From The Sunday Times: The X Files star’s new movie The Joneses sees him as a man who has it all. Real-life however, is not so straightforward

David Duchovny, Hollywood star, husband and father of two, is in the throes of a new relationship — and, to tell the truth, which he usually does, it has left him with mixed feelings. On the one hand, his new setup makes perfect sense, especially given his occasionally nomadic lifestyle. And, of course, we all have to move on and can’t live in the past. But he is something of a traditionalist and doesn’t enjoy leaving loved ones behind. Yes, like many, Duchovny is facing up to one of mankind’s great questions: just how do we feel about the Kindle?

“I travel quite a bit, and being able to throw this little thing in my backpack so I can take my entire library with me is unbeliev able,” reflects the 49-year-old actor, pondering his handheld vehicle for digital books. And yet paper is a good technology, I suggest. “I know,” he sighs, “I don’t like the idea of reading a book on a screen. But I tend to be a reference reader, flicking back and forth, so it really is useful.”

For all the success of the now-iconic The X Files, the more recent Californication and a clutch of films, Duchovny maintains a sincerely deep level of interest in literature, kindled during his youth. He began his doctorate in comparative literature at Yale in the early 1980s (one of his tutors was the eminent critic Harold Bloom), but his thesis — on magic and technology in contemporary American fiction — remains uncompleted. “My career started, so I couldn’t afford the time to finish it, but I do retain an academic interest in literature.”

There are few actors in Hollywood who profess an academic interest in anything, never mind literature, but Duchovny is cut from a distinctive cloth. Many actors display a ready wit and intelligence, but few have his candour, or the likeable nonchalance that imbues so many of his performances and makes his characters men you’d genuinely like to hang out with. He seems pitched somewhere between his two television characters — more relaxed than The X Files’ Mulder, more together than Californication’s troubled novelist, Hank Moody. He likes to shoot the breeze — he can’t cook, for example, although he does make a good sandwich. “And breakfast,” he adds with a pause. “Sandwiches can also be good for breakfast.”

In his professional life, after striking it big with the first of his two famous series, he eschewed big-budget bluster, concentrating primarily on independent film. His latest movie is one that few other actors could carry. Written and directed by a first-timer, Derrick Borte, The Joneses casts Duchovny and Demi Moore as the heads of a super-stylish household, parachuted into a swanky suburban neighbourhood to charm their friends and sell their lifestyle. Selling is exactly what they are doing: the family is false, assembled by a conglomerate to beguile an unwitting and seemingly affluent clientele into wanting what the Joneses have. It’s a smart piece, if a little contrived, and Duchovny’s first-class performance sees it through. “It’s smart and funny, and I wish that I’d written it,” he smiles.

Duchovny does, in fact, write, as well as act and direct, and admits to a hankering for the highbrow world of academia. “Actually, I have an interest in finishing my PhD, but I just know I never will. It’s like if I almost became a surgeon — that doesn’t mean I am going to operate on anybody right now.”

This little aside reverberates quite loudly through Duchovny’s life and career. Just as he’d like to finish his doctorate, but won’t, he’d like to write and direct, but accepts that he might not get the chance. He would also have liked to quit television after The X Files, but, in the end, he went back. Like many of us, he seems to want what he can’t have. Unlike many of us, however, he’s making his peace with the fact.

As a writer-director, for instance, his sole directorial effort on film to date (he has tackled a few X Files and Californication episodes) has come with the comic drama House of D, about an American artist in Paris, which he also wrote, and which featured his wife, the actress Tea Leoni. “I have things in mind for writing and directing, but the scripts I write seem to fall into this independent world,” he concedes, “which I started veering towards as I was finishing The X Files, about 10 years ago.” He pauses for a moment. “And it is a hard world right now, when you want to make the kind of movies I am writing. I think they could be popular, and could do business, but it’s hard to prove that at the script stage. At some point, I think somebody is going to take a chance and give me some money to make one.” If not, he could put one out as a novel, perhaps? “It’s funny you should say that. I have been working on this script this past winter, and I think it is quite dense. I don’t know if it is a movie or not. I hope it is, but I am also going to turn it into a novel, just in case.”

As an actor, Duchovny’s identity was — at least until Hank Moody arrived to ruffle his unflappable hair — inexorably tied to his X Files character, Special Agent Mulder, who, along with Gillian Anderson’s Scully, sleuthed the otherworldly on our television screens from 1993 until 2002. They’ve also popped up twice on the big screen, successfully with 1998’s The X Files ($189m at the worldwide box office), and less successfully in 2008’s The X Files: I Want to Believe (few felt the same; it took $68m).

“I think all great successes help and hinder, but they help most of all,” he says, reflecting on whether Mulder has cast a shadow on his subsequent career. “It happens that an actor comes into public consciousness only in one form. You can’t come out in three television series in one year and show people everything you can do. But I’m happy it was The X Files and not something I thought wasn’t good.” His pride in the franchise extends to the most recent movie, although he accepts that errors were made. “It was a $25m picture and couldn’t compete with the summer movies like The Dark Knight. It was a sombre mood piece, and that might have been a mistake. I hope we get to do another. Gillian and I would both be interested in seeing where it goes.”

Quite where that is remains to be seen, but there is no escaping the fact that The X Files transformed Duchovny’s life. Indeed, for all the material success it brought him, during one of the first conversations we had, in 2005, with the series three years behind him, he expressed a firm desire to avoid further television work. He popped up on Saturday Night Live, and in an episode of Sex and the City, but these were one-offs.

In 2007, however, he reappeared, in Californication. Despite some early criticism about its racy content (some critics dubbed it The Sex Files), the show proved an enormous hit; Duchovny scooped a Golden Globe for the very first season, and nominations for the two that followed. “When I said to you back then that I had no desire to go back to television, I didn’t see how TV was changing. Now, you can do a 12-episode series and it doesn’t dominate your life. I actually think that doing a series like this is the most free form of filmed entertainment you can make.” During his nine-year stint in The X Files, he starred in more than 150 episodes. “I just wasn’t smart enough back when we were speaking to see that the TV landscape was changing.”

In that previous conversation, we had spoken about infidelity. At the time, he had been happily married for eight years to Leoni — with whom he has two children, a daughter, Madelaine West, now 11, and a son, Kyd, 7 — and we had joked about man’s inability to keep his trousers on. “They’re discovering that levels of serotonin are much lower in men, and that’s the chemical that makes you happy, and also makes you want to bond,” he mused at the time. “So men not only want to have sex with lots of different women, to propagate, or whatever that old argument is, but they also have less of the feeling of being part of something. So it’s harder for a man to bond and feel connected.”

A few years later, in the summer of 2008, he released a statement that he was “voluntarily entering a facility for the treatment of sex addiction”. The news appeared somewhat ironic, given our earlier conversation and the libidinous nature of his character in Californication. Shortly after the announcement, he and Leoni separated, although they had reconciled by the autumn of last year, and the family went on an extended holiday on the West Coast. Despite his candour, I wonder, why did he go public?

“I would be glad to tell you off the record, but it is not something I really want to discuss in public,” he replies. It’s a delicate subject, and one that was inflamed further when a British tabloid claimed a week after the split that he had had an affair with a tennis instructor, Edit Pakay, while still married. Duchovny denied the report and announced legal action. The paper printed a retraction. He now views the whole business with an admirable mellowness. “The tabloid world is busy, and omnivorous, so I was not taken aback by that story,” he says. “I don’t take any of it personally. I am not saying I enjoy it, but these things exist because people buy them, so it is not for me to say they should not print this stuff.”

His refusal to blame the press is refreshing, and he even jokingly suggests that tabloid interest at least shows people still care. “It would be nice for them to get the facts right — but it is just gossip, so it’s not of world-shattering importance. It may be hurtful for me personally, but mostly what worries me is that my children are exposed to it. Luckily, they don’t read that British newspaper. But the time will come, with the glory of Google, that they’ll find something some day. ‘Dad, what the f*** is this?’ Hopefully, I’ll be able to explain. In the meantime, I’ll get on with enjoying my family, my work, my interests.”

Which brings us back to literature, books and, of course, the Kindle. What is currently top of his hard drive? “I have gotten into David Foster Wallace, mostly as an essayist. And Richard Powers I like very much. But I tend to read with attention deficit disorder. I read 10 or 15 books at a time, always wanting to read something else.”

Which comes as no great surprise. In fact, it might even be typical Duchovny, always wanting what’s just out of reach.

From Time Magazine: Even as he appears to be the most laid-back guy in the room, there’s a lot going on for David Duchovny, who is shooting a new season of cable hit Californication and starring alongside Demi Moore as the fake head of an artificial household in a movie about stealth marketing in The Joneses. Duchovny spoke with TIME about gadgets, his greatest golf shot ever and annoying X-Files pitches.

The Joneses is all about commercialism. You’ve made your share of commercials. Anything from the early-struggling-actor days?

They used to pay well. They could get you through the lean months. I did a couple of beer commercials. I did a vitamin commercial and a lottery commercial. When I started getting notoriety it was cheesy to appear in a commercial. Everyone was saying, “I have to get a commercial in Japan.” It was okay to appear on camera in Japan. But not in America. But that’s changing. Like with Luke Wilson and Catherine Zeta Jones. Seinfeld did the credit card one. It’s a sign of the changing times and I don’t think it’s an aberration. I think you’ll see more familiar people doing these.

So are you thinking about it? You do voice-overs for Pedigree dog food, but what what would you push onscreen if you had to push a product?

I’m not thinking about it. I’m not grabbing at the money. My kids are fine. We’re okay. It’s not something I think about. At one time there were voiceover artists, now there are celebrity voiceover artists. It’s unfortunate because these people need the money less than the voiceover artist. Commercials were traditionally a way for actors to support themselves to work on stage, movies or television.

You say in the film that whoever has the most toys when they die wins. Sounds good to me. Do you subscribe to that?

Not at all, I’m about three years behind the curve usually. I do have a Kindle, so maybe it’s only about six months behind the curve.

Do you have any tech obsessions?

No, I’m a luddite. I like my computer. But I don’t know how to use it as well as the 10-year-old daughter. I guess I like watches, but that’s kind of a 19th century obsession.

Really, how many watches?

I think I have two good ones.

That’s not an obsession. I probably have two watches somewhere.

I like sneakers. But they are given to me in the same way this film works. I think that satisfies an obsession because I was athletic as a kid. I was 12 or 13 when the Adidas Superstar came out and it was first time that you would pay more than $10 for a pair of sneakers. I remember wanting to pay $18 for a pair of sneakers and my dad was like “No way!”

Guessitmate your sneaker population.

There are a lot. I don’t know. 30 pairs.

Speaking of being athletic, there’s a scene in the movie on a golf course where you sink a hole in one. No trick photography?

Nope. Easily 40 feet. I was off the green. Into the hole. Second take.

How did you stay in character and not fall on your knees in joy when you hit that?

First of all it was freezing and windy. As [director] Derrick [Borte] set up the shot, I was like, “Are you kidding? I could be here all day trying to put that ball in the hole. It will be luck if it goes in.” I was surprised the first one was close. And when the second one went in, my impulse was to jump up and down. And I was like, “No my guy is a good golfer. He expects that.” So I put my head down again to hit another one.

Is that your greatest acting moment ever?

Derrick gave me a Quicktime movie of the shot and I sent it to everyone I knew.

Will you ever go back to The X-Files?

It’s ready-made nostalgia. It depends on whether [creator] Chris Carter wants to do it again. He certainly doesn’t have to. We always talk about it amongst ourselves. We talk a lot. Or I’ll text him and say “Do you have an idea?” Or I’ll say, “I have an idea for a show. I wish I had that one eight years ago. This would have been a good episode.” But generally I’ll be on an elevator with someone and the elevator will bump and they’ll say, “There’s an X-file.” And I’ll say, “Actually that’s not an X-file. That’s not a great story. The elevator just bumped.”

Super heroes are all the rage now. Which superhero would you want to play?

I’m not a big comic guy. Who’s not taken? Is anyone left? I knew a guy in graduate school who wrote about a cool character called Balloon Man. He floated above the city and he could see crime. But he couldn’t get down. He’d have to deflate himself in order to get down and by the time he did he had no power. I thought, “That’s the super hero I’m playing.” Because he’s totally ineffectual. To me that’s the truth. Balloon Man. He has no powers. To me The Incredibles was the apex of superhero [stories]. It deconstructs it and constructs it at the same time.

From The Orlando Sentinel: I talked with David Duchovny about his new movie, The Joneses, and focused on his relationship to the film’s satiric warning about the dangers of marketing and a consumerist lifestyle for the print version of that story.

But that didn’t leave room for him talking about his zeitgeist-tackling cable series, Californication, or his future plans or what car one should drive to Be Like Dave. So that part of our talk is below.

“I am so (s%^$$&) at the zeitgeist,” Duchovny says. “I didn’t see The X-Files coming. I didn’t Californication catching on.

“I thought a couple of movies I’d done were going to be huge hits and they weren’t. I’m really bad at that. I consider myself a smart guy, and yet I have no clue if something I’m doing is going to catch on.

“I realized, at some point, that there is no repeating of that X-Files thing. It’s luck. It’s Avatar, the planets aligning. I’m not going to try and top that.

“When I got off the show, I was thinking, ‘How am I going to top it?’ Then I realized that wasn’t going to happen.I said ‘No more TV’ Fine. But cable started doing these great niche shows – Sex and the City, The Sopranos – that were giving you more creative freedom than you get on broadcast TV or the movies.

“Californication only takes me 13 weeks to film a whole season. I don’t write them. I direct one of them per season, and the rest of the time, I just act in them. It’s a fantastic schedule which allows plenty of time with family, doing a show that I haven’t gotten tired of. We have this quick spring we do. By the time we get to episode 12, we’re tired, but we’re still sprinting. ‘Wow. It’s over. I hope we get to do another season of it.’

“We’re making this show almost in a vacuum. You can’t do that in a movie any more. They have to satisfy too many quadrants. The reason you get Tara or Nurse Jackie is because talented creative people are getting to do what they do and are not being told by marketers what they should be doing.”

Duchovny’s co-starring in The Joneses, which opens Friday. It’s about the ultimate viral marketing scheme, creating a fake family to infiltrate an affluent community, show off their toys, and convince the neighbors to spend spend spend to have those toys and keep up with The Joneses. I asked the father of two (he’s reconciled with Tea Leoni after a separation of the Tiger Woods variety) how he teaches his kids to be savvy to what advertising and marketing is trying to do to them.

“We don’t watch a lot of television. They love Cake Boss (on TLC). They watch American Idol. But as we watch their favorite shows, sometimes something inappropriate is advertised. An R-rated movie, for instance.It scares the s4356 out of them. How can they advertise that during family friendly shows?

“I say to them, ‘What are they trying to sell you?’ Commercials are more subtle than the old hard-sell. My kids’ll say, ‘They want you to drink their beer’ or ‘drive their car.’ And then we try to laugh it off with the kids. ‘You really think I’m going to want to drink beer based on that commercial?’

“They’re aware that there’s manipulation out there. We’re not Amish. The kids are going to be influenced in ways we’re not going to like. We just have to stay aware of it and try to help them navigate themselves into a nice life, one with values.”

He tries to squeeze in a small film in between seasons of Californication — though that is getting harder to do — not because of the TV schedule, which is only 1/4 of the year.

“Independent film reminds me of that game show where they stuck you in a booth and turned a fan on and the contestant got to grab as much cash as he could hold onto. That’s what financing these little indie features is like these days. You line one up, the money falls through.”

He directs one episode of the TV show a year, and has directed a film. Is he looking for more behind-the-camera gigs?

“In some ways, I feel like I’ve served a long apprenticeship and I’m on my game enough as an actor to be directing more often.”

Is he a screamer on the set?

“No noooo,” he laughs. “It’s good to scream once. I know a director who does it once, on the first day.”

So, if, as he maintains, the viral marketing of The Joneses has been with us ever since there have been sports starts and movie stars that the general public wants to emulate, what sort of car should I be shopping for? You know, to drive what he drives?

“Think hybrid. Think electric. Try to reduce that carbon imprint. Make that decision that makes companies push to be cleaner than their competition. People associate ‘green’ with hardship. But when people out here go green and companies get deeper into this, you’re gong to see it’s cooler and more fun to be green than to be wasteful. It’s getting less expensive to make that altruistic choice.”

2009 Toronto International Film Festival “The Joneses” Premiere:

2009 Global Green USA Millennium Awards:

X-Files: I Want to Believe Screen Captures (courtesy of xfilesmedia.com)

And more!

“X-Files : I Want to Believe” didn’t make much of a dint at the box office – probably just as well it didn’t cost an arm-and-a-leg to make.

FOX chairman Tom Rothman told IESB today that, despite the lackluster performance of the latter, there’s still the possibility of another – and he’s leaving it up to the cast and crew as to whether they’d like to see that happen.

‘It’s really up to Chris [Carter], David [Duchovny] and Gillian [Anderson]

Rothman tells the site.

Fox has announced an early-December Blu-ray arrival for ‘X-Files: I Want to Believe,’ which will come to high-def as the studio’s first title with BD-Live interactivity.

The follow-up to 1998′s first big-screen ‘X-Files’ film ‘Fight the Future,’ ‘I Want to Believe’ arrived in theaters this past summer over six years after the end of the television series. Again re-teaming David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as agents Mulder and Sculley, ‘I Want to Believe’ failed to ignite in theaters, grossing less than $25 million domestically.

Hoping to give the Chris Carter-directed thriller a second shot on video, Fox will debut the Blu-ray with multiple exclusives and Digital Copy on December 2, day-and-date with the standard DVD.

Complete supplements have not yet been revealed, but exclusive content confirmed so far includes a picture-in-picture (Bonus View) in-movie experience (featuring video commentary with cast & crew, behind-the-scenes footage and storyboards and concept art), an isolated score track and D-Box enhancement.

And in a first for the studio, the Blu-ray will include the BD-Live feature “The X-Files Dossier: Agent Dakota Whitney Files,” allowing users to search the files of the film’s characters.

Additional content shared between the Blu-ray and DVD include audio commentary by Carter and producer Frank Spotnitz, the “Trust No One: Can The X-Files Remain A Secret?” documentary, a pair of featurettes (“Body Parts: Special Make-up Effects,” “Chris Carter: Statements on Green Production”), deleted scenes, gag reel, still galleries, a music slideshow, theatrical trailers and a Digital Copy of the film.

Tech specs for the Blu-ray will see both the theatrical and unrated cuts of the film presented on a BD-50 dual-layer disc with 1080p/AVC MPEG-4 video and English DTS-HD Lossless Master Audio 5.1 Surround.

Suggested retail price for the Blu-ray has been set at $39.98.

Source: highdefdigest.com

Chris Carter, writer, producer, and director of The X-Files: I Want to Believe, was hospitalized on Tuesday due to “physical exhaustion and an acute sleeping disorder,” a source close to Carter (pictured, right, with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson) tells EW.com. The source says the hospitalization stems from Carter “working on multiple films back to back over a two year period” — the recently released X-Files sequel and Fencewalker, a covert project he is rumored to have begun shooting earlier this year. He is expected to recover quickly.

Source: Entertainment Weekly

He may have found success again in the hit TV show ‘Californication’ but to millions David Duchovny will always be Special Agent Fox Mulder. Having played Mulder since 1993, Duchovny now, after six years, returns to his most iconic role. The long-anticipated second film, based on the phenomenally popular, award-winning series The X-Files reunites the series stars under the direction of series creator Chris Carter, who co-wrote the screenplay with Frank Spotnitz. Here, Duchovny talks to us about bringing the team back together, working with Gillian Anderson and going head to head with the Dark Knight at the box office.

Photos and a video clip of David on Jimmy Kimmel Live on July 30, 2008 promoting The X-Files: I Want to Believe:

Four more after the cut.

UK’s GMTV Interview

Richard and Judy Part 1 of 2

Richard and Judy Part 2 of 2

PalTalk Scene Part 1 of 2

PalTalk Scene Part 2 of 2