Sex marks the spot
There is life after The X Files for David Duchovny, TV's newest antihero.
Joe Rhodes reports
THE scene, being filmed on a stuffy and intermittently noisy soundstage, involves lots of talking and lots of groping, as many of them do on the new, racy US series Californication.
David Duchovny, as the occasionally unpleasant antihero of the show, a creatively blocked novelist named Hank Moody, is fully committed to the moment. He and Amy Price-Francis, playing one of the many wrong-for-him sexual diversions who populate the story lines, are going at it in a full-on lip-locking kitchen-sink clinch.
"I love women," Duchovny's congenitally flippant character says after being accused of just using female partners to distract himself from his continuing writer's block. "I have all their albums."
"Cut," says the director, Bart Freundlich, one of Duchovny's closest friends, instructing the couple to disengage and start over. "There was a shadow on her head."
Duchovny has been engaging in a lot of this lately, choreographed fake sex with an assortment of actresses in varying states of undress, because Californication, as the title suggests, is chock full of sex.
"It reminded me of movies that I love from the '70s like Shampoo or Blume in Love, where they are adult sex comedies," he says in his trailer between scenes.
"I hate to say that because I'm already going to combat that kind of very easy tag people will have for the show. I'm sure there's going to be people calling it Sex Files and Triple X Files and all that.
"But when I say 'adult'," he continues, "I mean more like a grown-up view of life, family and the kind of stuff that I haven't seen, not in movies and definitely not on network television for a long, long time."
There are plenty of naked bodies (five, including Duchovny's, in the pilot episode alone) and dirty words in Californication but almost all of them lead to punch lines. Sex may be the early selling point but Duchovny says it's not what the show is about.
"In this world of trying to get a foothold with the audience in 10 seconds I think it's a calling card, a way to establish how this show is different," he says of the early emphasis on graphic language and undulating torsos.
"But to me it was never necessary, it was never part of what I felt was funny."
Instead, Duchovny sees Californication as a portrait - sad and funny - of a man wrestling with the realisation that he messed up his best relationships - with his former girlfriend (Natascha McElhone) and their 12-year old daughter (Madeleine Martin) - and in the process sabotaged his ability to write.
Hank's one successful novel God Hates Us All has been pappified into a sappy and successful movie renamed Crazy Little Thing Called Love and starring "Tom and Katie".
He hates the movie, hates himself and seems well on the way to having everyone he cares about hate him too. But, no, really, it's a comedy.
"I had this discussion with my wife," says Duchovny, who has been married to actress Tea Leoni for 10 years, "and she said: 'I don't know. I don't like this guy.' And I said: 'I have a feeling that I know how to play this. I can make this guy somebody that you're going to pull for.'
"Because I think you can like anybody if you understand why they're doing what they're doing, even if what they're doing is reprehensible. And that's what was interesting to me about Hank. Besides being a guy who appears not to care so much about women, the heart of the show is that he really wants to get his family back. And this guy, who appears to be amoral, will end up being the most moral person in the particular universe. To me that was intriguing.
Californication began as an independent screenplay, written by Dawson's Creek writer Tom Kapinos, partly to purge himself of the demons left over from writing for four years on that prime-time teenage soap opera, a period Kapinos calls "both miserable and lucrative".
"I'd spent four years on a show where the characters bore no resemblance to anybody I knew," Kapinos says.
"No one seemed real. And I came off that and just wanted to create a guy that felt more like a romantic '70s antihero. To me, it's a cautionary tale that there are people out there who get it right the first time but somewhere along the way mess it up."
The script, after several revisions to make it a pilot for a dramatic series of one-hour shows, found its way to Showtime, where Robert Greenblatt, the network's president for entertainment, suggested it might be better as a half-hour comedy.
"Flawed main characters is one of our hallmarks and this seems like another great flawed character that hopefully isn't so flawed as to be hopeless," Greenblatt says. It has been five years since Duchovny's last television series, The X Files, with a large and loyal sci-fi-based audience, ended its nine-season run.
That series, in which he played Fox Mulder, an FBI agent investigating paranormal activities, made him a household name, led to a big-budget X Files feature film in 1998, the sequel to which is in pre-production.
But in the years between, Duchovny, who turned 47 this month, has sometimes appeared to be struggling with his career, not quite sure how to follow the enormous success of The X Files.
Californication, he says, is a way to return to television without tarnishing his X Files legacy and, as opposed to the grind of a series, allows him to make 12 episodes a season, leaving plenty of time for other projects.
"I wasn't looking to do another television show necessarily," he says. "This just happened to come my way. I came out of The X Files with a certain pride where I felt, rightly or wrongly, like we'd done a terrific show for a large number of years, maybe one of the handful of best hour-shows that's ever been on TV.
"And the thought of doing another television show that would be in the same realm - not necessarily science fiction but a drama or a crime show - it just seemed empty to me. It just felt like if I was going to do television it would have to be completely different from what I'd done before."
He has written scripts and wants to direct. "I've become more suited to being a director," he says.
"At some point waking up at 6 in the morning and sitting in a make-up chair for a half-hour getting your hair done doesn't suit my temperament."
- NEW YORK TIMES
Joe Rhodes reports
THE scene, being filmed on a stuffy and intermittently noisy soundstage, involves lots of talking and lots of groping, as many of them do on the new, racy US series Californication.
David Duchovny, as the occasionally unpleasant antihero of the show, a creatively blocked novelist named Hank Moody, is fully committed to the moment. He and Amy Price-Francis, playing one of the many wrong-for-him sexual diversions who populate the story lines, are going at it in a full-on lip-locking kitchen-sink clinch.
"I love women," Duchovny's congenitally flippant character says after being accused of just using female partners to distract himself from his continuing writer's block. "I have all their albums."
"Cut," says the director, Bart Freundlich, one of Duchovny's closest friends, instructing the couple to disengage and start over. "There was a shadow on her head."
Duchovny has been engaging in a lot of this lately, choreographed fake sex with an assortment of actresses in varying states of undress, because Californication, as the title suggests, is chock full of sex.
"It reminded me of movies that I love from the '70s like Shampoo or Blume in Love, where they are adult sex comedies," he says in his trailer between scenes.
"I hate to say that because I'm already going to combat that kind of very easy tag people will have for the show. I'm sure there's going to be people calling it Sex Files and Triple X Files and all that.
"But when I say 'adult'," he continues, "I mean more like a grown-up view of life, family and the kind of stuff that I haven't seen, not in movies and definitely not on network television for a long, long time."
There are plenty of naked bodies (five, including Duchovny's, in the pilot episode alone) and dirty words in Californication but almost all of them lead to punch lines. Sex may be the early selling point but Duchovny says it's not what the show is about.
"In this world of trying to get a foothold with the audience in 10 seconds I think it's a calling card, a way to establish how this show is different," he says of the early emphasis on graphic language and undulating torsos.
"But to me it was never necessary, it was never part of what I felt was funny."
Instead, Duchovny sees Californication as a portrait - sad and funny - of a man wrestling with the realisation that he messed up his best relationships - with his former girlfriend (Natascha McElhone) and their 12-year old daughter (Madeleine Martin) - and in the process sabotaged his ability to write.
Hank's one successful novel God Hates Us All has been pappified into a sappy and successful movie renamed Crazy Little Thing Called Love and starring "Tom and Katie".
He hates the movie, hates himself and seems well on the way to having everyone he cares about hate him too. But, no, really, it's a comedy.
"I had this discussion with my wife," says Duchovny, who has been married to actress Tea Leoni for 10 years, "and she said: 'I don't know. I don't like this guy.' And I said: 'I have a feeling that I know how to play this. I can make this guy somebody that you're going to pull for.'
"Because I think you can like anybody if you understand why they're doing what they're doing, even if what they're doing is reprehensible. And that's what was interesting to me about Hank. Besides being a guy who appears not to care so much about women, the heart of the show is that he really wants to get his family back. And this guy, who appears to be amoral, will end up being the most moral person in the particular universe. To me that was intriguing.
Californication began as an independent screenplay, written by Dawson's Creek writer Tom Kapinos, partly to purge himself of the demons left over from writing for four years on that prime-time teenage soap opera, a period Kapinos calls "both miserable and lucrative".
"I'd spent four years on a show where the characters bore no resemblance to anybody I knew," Kapinos says.
"No one seemed real. And I came off that and just wanted to create a guy that felt more like a romantic '70s antihero. To me, it's a cautionary tale that there are people out there who get it right the first time but somewhere along the way mess it up."
The script, after several revisions to make it a pilot for a dramatic series of one-hour shows, found its way to Showtime, where Robert Greenblatt, the network's president for entertainment, suggested it might be better as a half-hour comedy.
"Flawed main characters is one of our hallmarks and this seems like another great flawed character that hopefully isn't so flawed as to be hopeless," Greenblatt says. It has been five years since Duchovny's last television series, The X Files, with a large and loyal sci-fi-based audience, ended its nine-season run.
That series, in which he played Fox Mulder, an FBI agent investigating paranormal activities, made him a household name, led to a big-budget X Files feature film in 1998, the sequel to which is in pre-production.
But in the years between, Duchovny, who turned 47 this month, has sometimes appeared to be struggling with his career, not quite sure how to follow the enormous success of The X Files.
Californication, he says, is a way to return to television without tarnishing his X Files legacy and, as opposed to the grind of a series, allows him to make 12 episodes a season, leaving plenty of time for other projects.
"I wasn't looking to do another television show necessarily," he says. "This just happened to come my way. I came out of The X Files with a certain pride where I felt, rightly or wrongly, like we'd done a terrific show for a large number of years, maybe one of the handful of best hour-shows that's ever been on TV.
"And the thought of doing another television show that would be in the same realm - not necessarily science fiction but a drama or a crime show - it just seemed empty to me. It just felt like if I was going to do television it would have to be completely different from what I'd done before."
He has written scripts and wants to direct. "I've become more suited to being a director," he says.
"At some point waking up at 6 in the morning and sitting in a make-up chair for a half-hour getting your hair done doesn't suit my temperament."
- NEW YORK TIMES
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