The only episode which was completely my idea was for Mitch Pileggi, the actor who portrays Skinner, the Assistant Director of the FBI. He appears often in the series, but only for a few scenes. You know virtually nothing about him. I wanted him to have an episode that was his alone, so I wrote Avatar for him. He even has a scene that's pretty . . . hot [knowing smile]. He was very happy.

One of the scary things is that, when you're a kid, you look at your dad as the man who has no fear. When you're an adult, you realize your father had fear, and that you have it, too.

What I liked about Mulder was his quality of not caring what other people thought of him. He was very independent. He wasn't interested in women. I liked that. He had kind of an intellectual quest, but not a sexual quest. That was the challenge of Mulder. Here was a guy that got almost sexually excited about aliens. And I wanted to be able to do that!

A lot of times passion projects or films are difficult to make because they don't have proven directors attached to them.

I kind of dread any kind of critical response, just because it's always painful in some way. Even if it's 80 percent good, it's the 20 percent that's bad that you remember - and that's a higher number than I usually get, 80 percent would be amazing.

I think patience is a skill and I wish I had it.

Obviously people's feelings are going to get hurt when you use certain words, but you can't outlaw words. They're really the history of our culture. They tell you what's going on. When you make words politically incorrect you're taking all the poetry out of the language. I'm pro anybody living their lives the way they want to live, sexually and otherwise; and I'm anti any kind of language repression.