tried to keep it in the voice he used when he was 19.
A: I think the only virtue of something like that is keeping it as it is. If somebody wanted to publish it, I guess I would. Why not? I don't think it would embarrass me. I'm more interested in a volume of poems I'm working on. I'd like to publish them.
Q: That should make you a bundle.
A: Probably the best thing about poetry is you can't get rich from it. If I take my hiatus without working this year, which I probably will do, it will give me time to see what I have.
Q: Would you publish one of your poems with this interview?
A: Yeah, sure I would do that.
Q: I read that you wrote poems to a girlfriend who got married and her husband threw the only copies away. What writer writes without keeping a copy?
A: Me. They were on those aerograms.
Q: Think that former girlfriend has any regrets?
A: No, I think she's happy in her life.
Q: Are there any lies you've told former girlfriends you'd like to retract?
A: No, because I think they found out and have either forgiven me or not.
Q: As a graduate student at Yale, you studied with one of the giants of academia, Harold Bloom.
A: He had a mind that was unlike any other. He's the librarian of Western culture. Of anybody in the world to have a conversation with about books, you'd want to talk to Harold Bloom. If I could just have Harold in my car stereo and go, "Talk to me about Milton today," it would be fascinating.
Q: Saul Bellow said Harold Bloom has one of these souls that began to wither under the influence of too much education.
A: Harold Bloom's philosophy is about the soul withering under education. The Anxiety of Influence, his most famous treatise, is about being crushed by what came before. If you come to a strong writer too early, you don't write.That's one of the problems with my education. I don't think it's such a great idea to expose young creative people to the best that Western culture has to offer because then you go, "What am I going to do?"
Q: Did you ever want to study abroad?
A: I was up once for a Rhodes scholarship. I made it to the regionals, which involved an interview. They put us all in a room and we're all sure we were being watched. When it was my turn I walked in the door and there were 10 people. As soon as I stepped into the room, the questions started--I didn't even get to sit down. The first question was: does a fiction writer have any responsibility to teach good morality?
Q: And what position did you take?
A: Obviously the wrong one. [Laughs] I said no. But this was the Rhodes scholarship committee and the answer they wanted was yes. I'm involved in something similar now with discussions about violence. What is the effect of entertainment on morality? It's an impossible discussion. When the state decrees what art should tackle and how they should do it, you get the 70 years of Soviet realist art that no one wants to look at now. I always go back to Milton's essay on censorship, which basically said: the devil exists--is it our responsibility as teachers to show our children only God and leave them to be surprised by the devil and taken more easily?
Q: John Grisham challenged Oliver Stone over this issue, saying that Stone had to be partially blamed for the true-life murder spree committed by a couple who dropped acid and watched Natural Born Killers.
A: Well, see, Grisham can't write. He's an idiot for doing that. How many more people have taken machine guns to other people while quoting scripture? There's no accounting for human nature. If they hadn't been copying Natural Born Killers they would have come up with it on their own. You can't define causality in that way.
Q: So the bottom line with you, then, is not to legislate degrees of violence but be responsible about what you watch?
A: I'm for violence occurring offstage, but you go back and look at the Greek plays-- they're much more violent than anything we have. And much more profoundly disturbing. When's the last time we've had a hit movie about some guy fucking his mother? And yet it's one of the central works of Greek art, and we now think of it as high culture. They've got a play about a woman going crazy and eating her son. Big hit! Try and get that one made. Unfortunately, you have the marketplace determining what's going to be made.
Q: What's the most violent thing that's appeared on The X-Files?
A: We've had huge canker sores exploding; a guy who ate somebody else's livers; a guy who has no body fat himself and survives by sucking the fat out of fat women. It doesn't get any worse than that, does it? We killed a little dog, and we got so many letters--you kill a dog, forget it. You can kill as many people as you want, but if you kill a Pomeranian, you're in danger of losing an audience.
Q: Anthony Hopkins told me, "Actors are of no consequence. Most actors are pretty simpleminded people who just think they're complicated."
A: [Laughs] I don't think I'm simpleminded, which is different from being simple. I respect simplicity. I think I'm intelligent. I definitely think a lot, which is not necessarily an advantage for an actor. Intelligence and thinking are not what we want from our actors. We want spontaneity and instinct. We want them to do the things that we don't do. Anybody can sit and think. But acting is like any other profession: you've got interesting people in it and you've got boring people in it.
Q: What's your definition of an actor?
A: One of the best definitions of an actor I ever saw was Pauline Kael talking about Brando, where she said as an actor he always looked like he was about to say something more interesting than he eventually did. I think Nicholson has that too. It's a gift.
Q: Whose work will you go out of your way to see?
A: I'll go see Pacino. Duvall. I'll always see Brando, even in The Island of Dr. Moreau. I like Nicolas Cage. Sean Penn. Travolta. There are a lot of famous actors who are good. And there are a lot of non-famous actors who are wonderful.
Q: What's the hardest thing about acting?
A: The waste of time. I like acting, but not living in the trailer and waiting for setup after setup. I haven't been able to make productive use of that time. It's not quite free time. There's work coming up--so it's like this tense boredom. It's not even just flat boredom.
Q: Do you have any friends who can hang out with you?
A: Not really. I don't have a key man. I've got to get one. I love the idea of a key man. Old-time actors have key men. It's always a guy. The new actors have assistants, who are usually women. But the old-time guys have the guy from the neighborhood, guy they grew up with, the key man. He checks out what's for lunch, he's always around.
Q: Have you ever wanted to play Hamlet, supposedly every actor's dream role?
A: Hamlets are no good when they get close to 40. It's like, What are you whining about your parents for? If he's 40, you lose respect for him.
Q: Are you superstitious at all as an actor?
A: Yeah, but not so much that I can tell you what it is that I do. I save my scripts, I have a sentimental attachment to them, with the notes that I write in the margin. Some of them are personal: "Think of Dad when you saw him peeing," or something secret like that.
Q: What did you think of Brando's comment that the Jews run Hollywood?
A: If you look at it objectively, Jews created a lot of the studios, Jews do a lot of the agenting, Jews do a lot of the producing. But when you say something like "Jews run Hollywood," it's an anti-Semitic comment, as if some other race or religion is better suited to running it. As if the Jews have an agenda in the movies that they make. I don't believe that. It's like when people say Jews are bankers. Maybe so--but why? Because they weren't allowed to own land and the only thing they could trade in was money or jewelry, that's why Jews are jewelers and bankers. Not because they love money and are all a bunch of Fagins and Shylocks, it's because that was the only avenue opened to a Jew in ancient Europe. I think it's a pity that Brando would have to say something like that, but objectively there's a lot of truth to it. But I think Brando's smarter and more sensitive than that.
Q: Some offbeat questions: what are your favorite foods?
A: I don't know, but let me tell you something funny. There's this snowboarding kid from the Olympics, Ross Rebagliati. He's from a little town not far from Vancouver, so when he got his medal reinstated and came back home he was all over the local news. He's 26 and has got nothing to say, but they're treating him like royalty. It was hilarious to watch. The mayor, who was trying to score big time, makes a big speech and brings out Ross and says, "We know you've had all the tough questions from all the journalists, but now we'll give you the real tough questions. We had our second-grade elementary class write questions they want to know." And they were questions like, "Did you ever lose hope?" And he gave great answers-- he's a snowboarder, and wow, he's, like, Jesus. So then they go, "What is your favorite food?" And he takes the mike and gives it a lot of thought. It's the most seriously he's taken any question. And comes up with "Honey Nut Com Flakes." He truly is a hero.
Q: What depresses you?
A: How I don't seem to have enough energy to do all the things I want to do. Life seems to be long enough, I just don't know if I can stay awake.
Q: What are all the things you want to do?
A: Write. Have my family. Be what my mom calls a decent man. I'd like to cause less pain than there is. Maybe alleviate some pain.
Q: Can you see using your celebrity to alleviate pain?
A: Maybe, but that's not something that I think about.
Q: So you're not going to walk through land mines to bring attention to that problem?
A: I don't see that happening.
Q: What did you think about the death of Princess Diana?
A: Everybody was saying what a tragedy it was. I felt people were missing the point. It's not a tragedy. A tragedy makes sense in some deeply human way. This made no sense. This woman killed herself trying not to have her picture taken. I understand why. I understand the kind of craziness you get into. I understood everything she must have been going through to get away from these people. But that's not a tragedy. Tragedy is, like, glorious. This was horrible and tawdry.
Q: Think anybody learned anything from it?
A: I think people learn for a couple of weeks. That's human nature. Lessons don't stick.
Q: What have you learned about paparazzi?
A: It's worse when the paparazzi think you're hiding. As soon as they know that they're bugging you, they smell blood. When I'm with my wife, a real primal thing happens. You want to show your woman that you can protect. I know the worst thing I can do is to lose my temper, but you want to. I find that being a celebrity has introduced me to situations where I cannot win. Even the discussion of celebrity is one you can't win.
Q: What rock musicians or groups would you pay to see?
A: Plenty of them. I always wanted to be Mick Jagger.
Q: What song would you like to have written?
A: I wish I'd written "Wild Horses." "Gimme Shelter." Or "The Long and Winding Road." Or "Tangled Up in Blue."
Q: Who are the three people in your life you know you can trust?
A: My wife, my sister and my manager.
Q: All three are women. Does that make you feel more protected or isolated?
A: Physically I feel more protected and isolated at the same time. I feel protected because it's hard to get to me on the set, but isolated because strangers know me and I don't know them, so I feel vulnerable. Ultimately I feel much more protected in marriage than anything else, because I feel protected by Tea in an intimate way, in a sense that she knows me and all the other noise that happens in the world of being known is just noise.
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Lawrence Grobel interviewed Nicolas Cage for the June '98 issue of Movieline.