The X-Files movie opens as a bomb is discovered within a Federal building in downtown Dallas. It quickly becomes apparent that the FBI can't disarm the explosives, so Mulder and Scully flee the structure and try to escape by car. Designed to start the film off (literally) with a bang, the sequence allowed the filmmakers to confront the audience with a large-scale event as it unfolds in full impact and scope. This marked a true departure point from the television show, which usually presents only the aftermath of a cataclysmic event. "I think I went through that sequence seven or eight times in the storyboards," recalls Bowman. "I had all of the classic angles that we are used to seeing for explosions, but I still thought, 'There's something that's not breaking through here. We haven't cut through to anything special.' I wasn't inside [Mulder and Scully's] car as much as I should have been because all of the typical angles for the explosion were outside of the vehicle. So I decided to do a version of the storyboards where we see the entire sequence from only inside the car.
"Although that's not exactly what ended up in the finished film, it is the crux of the [visual perspective]. You are with Mulder and Scully right next to that exploding building. Although there were a lot neat shots outside the car that we didn't cover, the sequence sets the tone for the entire movie by establishing the audience's perspective, which is right alongside Mulder and Scully."
The sequence offered its share of logistical challenges. Bowman notes, "We worked with the special effects and visual effects guys using hydraulic rigs and propane explosions. We also got some brave stunt work from David and Gillian, who crashed into some parked cars without wearing seat belts. All of those elements were combined to create what I think is a very visceral experience that's not made up of typical movie gags."
"Rob really wanted to always be right there with the actors, as we see the explosion through the car's back windshield," says Russell. "The effects department built a car body on a traveling trailer. The car could have its windows blown out repeatedly, and it could be thrown up in the air by a shockwave effect [ostensibly created by the building blast]. As the shockwave approaches, we see five other cars on the street behind them being blown over like leaves, which is very effective. We had three cameras in the traveling car: a two-shot [on Duchovny and Anderson] and a close-up of each to get their reactions as they're flung about in the car. At the same time, we see the explosion in the rear window. It really feels like you're there with them."
Russell adds that he was able to schedule the explosion so that the sun offered a back crosslight. He sought to keep its rays off the front of the building, allowing the blast to stand out more forcefully. The building could only be detonated once, so additional takes featuring Duchovny and Anderson being thrown around inside the bucking car were filmed as mortars and fire bombs were triggered behind the process trailer. To create interactive lighting in the car, three dimmer-controlled Maxi-Brutes, gelled red and orange, were driven alongside the vehicle to create a back-cross lighting effect motivated by the flaming blast.
A substantial portion of The X-Files occurs in an FBI interrogation/debriefing room, where Mulder and Scully are interviewed extensively by their FBI superiors. These scenes were shot on location within the vacant 26th floor of the Unical building in downtown Los Angeles. Russell details, "The interrogation room was a dark-paneled rectangular space with an eight-foot-high hard ceiling, no lights and some doors at one end. The challenge was to make the scenes visually interesting in this big boring box where you couldn't hide anything. Fortunately, there were light troughs at the top of the wall around the room, so we doubled up the fluorescents inside them all the way around the room to get a wash of light bleeding down the walls. There was a big table at one end of the room where the FBI's review board sat; there was a big Federal logo and some flags on the wall behind them, so I highlighted those elements with Peppers on the ground to add some visual interest. Additionally, on the tables, I had some small goose-neck desk lamps, so we made sure that everyone had plenty of white paper in front of them on the table to bounce a little bit of light up from below.
"The rest of the lighting was then a matter of designing the windows so that I could position lights outside them and create a broad, soft light source. The art department found some large vertical blinds that we could open and close like shutters; those allowed us to increase or decrease the intensity of the light as needed, and also to focus the light. I had six 20Ks outside shooting through 1000H paper on the windows. As long as we shot from angles into the light, we got a nice moody look for the people in the room. When we shot head-on, we also got a nice soft half-light coming in, so I would then just play the extremes overexposing the key by a stop and using a slight level of fill to make the other side go three stops under."
"Basically, the windows served as the only source in the room," adds gaffer Jerry Solomon. "But the window light was wrapping [around the actors] enough that we didn't really need to fill much. Depending on what we saw, we'd then determine whether or not we'd add fill or put a bounce card in. For the interiors, Ward generally used a lot of broad, soft sources from both the side and back.
"From the crew's perspective, the biggest challenge on the film was the lack of prep," Solomon continues. "We basically had two types of setups on the movie: the exterior location work which was first up on the schedule and then the stage work. We were shooting the exterior scenes as we were prepping the stages. We often had to shoot our tests on our lunch hour and on weekends to make sure that what we had in mind was going to work."
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