Defenders of Justice
The Story of the Lone Gunmen
[Transcribed by Libby]
Frank Spotnitz:
The idea of doing a Lone Gunman spin-off had been suggested very early on.
Michael McKean:
I always thought it was perfectly cast. They all had that kind of great visual take on who they were.
[Langly: We tell the stories others refuse to tell.]
Bruce Harwood:
I'm Bruce Harwood, I play Byers.
Dean Haglund:
I'm Dean Haglund, I play Langly.
Tom Braidwood:
I'm Tom Braidwood, I play Frohike.
All:
And we're the Lone Gunmen.
Frank Spotnitz
Executive Producer
Actually the Lone Gunmen were introduced onto the X-Files in the first season, in an episode written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, called E.B.E.
Byers: We're talking about a dark network. A government within a government, controlling our every move.
Bruce Harwood
John Fitzgerald Byers
I went in. I auditioned once. I got the part. Then I didn't think much of it. And then they just kept calling me back for one day here, one day there, playing these characters.
[Mulder: All right, what do you know about the Gulf War Syndrome?
Langly: Agent Orange of the 90s.
Byers: Artillery shells coated with depleted uranium.]
Vince Gilligan
Executive Producer
Jim Wong and Glen Morgan, who created the characters of the Lone Gunmen, had a little difficulty casting the character of Frohike. They had already cast Bruce Harwood as Byers and they'd cast Dean Haglund as Langly. But the third character was kind of illusive.
[Mulder: Hey, Frohike. Can I borrow those?
Frohike: If I can have Scully's phone number. ]
Chris Carter
Executive Producer
Glen Morgan and James Wong had written them to sort of become the kind of even more paranoid group than Agent Mulder. In fact, that's the way they were billed, as the paranoids.
John Shiban
Executive Producer
These are unlikely heroes, not only in their characters but in the actors we cast. That's for us the fun of it.
Chris Carter:
They were funny, they ended up becoming, for the writers subsequent to that, a kind of comic relief. We'd always go to the Lone Gunmen when we wanted strange and weird facts, information.
[Byers: That is the Eurasian cluster fly. They infest vegetation like apples or cherries, and can inflict a great deal of damage to crops.]
Dean Haglund
Richard 'Ringo' Langly
Each episode that we got as the Gunmen in those little early years were feeding the next one so the information that we got from the first one would inform the character choices which we would make for each following episode.
Frank Spotnitz:
The Lone Gunmen were very popular among the writers on the show and we were always looking for ways to bring them back. Ironically, they almost were no more in season 4 because Glen and Jim, who had returned to the show for a number of episodes in season 4, had written an episode called 'Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man'. The end of that episode originally had Frohike being killed by the Cigarette Smoking Man, shot in the head. We were all very upset, all of us who were on the show and were going to stay on the show. We didn't want these characters to go, and so we made our case to Chris, and if you watch that episode again, the music actually sort of ramps up to the moment when Frohike is about to die and then it's almost like it goes back in reverse, like that moment was supposed to happen but didn't happen. We were all glad that they got a reprieve and lived another day. So, at the beginning of season 5, we were without David and Gillian for a number of weeks because they were still filming the X-Files feature film and so we had to find ways to start the series so we could debut in time in the Fall but not have their characters. So Vince Gilligan, my colleague, came up with the idea of doing a Lone Gunmen episode.
[The Lone Gunmen together in a police cell.]
Vince Gilligan:
The Lone Gunmen first appeared as cameo characters and I always wanted to see more. We got our opportunity with an episode called 'The Unusual Suspects'. That was an episode that our three guys carried, and carried it admirably.
Frank Spotnitz:
Due to the success of that episode, we then did another episode, a comedic episode with the Lone Gunmen, called 'Three of a Kind', set in Las Vegas. And I think that episode was such a success and a pleasure to write and watch that it really was the spark for the idea of doing a Lone Gunmen TV series.
Chris Carter:
Frank Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan, and John Shiban came to me and said, 'we'd like to do a spin-off of the X-Files, starring the Lone Gunmen.' And it seemed like a perfect idea.
[Langly (to Fletcher): Do you want to know why Joey Ramone's my hero? 'cos people like you never managed to grind him down. They never stole his spirit. He never gave in, never gave up and never sold out. Right till his last breath.]
John Shiban:
I'm not sure they got it until we actually pitched it and we sat in a room with the Fox executives and pitched broad strokes of the pilot episode, and the mystery of it.
Frank Spotnitz:
Because the three leading men aren't classical leading men, aren't the types of guys who normally drive a network television series. And we all had quite a hard time picturing what it would be. When we finally did this episode 'Three of a Kind' at the end of season 6 of the X-Files, it became clear to us what this show could be. It could be Mission Impossible with three geeks. And we knew from the pilot that we needed someone else for them to play off against and someone else who was going to help redefine the world of the Lone Gunmen as opposed to the world of the X-Files. And that became the character Zuleikha Robinson played, Yves Adele Harlow, which is an anagram for Lee Harvey Oswald, and we always looked at her as a sort of competitor, a competitor who you would not know for the longest time whether she was good or bad, what side she was fighting on. All you knew is that she was thwarting the Lone Gunmen's attempts to get their stories.
Tom Braidwood
Melvin Frohike
The first day that Zuleikha and I met was the day that we were doing the episode when I was hanging on the wires and I end up upside down and she's dressed up as a guy and she kisses me. And she was so bashful about it all, she felt so badly that we didn't know one another and she had to kiss me while I was hanging upside down. (laughs)
Zuleikha Robinson
Yves Adele Harlow
I was the ugliest man I think I've ever seen in my entire life. They put the short wig on and I said, 'ok, ok, don't look so bad with short hair' and they put the moustache on and I'm just like, 'oh, I'm so ugly'. And I went outside and I was playing around and asking women if they'd go out with me and they're all just standing there going...because I was just so weird looking.
[Byers: Are you sure that man with a beard was Yves Adele Harlow?
Frohike: Trust me. No guy kisses like that.]
Mat Beck
Visual Effects Supervisor
The shot where Frohike was dangling was actually kind of fun just because it was so comic. It was both a simple and a difficult shot.
Rob Bowman
Director
Wire work is an art in itself. You can't just stick actors in them and say 'ok, now fly around the room, look like you know what you're doing'. There are artists who do that and double actors and so the fact that he was able to stay in character, survive a day in the harness which makes your mid area really sore, and then perform acrobatics that are actually fun and entertaining. He dove into that role as though he was made for it.
Robert McLachlan, C.S.C.
Director of Photography
You know, we did have a stunt double but poor Tom had to be hanging in that thing an awful lot and I don't remember if he got out of it and threw up or not but I know we were all, judging by the look on his face, we were all being really careful not to stand under him after two or three takes. (laughs)
[Car wrecking place. Frohike falls face down in the mud.]
Bruce Harwood:
ABC Recycling was an actual car reclamation thing and it was filthy, it was wet, it was cold, the mud was about this deep (hold his thumb and forefinger about 3 inches apart) and it was toxic mud because it was full of rust and gasoline and who-knows-what.
Tom Braidwood:
It was fun. The director really wanted me to do it. They had a stunt double. I said I would do it but I would only do it once, that if it didn't work I wasn't going to do it twice.
Bob Comer
Special Effects Coordinator
There were all those safety concerns too, because there was metal in there. So what we had to do is we actually scraped out a square area about 6 feet to 8 feet square and about 9 inches deep and cleared it off completely and we put a base in there so that it couldn't be polluted by other stuff. And we filled it with a combination of peat moss and a special clay and mixed it all up, so it was all very clean.
Tom Braidwood:
I just went for it, you know, I just sort of figured out the timing on it and we went back and we did it the first take. And I did the face-plant in the mud and I guess they were happy with it because that's what ended up being cut into the picture.
Rob Bowman:
This old friend, you know, run and fall down face first, dig his face into the mud to make sure it's under good, then come up and play as if it's not there. I can't say that I had to sort of cover my mouth laughing at the monitor. I applaud his commitment to doing it, and fearlessness also.
[Langly using a computer showing the track of the aircraft towards the World Trade Center.]
Frank Spotnitz:
We were trying to imagine, you know, crimes that weren't paranormal. That would involve serving terrorism, in this case government-sponsored terrorism. So we came up with the idea of running an airliner into the World Trade Center in Manhattan.
John Shiban:
As a writer and particularly on the X-Files, that's the kind of stuff you spend your day doing, you're supposed to imagine the unimaginable and the unthinkable. We want to set these characters up as heroes who are going to, unbeknownst to all of us, save the world. What would be a terrible, horrible thing that could happen. Unfortunately, it was the World Trade Center.
Frank Spotnitz:
I have to say, at the time if it ever occurred to me I imagined well of course the government has already thought about things like this, of course there are systems in place to, you know, if we can imagine it we're just Hollywood writers, there are people in the Defense Department in Washington, D.C., who are charged with defending our country who think about these things and that there are things in place to defend against it. And I remember that Mat Beck, who did our visual effects, flew to New York and was in a helicopter buzzing around the World Trade Center to get all the shots that were used as plates to cut in with the CGI plane.
Mat Beck:
In retrospect, you know, it's a little bit painful to talk about, but I went there and, you know, we did a lot of flying around in the helicopter and I kept doing pass after pass, flying at the building. We actually flew over it quite close to it and, you know, we got footage that, you know, was beautiful and in retrospect really poignant.
John Peter Kousakis
Co-Executive Producer
We got special permits at the time to go into New York city, to have a helicopter shoot at night heading towards the towers. I mean, you know, the difficulty in just mounting that and getting the authorization to do it, and here, you know, months later.
Frank Spotnitz:
And the morning of 9/11, I was directing an episode of the X-Files, and I woke up to see that on television, and my first thought was The Lone Gunmen. And of course my first thought was, god I hope, because I didn't know yet what had happened or why, but I thought I hope this has nothing to do with what we did on television 6 months ago, I hope we aren't somehow guilty of inspiring this or... it became clear within hours that of course we had nothing to do with it. But it was a terrible, obviously very terrible feeling.
John Shiban:
When you live in and work in a world that has so much imagination and then when reality just comes and sort of slaps you in the face, it's scary.
Frank Spotnitz:
I actually couldn't bring myself to even look at that episode again until I sat down to prepare for this interview today.
[Jimmy tells the Lone Gunmen that he wants to help them.]
Frank Spotnitz:
After looking at the pilot, which we were pleased with, we realized we needed one other character because the Lone Gunmen, even though we had staked out separate positions for the three of them, they all basically know the same thing, they all work for the same newspaper, they all have the same beliefs about conspiracies and the same knowledge about computers and they needed somebody they could talk to, they could explain this stuff to because the audience doesn't know all these things and it's not obvious to the audience. And so we came up with a character who would not only serve that function but also stand in relief to them because he would be a really classically good looking guy and could potentially serve as a love interest for Yves Adele Harlow which was unlikely for the three Lone Gunmen.
[Jimmy: These boys are out here because it's difficult, because people say it can't be done. They have courage.]
Bryan Spicer
Producer/Director
The Jimmy Bond character was the one that had the heart, he wasn't really smart but he always saw the love and the heart and the emotional side that people had.
Stephen Snedden
Jimmy Bond
I knew that I was going to be in other episodes. A lot of the crew, they just thought I was a guest star, so people were coming up and they were saying, 'OK, bye. It was great, what a great job, it's a funny character too. Be nice to see you again.' And then I came back.
[Jimmy talks about how much he loves football.]
Stephen Snedden:
I didn't know what people's reactions were going to be to this character that I had been working on. Because it is a little bit absurd, and I thought, well, OK, let's film this and hope everybody likes it.
['Eine Kleine Frohike']
Vince Gilligan:
I love the teaser for 'Eine Kleine Frohike', harking back to the old Fox Movietone News and I love the way our special effects team, led by Mat Beck, mixed old Movietone footage with this really high-tech computer animation and maps and stuff of Europe during the way that segues beautifully.
[The German man handing an old photograph of a Nazi Officer, looking very much like Frohike, to the Gunmen.]
John Shiban:
Those of us who wrote for the show were geeks in the best sense of the word in that a geek is someone who is very passionate about a very small area of minutiae whether it's computers or cars, and I was always a film geek in a lot of ways and this was an opportunity for me to bring a lot of influences and play with them.
[Mrs Haag tries to persuade Frohike to eat a pastry which may be poisoned.]
John Shiban:
I'd always been a big fan of the Ealing comedies of the late 40s and 50s, British comedies, Alec Guinness, etc. and once we started doing the Lone Gunmen series it was something that I kept saying: I want to do The Lady Killers. For a lot of reasons, one that it's an undercover story, it's an undercover mission and there is so much tension in that, and from that tension so much comic possibilities in my mind. Just the character Frohike is such a ...he's driven, he's a little bit of a curmudgeon, and the idea to put him in a situation where he has to be a fish out of water and maintain another identity, I just knew it would be fun.
Tom Braidwood:
But it was so much fun to do and playing with Ruth Manning from New York who played the old German Frau – she was just a delight, she was an absolutely fantastic person to work with.
[Mrs Haag enters the bathroom while Frohike is taking a bath.]
Tom Braidwood:
The idea was outrageous and foolish and the whole idea of making me up to look like her son and all of that business. The make-up girls had a lot of fun, the costume people had a lot of fun doing all the different costumes for me. It was a fun, fun show. It was great.
Frank Spotnitz:
Another one of the ideas we had from the get-go about the Lone Gunmen was that we could have a lot more fun and be a lot looser in the tone of the show than the X-Files ever could be. And so that meant using a lot more source music.
Mark Snow
Composer
There was a music supervisor who found this most eclectic, bizarre, wonderful, stuff.
Frank Spotnitz:
We turned to a music supervisor named Barklie Griggs who would come up with dozens of possibilities for us, songs to use for these pieces. And so we had a great time inserting this music.
Mark Snow:
It was sort of an inspiration to me because when I heard these pieces, it made me think: boy ... and I knew that Chris Carter and company was going for this stuff. I knew I could really step out a bit, you know, out on a limb and try all kinds of things.
Frank Spotnitz:
Chris is enormously interested in music and listens to everything and is always listening to new music, so he really welcomed the chance to do a show where you could use a lot more contemporary and new music. And actually in the episode that he wrote by himself, 'Three Men and a Smoking Diaper', he specified what all the tracks would be. He knew exactly what he wanted and wrote for those tracks.
['Three Men and a Smoking Diaper']
Vince Gilligan:
Chris created the X-Files and he created that feeling of gloom and despair that we love so much from the X-Files, the thing to know about is Chris is a really funny guy in real life and that episode is that other side to him that you don't see that much, a lot of bodily function jokes and whatnot, and that's the other side of Chris Carter.
['Planet of the Frohikes']
Vince Gilligan:
I had the idea for intelligent animals created by the CIA or the Department of Defense a long time before this and I was thinking of a straight thriller.
Bruce Harwood:
I always say that you can tell chimps are smarter than actors because the monkey would get it right on the first take and then he'd be bored. And he could never understand why he had to do it over again. So you'd see that, say do this and he'd do it, and he'd do it once but no, we have to take it again for some reason and then he'd start thinking about other things to do. And his trainers would have to work really hard to get him back to do whatever it was he was supposed to be doing.
Dean Haglund:
When they were supposed to be typing on the computer, they would actually just use their strong fingers to pick off all the keys and eat them. So basically they ate our really great laptops.
Frank Spotnitz:
Working with chimpanzees is not easy. So we had a very hard time executing that show.
Stephen Snedden:
I remember there's one shot where they wanted to film all the chimps, they're all sitting together drawing. So I asked, let me sit down with the chimps and it kind of reflects my character, you know, very similar to the chimps. And I was drawing with crayons and this chimpanzee would reach over and he'd take the crayon from me, so I pick up another one and he was like a little kid, every colour that I drew with he wanted. He would take it away from me.
John Peter Kousakis:
Chimpanzees, by nature, don't work well in cold weather. They're not cold-weather animals. And that episode focused mainly and was driven by these chimpanzees. I remember receiving a call saying the chimpanzees won't work, they won't come out.
Vince Gilligan:
There's one scene toward the end, on the bridge, when they're going to make the switch, the chimp was going to go back to his Air Force doctor, but it was, I hear, bitterly cold and chimps do not like the cold. And, yes, there were special accommodations made for the chimps.
['Madam, I'm Adam']
Vince Gilligan:
'Madam, I'm Adam' is one of the craziest hours of TV ever and I'm so glad we somehow got it past the censors.
Tom Schnauz
Writer
I like it, right at the opening scene there's a shot of Stephen [Tobolowsky] sitting on the toilet so you know you're in for quality television when you (laughs) you turn on your television and there's a man sitting on the toilet. It doesn't get any better than this.
Frank Spotnitz:
The humor in that episode is so evil and nasty and just deliciously bad taste.
Tom Schnauz:
I pitched this idea about a man being reprogrammed because he's a bad guy, he's troubled and is it right for society to change a person, to make society safer or do you let the misfits run wild. It was a take-off on 'Clockwork Orange' sort of, somebody who was being reprogrammed. It became this very interesting thing about him arriving back at this house where he thinks he lives and the original owner coming right in behind him, it becomes a very funny situation.
Frank Spotnitz:
Tom Schnauz who has a deliciously perverse sense of humor, and if we were worried about Frohike's reactions to 'Eine Kleine Frohike' in which had to wear lederhosen, be bathed by an old woman, we were specially worried about his reaction to 'Madam, I'm Adam' where Stephen Tobolowsky, who is hilarious, keeps flashing to a midget wrestler whenever he sees Frohike.
Vince Gilligan:
Tom Braidwood is truly a class actor. He's a guy who put up with a lot of indignities, to say the least, during the making of this series and we god bless him for it because some of those moments were absolutely the funniest moments in the series.
Lou Bollo
Stunt Coordinator
We actually shot quite a long sequence of a fight of a wrestling match in a ring, that they had to have for video, and I brought in a stunt guy we have who's an ex-jockey, so he's the right size for this kind of thing, and he's pretty tough. And he went in there with this guy who's actually done some professional wrestling and that guy didn't know how to pull a punch, and he was just hammering the living heck out of this poor stunt guy. I mean, we would do a shot and then we'd, you know, talk about it a bit, and our stunt guy would come back and go, 'this guy's killing me, he's really killing me'. I'd go talk to the wrestler again and they'd go back and he'd hammer the heck out of him again, he's waling on him, and kicking him, and jumping on him. You couldn't get him to back away. It was the toughest day I think that stunt guy ever had.
[Adam telling Byers and Jimmy about his situation.]
Tom Schnauz:
He's just such a fantastic funny actor, he was just the best casting for the role. I mean, I couldn't imagine a better choice.
[Adam giving Byers a small tub of blue goo which he says is proof of alien abduction.]
Bob Comer:
I go to a local hairstyling company who made us two thousand gallons of blue gel. It had nothing else in it, it was just a blue gel, a clear blue gel. And we had to pump it in these big tanks. Well, we pumped it in on the weekend and the director, Bryan Spicer, came over on Saturday morning and said, uh, I can't see anything, you've got to change it. So we worked all weekend, we got this big, huge, pumper truck to suck it all out except one tank, and we filled it with blue water because he really wanted to be able to see the people in it. And what we didn't know is when you got like two hundred gallons of the stuff, you couldn't see anything in the tanks, so we just changed it all. And the only time we used the actual gel was when we saw him climbing into it and going to the bottom, but the rest of it was just water.
[The front of a house falling outwards.]
Dean Haglund:
They found a house that they were going to tear down that we could actually cut the front off of. So that house was about to be demolished and the locations guy found it perfectly so we could like just sheer off the whole front and it comes down. We only had one take to do that of course, as you can well imagine.
['Diagnosis, Jimmy']
Frank Spotnitz:
'Diagnosis, Jimmy' as in 'Diagnosis, Murder'. It didn't hurt that it was going to save us some money. It had some very clear James Bondian elements in it, in the ski chase. We were also looking for a way to give Steve Snedden more of a showcase episode, one that would really feature him.
Bryan Spicer:
We actually got to go up in Vancouver up on a mountain actually to film for two days up in the snow which was a challenge, I had actually never shot before in snow, but it was fun.
Vince Gilligan:
They shot the skiing scenes up in Whistler, up north of Vancouver. I think it was one of those situations where we wrote Jimmy and Yves skiing before we ever asked the two actors, Zuleikha or Stephen Snedden, whether or not they could ski.
Stephen Snedden:
The scene where I ski into the tree. Of course, I just kind of ski a couple of feet and then they put in someone and he skis in and there's a rope that yanks him back. I was blown away, I kept thinking if he just leans forward too far he'd hit himself on the nose.
Bryan Spicer:
Jimmy had a ski accident and ended up in the hospital.
John Shiban:
It's always a challenge when you have a character who's immobile. I kept, again, going back to what inspires me. I kept watching 'Rear Window' and thinking how do you solve this problem. And a lot of it is what the character sees and reacts to even though he can't move. And so we try to build set pieces around what he sees on TV, his suspicions of the doctor, what he hears from the next bed with the old man who may or may not be the victim, etc.
Stephen Snedden:
The toughest part was actually they put me in a real cast. So I would have to show up, put a cast on, and then they would saw the cast off, and do the same thing the next day.
['The Lying Game']
Vince Gilligan:
'The Lying Game' was a fun one because we got to work with Mitch Pileggi and it was so much fun to have him in that episode.
Frank Spotnitz:
At Ten Thirteen we'd always been against cross-overs. We resisted them throughout the run of Millennium, it had been suggested numerous times and we never did one, only after Millennium ended did we bring over Lance Henriksen to the X-Files. But with the Lone Gunmen, our feelings were completely different. We thought cross-overs would be fun because it's comedy, it's a completely different genre.
Vince Gilligan:
It was so good to see Mitch get to be funny, because Mitch in person is hilarious. He's absolutely not Assistant Director Skinner.
Stephen Snedden:
He's playing me playing him. The funniest thing – Mitch is such a nice guy, and he watched tapes of me and my performances.
Mat Beck:
We had of course Mitch who is a trouper, a really great guy to work with and we lined him up and we shot him with and without a tearable mask and then in order to make the sequence work, we actually had to take footage of him performing and track it on to a computer generated face so that we had control over the surfaces and that allowed him to actually deliver a line and then have his mouth pulled off and deliver a line again.
['Tango de los Pistoleros']
Tom Schnauz:
I'd had this idea about them going undercover and something to do with dance and I seem to remember pitching it being in a disco and luckily Frank Spotnitz said tango.
Frank Spotnitz:
The tango episode is one of my favorites because it gave Zuleikha Robinson so much to do, I know she loved doing it, and because it got to deepen the romance between her and Jimmy Bond, Steve Snedden's character.
Zuleikha Robinson:
The tango is such a beautiful dance and, you know, for Yves' character to actually do something normal. I think for me that was the best part about the whole show. The guy they cast to play opposite me was a fantastic dancer, he was a salsa dancer, he was John Vargas. It was very challenging because we really didn't have that much time at all to learn this dance.
Stephen Snedden:
I had to learn how to do an Elvis impersonation pretty quick. Then I had to learn how to tango dance, two or three lessons. Luckily I had a great partner, great people teaching, and out of necessity you learn. But that frightened me, (laughs) because I'm not that much of a dancer, especially I'd never tango danced.
Bruce Harwood:
We had to spend hours learning to tango for what was a 30 second opening bit or something like that. I am a terrible dancer and I hated learning how to tango. But the woman I danced with in the teaser was the woman who taught me and she was really good. It was nice because all I had to do was stand up straight and do the basic moves and she would dance around me.
Tom Braidwood:
This crash course in learning how to dance, and of course once the guys learned that while really in the tango the woman does all the work and we just stand there like an idiot and, you know, look good. Depending on how good she dances that's how good you look in the end.
Dean Haglund:
I don't want to brag, but that was me doing the splits. I have a bit of dance training in my background, not that you can tell from that shot, but I did four years of modern dance and three years of ballet as a double major in my theatre degree. So when they said: oh, just make up any sort of dancing you want, that is the result of thousands of dollars of tuition.
Frank Spotnitz:
One of the funny ideas of that script was that Frohike was in fact this incredible tango dancer and that he had this very hot Latin lover that he had abandoned and he had to go back and pick up the mantle again which was just hilarious.
Tom Braidwood:
The idea that Frohike had had this deep platonic relationship with this woman was kind of fun to work on, you know, it was enjoyable.
Tom Schnauz:
Just thematically it was the perfect choice for an episode because it's all about loneliness and isolation and so many of these characters, Yves and the Gunmen themselves, they're lonely characters. It's ultimately why the episode is so sad in the end is Yves and Santavos, two lonely characters sort of make a connection but Yves is doing it to get to another end, but she ultimately has romantic feelings for Santavos. So that makes it really sad in the end when he takes a knife in the back for her.
Vince Gilligan:
Bryan Spicer who was our linch-pin director, producer/director, who directed most of the Lone Gunmen episodes. I mean, every time we do one of these things he'd outdo but that one in particular, the tango contest sequence at the end, I think he had like half a day to shoot it.
Bryan Spicer:
You only have seven days of prep and eight days to shoot, and the script was changing as we were going. It was challenging but I learned a lot about tango and dancing and again utilizing camera movement to really make it sexy and make it flow and make it really a unique piece.
Frank Spotnitz:
I got choked up every time I watched the final dance with her and Steve Snedden. I actually lost an argument about that, because originally it was scripted that he gets to dance with her at the end and she's heartbroken about what's happened and they dance and it's a nice moment and then he stumbles, ever the klutz. And I was insistent that we had to preserve that stumble and they didn't want to shoot it, they really wanted to preserve the niceness of that moment. But they shot it for me and I saw both of them and I realized that they were right.
Stephen Snedden:
It was Jimmy Bond, there was a lot of jealousy about Yves falling for someone else. Then the tragedy at the end. But it was a great episode and I felt like we were really getting into our groove. We were really figuring out what we wanted to do and how we wanted to continue the show and approach things.
['All About Yves']
Vince Gilligan:
Our strongest episode, in my opinion, is 'All About Yves', the one that should have ended the series.
Zuleikha Robinson:
'All About Yves' was kind of, you know, the beginning about all about Yves and we never really got into it that much. We find out that she has a father and he's this kind of ominous presence.
Tom Braidwood:
It took a while for the character to find itself. At first she was simply just a nemesis, a very pretty nemesis, which was counterpoint to us rough and tumble guys, but then she grew and became an interesting character.
[Morris Fletcher being nasally probed by an alien.]
Michael McKean
Morris Fletcher
They made these little appliances and it's basically just thin rubber around here [the sides of his face] with little nodes to attach the fishing line stuff with.
[The Lone Gunmen confront Morris Fletcher, mentioning 'Romeo 61'.]
Michael McKean:
The Lone Gunmen were still growing when the show was cancelled. They were becoming more and more defined.
John Shiban:
I think we all felt like we had found our groove and that the show was really working. The ratings were acceptable and good, and as good as X-Files in the early days.
Frank Spotnitz:
We wanted to give the Lone Gunmen a big finish and we knew that we'd sort of let down our fans by ending The Lone Gunmen series with a 'to be continued' and there was a tremendous battle royal with the studio about bring the Lone Gunmen back at all.
[The X-Files: 'Jump the Shark']
Frank Spotnitz:
And then, what we attempted to do was blend them into the fabric of the X-Files at that point, which was not easy.
Bruce Harwood:
It was the last season, it was the ninth season of X-Files, they wanted to finish everything off. They wanted to close that loophole. So they did an episode called 'Jump the Shark' where they kind of tied up the loose threads of The Lone Gunmen series in an X-Files sort of way. They brought back Morris Fletcher to kind of tie it all in and Zuleikha and Stephen. And sort of wrote an end to the series.
Frank Spotnitz:
The decision to kill them off was made because we didn't to dishonor them with sort of a tepid ending. We knew it would be the last appearance in the series. We didn't know if there would be any life for the X-Files beyond that season. And so we wanted to give them a really, a proper hero's exit. And so that's why we decided to kill them.
John Shiban:
I felt like it would be the ultimate tribute to these unsung heroes in that if these guys really are the guys who are saving the world and they're willing to sacrifice themselves for it, there's nothing more heroic than that.
Dean Haglund:
You know, I was actually quite thankful that we got an awesome death scene because it was, you know, if we didn't we'd just be: oh, the Gunmen walk off into the sunset with a stick and a hobo bag. You know, that would have been just kind of a lame send-off, so it was something heroic and phenomenal. But, you know, in science fiction no-one's ever dead. I mean, Level 5 quarantine coffins are supposed to be fitted to the person. All the coffins are the same size? One of the Gunmen is shorter than the others. Uh-huh? Saying maybe our bodies aren't in those things.
Vince Gilligan:
With the purest of intentions we wanted these guys to go out on a high note. We wanted them to be recognized as heroes and that ending with them being buried at Arlington, you know, heroes, national heroes was a high point but very bitter-sweet as well.
John Shiban:
I think it was the right thing to do. We did address tying up some loose ends in the final X-Files episode.
['The Truth']
Frank Spotnitz:
We've been very blessed both with the X-Files and with Lone Gunmen to have very loyal, smart, supportive fans. And the fans of Lone Gunmen have been particularly vocal and active and loved these characters and supported the show when it was on. And we're right there with them, you know, we would have loved to have brought it back and still would if there was some way to do it.
[On set:
Dean: When we started it was like a day player.
Bruce: Day players and what did we get? Nine years and a spin-off.
Dean: We're the luckiest day players around.
Tom: We are a bit of a fairytale come true.
They all agree that it's been fun.