David Duchovny: Coming & Going

by Lawrence Grobel

Lawrence Grobel sat down with the smoldering star of "The X Files," David Duchovny, for the April 2000 issue. Duchovny, who's been burned before by not having much to say during an interview, had plenty to say this time, talking about coming to the big screen in the romantic comedy Return to Me and not going back to the small screen for "The X Files" no matter what.

Grobel: What's your writing process?
Duchovny: I have an idea, I write it down, I start to think about it. When I can't think about it any more, I start to write. I write really quickly. This last one [episode of "The X Files"] I just did, I had the idea, it wasn't right--and I can't start writing until it's right. I got this other idea that made it right and then I wrote it in four days.

Grobel: Would you want to write [a feature]?
Duchovny: If I had an idea that could sustain a movie and not just an [episode]. I'm very good at ripping things off. I wanted to steal Joyce Carol Oates's Zombie for an "X-File." I thought I'd camouflage the idea, but in the end I figured it was too psycho-sexual. How are you going to put a gay guy lobotomizing other men in order to make them sexual slaves on television?

Grobel: Would you like to direct a feature?
Duchovny: Yeah, if I wrote it. I've got some ideas. You've really got to be ballsy to direct a feature. You really have to believe in the idea because it's going to be two years of your life. The great thing about writing and directing the TV show is I can bang out a script in four days, give it to the writers, and a month later I can be in pre-production for a week, and then shoot it for two weeks. In two months it's on the screen.

Grobel: How did you deal with criticism of your work?
Duchovny: I think back to the first comments on my writing, and you just remember those. I wrote a play that a girlfriend of mine was able to get to John Guare. He wrote me a pencil-written note on some jagged scrap paper, scrawled all over, giving me a lot of advice. He didn't really like the play. He said it lacked soul. It was "superficially interesting linguistically." Of course, I was 19--I didn't have any soul. As you get older, it's not so much that I know more, it's that I know more of what to leave out. It's the same with acting. Maturation is leaving out.

PAGE 1 | 2

Grobel: And learning to keep it simple.
Duchovny: Yeah. Also when I was younger I wanted to show people how much I knew, and I wanted them to see me work. Then you realize at some point that there's nothing worse than people watching you labor in any art form. You don't want to see how hard it was to make that painting, or how many years you spent on that book. You don't want to see people act, you get angry. John Ashberry calls learning what to leave out "the art part." Samuel Beckett, who I studied a lot, was extremely pared down. It was like he was trying to get to the point where he wasn't even writing any more.

Grobel: Have you ever acted drunk or high?
Duchovny: Once, in Kalifornia,I did a scene where Brad Pitt and I were supposed to be drunk, so I drank Coke with some whiskey in it. It worked for an hour, then I got too drunk, then angry. You don't realize that a five-minute scene takes about 12 hours to do. To try and maintain that perfect drunk edge is pretty difficult.

Grobel: Any performances [this year] make you sit up and take notice?
Duchovny: I loved Kevin Spacey in American Beauty and Katherine Keener in Being John Malkovich. Tom Hanks was great in The Green Mile, and so was Michael Clark Duncan.

Grobel: What did you think of The Green Mile?
Duchovny: It was 45 minutes too long, which hurt it. I liked American Beauty a lot. And Being John Malkovich.

Grobel: See anything on the Internet that you like?
Duchovny: No. I sent my first e-mail last week.


PAGE 1 | 2