What are the elements you must include to make a true ’50s scifi B-movie?
Part of it was Jim’s genius at cherry-picking from The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came From Outer Space and War of the Worlds — taking a character from here or there and a monster here and alien there. Here’s the old man who lives up by the bluff and believes in aliens and there’s the dog. And then I went through every movie I could get my hands on to find these wonderfully funny moments, like when a character is supposed to be walking down the road and he’s obviously on a treadmill, and then he stops — and the background keeps going. I found that stuff so charming. Q: Did your work on The X-Files inform this at all? A: My job on The X-Files was to produce the show, and in the first season I helped create that look, which was a feature look. What happened over those years was we learned how to make a feature-quality film on a television schedule. And that really helped me because with Alien Trespass, we only had 15 days to shoot the movie. The other thing was that The X-Files was sc
