"I have developed into a person of greater faith."

Chris Carter's Character Development Is Integral to 'The X-Files: I Want to Believe'

After nearly a decade of running a TV show about conspiracies and alien invasions, "X-Files" creator and California native Chris Carter, 51, took a sort of five-year vacation. He ran two marathons, surfed in Indonesia, took up the drums, became a pilot, braved a summer storm on a glacier at 10,000 feet and did a fellowship at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. Then he got back behind the camera for the second "X-Files" movie, "I Want to Believe," which opened Friday.

-- Nancy Palm

You've done a lot more in five years than people do in their lives.

I wanted to put myself in situations of discomfort, of challenge. . . . One of the reasons I became a pilot is because a friend of mine said, "If you become a pilot, you'll be better at everything." I know exactly what he means. I'm a better director and producer as a pilot than I was before, because pilots are taught a methodical, systematic way of approaching a problem or situation. . . . Moviemaking has a lot of problem-solving.

How did you develop "I Want to Believe"? Was it a story you had in your mind since the series ended in 2002?

We talked about doing a [second] movie before the series ever ended. . . . We went back to get our old story and couldn't find it. We had lost all of our notes. Actually, it was really a good thing . . . because we had to imagine [the characters] with the years that had passed. All of a sudden [they] became more interesting to us.

The shows you've done ("Harsh Realm," "Millennium," "The Lone Gunmen") deal a lot with the unexplained. Do you yourself follow that?

Yeah, but I follow science, and science really is delving into the unexplained itself. . . . There's a fantastic magazine called New Scientist, a weekly magazine. There's like an X-file on every page. Really, some of the best "X-Files" stories come right out of science. And you just apply that "what-if" idea. Oh, what if this were true? And that's why so many times the show is scarier because it was not necessarily improbable.

Would you consider yourself more of a skeptic or more a believer?

A combo, and a number of years ago I would have called myself a natural skeptic. Now I have to say I have developed into a person of greater faith through the years. . . . That it's all not for naught. That there is meaning.