David Duchovny tells campus gathering he ‘stumbled upon’ acting at PU

Actor-director, perhaps best known for role in "The X Files," talks candidly about his career

By: David Campbell
   Actor-director David Duchovny, perhaps best known for his role as FBI special agent Fox Mulder on television’s "The X Files," spoke candidly about his career during a talk Thursday at Princeton University. He also fielded the inevitable question from the audience: Does he believe in aliens?
   "Do I believe in aliens?" said Mr. Duchovny, who addressed a packed house in the Stewart Film Theater on the university campus. "Probably not."
   The 1982 Princeton graduate then told a joke he said he sometimes used when asked the same question during his "X Files" days, one that finished with an off-color punch line involving dentistry and anal probes.
   Mr. Duchovny’s talk — laced with wry humor and the occasional reference to Robert Frost, Harold Bloom and others — touched on all facets of his career, from his philosophy on acting, to the craft of screenwriting, to getting the best performances out of the actors he has directed.
   He said he didn’t plan on becoming an actor, a profession he said he stumbled upon by chance while at Princeton after a roommate clued him into an acting exercise involving masks. In the exercise, he explained, some tried to personify the mask through gestures and behaviors.
   "The person who embodied the mask was the one who did nothing," he said, however. He called acting "a physical manifestation of the emotional state" and said that an actor’s job, once the research and preparation are done, is to "let the mask speak for itself. I learned that here at Princeton by mistake."
   Mr. Duchovny said screenwriting is very different from writing fiction and more closely related to writing poetry in that the writer is "writing pictures" and creating moods.
   "A screenplay is a bastard thing," he said. "It’s not a thing in itself, it’s a step from the writer’s head. You try to create the feel, the mood of what’s in your head."
   He called the idea of the film auteur — "The idea there’s one person making a film" — more a public-relations technique for promoting movies. He added: "It’s so you have less people to interview."
   Rather, he asserted, a film is the product of collaboration, and that, as a director, "you’re constantly falling back on your instincts. I’m here to tell you that all you have is your instincts." He called the director the "immune system" of a film.
   Mr. Duchovny said that his best and most satisfying work he has done by mistake, and said of acting, "It really is ‘fake it until you make it.’"
   Mr. Duchovny starred in "The X Files" from 1993 to 1998. He has starred in several feature films, including "Kalifornia," "Playing God," "Return to Me" and "Connie and Carla." The 2004 film, "House of D," marked his debut as writer and director.
   He appears in a new comedy about the making of a television pilot, "The TV Set," which premiered Friday at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
   His talk at Princeton, designated as the John Sacret Young Lecture, was sponsored by the Program in Visual Arts and the Committee for Film Studies.