Talking to Vince Gilligan about one of his most popular episodes of The X-Files, "X-Cops," 25 years to the day after it originally aired, felt like a mini-X-File in itself.
The inventive episode, which aired on February 20, 2000, finds F.B.I. agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Emmy-winner Gillian Anderson) struggling — in real-time — to investigate a shape-shifting entity that preys on human fear while the duo are also being chronicled by the Cops film crew. "X-Cops" fully commits to the Cops aesthetic, complete with using the show’s iconic "Bad Boys" theme song by Inner Circle, as well as strobing police siren-themed commercial “bumpers” in the style of those seen on Cops.
Episodes that went "outside the box," like this crossover installment, were a calling card of Gilligan’s work on the series at the time, with "X-Cops" stemming from the future Breaking Bad creator’s fascination with the long-running Fox docuseries.
"I was a big fan of the TV show, Cops," Gilligan explains in an exclusive interview. "And I just wanted [our episode] to look as much like Cops as possible. I was very excited that we shot on video, too."
ABOVE: Writer Vince Gilligan, seen here at a 2013 Television Academy event (Photo courtesy of AP/Invision for the Television Academy)
In honor of the fan-favorite episode’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Gilligan breaks down for the Television Academy how “X-Cops” came to be, using key camera crew from Cops to film it and why it turned out to be one of the most fun episodes for cast and crew to shoot.
Television Academy: In your script for “X-Cops,” how fully did you commit to the bit? Like, did you write in your script that the episode would open with the traditional Cops disclaimer title card or was that something the network implemented?
Vince Gilligan: That was not my idea. That was the studio or network. Nielsen ratings meant the world back then, they don't mean as much now, but [Fox] didn't want people thinking, "oh, the schedule is screwed up. They're showing Cops. And I was tuning in for The X-Files." They didn't want people tuning out and messing up the Nielsen ratings for that week. I think it had everything to do with our executives who ran Fox at the time, worrying that people would think that X-Files fans would tune out and therefore, we'd get a decrease in our Nielsen ratings.
It's amazing to think that the network would be worried that fans tuning in to a show in its seventh season would forget what show they were watching.
[Laughs] But I understand the thinking. I just wanted [“X-Cops”] to look as much like an episode of Cops as possible. It was a big deal, for instance, as I recall, to shoot it on video, instead of shooting it on the normal 35mm Kodak stock that we shot the show on. And I felt that was important.
What were those discussions like internally?
There was some conversations internally with [X-Files creator and showrunner] Chris Carter and Michael Watkins, the director, and some of the other producers of the show. The thought being that — if we shoot it on film, we can always bump it on to video. But I didn’t think that it would look the same. I was a big fan of the TV show, Cops. And I just wanted [our episode] to look as much like Cops as possible. I was very excited that we shot on video, too. I won that battle.
And we shot with Bertram van Munster, who was a producer on Cops at the time. He was a great guy, he went on to create The Amazing Race. He was one of their lead camera operators; he’d be the guy riding around with this big camcorder on his shoulder, riding around the back of these squad cars on Cops. He photographed a fair bit of the episode himself, because I said to John Langley, the creator of Cops — who I got to know a little bit, who was a great guy — that it would be great to have this episode look and feel like one of theirs. And both John and Bertram van Munster were very excited about the crossover.
So you talked to them about how to best achieve the Cops aesthetic on The X-Files?
I talked to them for as long as they would let me. What can we do to make it look as much like a Cops episode as possible? Because I actually did want to fool people. And Fox was probably smart to say, “we should probably put a disclaimer on there.” Because it takes a few minutes before Mulder and Scully show up, and we lose some viewers in the meantime. Although, Cops was very popular. So what we might have lost in X-Files viewers, we might have gained in Cops viewers.
How hard was it for cast and crew to adjust to this style of filming after being accustomed to the more traditional one-hour drama style?
As I recall, they really enjoyed it. I think they enjoyed it for a couple of reasons. It was something different. And this was season seven, so we were three-fourths or four-fifths of the way through shooting. And they were ready for a change.
The other thing I remember them being particularly excited about is because of the electronic news gathering idiom that we're going for, the visual look that we were going for, that shoots a lot faster than the way we would shoot a typical episode of The X-Files. I think our typical episode of The X-Files was a 13-day shoot. It was something like eight days [with] first unit and then five days, second unit. And, sometimes, we even had third units. It was a megillah to shoot a regular episode of The X-Files. Don’t quote me on this, but my memory of the shoot is: Michael directed and shot this thing in five or six days. And I think, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, as I recall, were very happy about that, because they got to wrap sooner. We were working them like crazy. All of us were working hard, but they had a tough job. But I recall, they were really running on fumes at that point. And we were really working hard.
That was not the intention of the episode, but it was nice. And inadvertently, it gave them, as I recall, a break. And they had fun. It was probably more like putting on a stage play than a typical episode of The X-Files would be, where you have to do take after take. We did a lot of takes of this, as I recall, but they were ones that would last, sometimes, three or four minutes.
I read an interview with Anderson, where she said that there was a three-and-a-half page scene that was shot in about three hours, and then they were done for the day — which she appreciated.
I'm sure she's right — and that was very unusual for The X-Files. I got to direct two episodes of The X-Files and they were more standard episodes. I had the best time doing it. It was time-consuming to direct an X-Files. Out of 202 episodes, this was the one that was done in maybe half the time.
At the time the episode aired, the seventh season was rumored to be the show’s last, and you had pitched this crossover a few times prior to that. Did Chris Carter and the producers finally greenlight it because the feeling was they were near the end so let’s do it?
As I recall, I wore Chris Carter down [laughs]. I bugged him for a while about directing and I eventually wore him down on that, God bless him. I will be eternally grateful to Chris Carter, because, I mean, he changed my life. I wore him down on the Cops crossover. And finally, at one point, he was just like, “I'm tired of hearing about it. Just go ahead and do it.” So, God bless him.
This episode, like most X-Files episodes, has to deliver a ton of exposition and that is not easy to do in a dynamic, character-driven way. But, in your episodes, you seem to effortlessly pull it off. How hard is that to do, week-in and week-out, write was is essentially the same scene but with different “cases of the week”?
I'm very flattered by that. That means a lot to me because we have a long-standing, running joke in all the writers rooms I've been in where we get to a point of — how are we going to get this exposition across? And then someone in the room invariably says, “Dave, how long have we been brothers?” Which is our line, which is like the “bad” way of delivering exposition. Brothers are not going to say that to each other [in real-life], one brother is not going to ask that question of another brother. They know how long they have been siblings. But, in the writers room, that's our go-to line when we come upon what we think is going to be a particularly clunky bit of exposition.
I think the shorter answer, though, is just to be allergic to the "Dave, how long have we been brothers?" moments and work like hell to avoid them. I'm definitely not any smarter or better than anybody else I've ever worked with. There was a lot of midnight oil being burned, trying to figure out how to get exposition across [in these episodes] in a way that didn't seem expositional. One of the many things I learned working on The X-Files for seven years was, how little the audience needs explained to them. It took me years to learn that as a writer, but it was an invaluable lesson. And you don't learn it just from writing many episodes of TV, you learn it from spending hours and hours in the editing room. You come to realize that there are whole reams of dialogue that you can cut out in an editing room — because the actors are so good.
You learn to trust your actors, these great actors like David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, or Bryan Cranston, or like [Better Call Saul’s] Rhea Seehorn. You learn to trust them. These actors, they can convey stuff almost like they're beaming it at you telepathically. It took me years, but you finally learn that. And then you start feeling good about cutting out the dialogue, either on the computer or in the editing room.
[Working on The X-Files] was like seven years of going to film school, except they were paying me to attend.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The X-Files is now streaming on Hulu.
