'X-Files' creator Chris Carter kept one secret even from stars

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Chris Carter could always keep a secret.

The creator of The X-Files let one slip this month during a Fox session to talk with reporters about the six-episode reboot of the series.

I asked whether he'd continued thinking about the characters in the years since he'd been away from them - the show ended in 2002, and the second movie, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, was released in 2008 - or whether he'd begun thinking about them only when Fox called to ask him to write for them.

That's when we heard about the third movie. And by we, I mean a couple of hundred reporters at the Television Critics Association's winter meetings and X-Files stars Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, who looked surprised.

"I did have to sit down and come up with an idea," Carter said. But there had been "casual talk" of doing a third movie, "and so I actually wrote a third movie just because I was interested in where that might go."

After Fox called to ask him about reviving the series on a limited basis, Carter said, "I let my wife read the third movie, and she says, 'I think not for television,' " suggesting something else he'd written would be more appropriate.

"And that's how the mythology, the entry into the mythology, came about" for the new X-Files series, Carter said.

Afterward, I asked Anderson whether she'd actually been surprised.

"Yeah, I did not know that information," she said, adding, in response to another reporter's question, that the cast had all been willing to do another movie.

"From the time that we ended the second film, you know that the idea was that we would potentially do another movie, if we were allowed, if Fox would fund it, and if Chris got it together," Anderson said.

One thing that didn't surprise her was that Carter, having written a script, hadn't told his stars.

"I did it all in secret," he explained later. "I didn't tell anyone, and I showed it to very few people. Because for me, it was really kind of an exercise in seeing how I felt about the characters, how I felt about their professional and personal lives. And it's just keeping those voices alive for me."

And though none of the script made it into the six-episode TV event, Carter hasn't given up on making a third movie.

"I think it's got really interesting stuff in it. I can tell you that Robert Patrick would be a part of that story, as I conceived of it. He's on another television show [CBS's Scorpion], so he wasn't able to be part of this. Which is unfortunate, because I really loved working with him," he said.

"I think that if there were to be a big movie, it would have to be a really big-budget movie. That's what X-Files fans want out of a big-screen experience."

Anderson, meanwhile, seems pleased that her second small-screen X-Files experience wasn't as draining as the first.

"When I ended this series, I didn't know if I could be on a set again. You know, it was nine seasons and I was exhausted. And everything becomes really kind of intense and incestuous and just weird at the end of being with the same crew for so many years. And the first thing I wanted to do was to do theater, and I went to London to do that and realized this is where I want to be," said the actress, who grew up in London and Michigan and who's also appearing - as a Russian with an English accent - in Lifetime's War & Peace.

The decision to come back hinged, she said, on the number of episodes.

"I'm committed to other things," she said. "I've got three children. And so it needed to be a small amount of episodes. And before last year, [broadcast] networks were barely able to have that conversation, about allowing things to be less than 13, minimum. So it really wasn't until that could happen that I could think about it."

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