Frank Spotnitz Writer/producer Frank Spotnitz (Millennium, Night Stalker, Strike Back) helped shape the television we watch today. His work on more than 40 episodes of cult hit The X-Files included development of the elaborate mythology thread which baffled and bewitched fans and inspired a thousand imitators.

His latest project, Hunted, brings the Spotnitz style to UK shores and takes us behind the scenes of a private security agency – Byzantium – and its mission to infiltrate a powerful family and gain their client leverage in a high stakes bidding war. The show’s protagonist, Sam Hunter, was once Byzantium’s lethal Lolita, but an assassination attempt sent her underground to regroup and her return to the firm is motivated solely by her desire for retribution.

The series was aired here on the BBC and by Cinemax in America. The BBC have declined the opportunity to make a second season so HBO – who ran a rather clever viral campaign for Hunted’s debut – will be behind its new incarnation. I had mixed feelings about Hunted following my initial viewing. So many elements that intrigued me were left unspoken or unexplored that I felt much of its potential had been unfulfilled. Yet there was much that was good there too, not least the rather splendid bad guys and a smart use of London locations which presented refreshing new perspectives on the city.

Frank’s dedication to and enthusiasm for Hunted was infectious – in fact I left the conversation convinced to sit down for a second viewing. I also had one or two conspiracy theories of my own confirmed, which is always comforting when you are an habitual ‘solver’. I have high hopes for its return and trust HBO will allow room for the fledgling drama to grow darker and thrive. He also spoke of the potential X-Files return and how much further he would be prepared to travel with Dana and Fox before bidding the franchise farewell.

HUG: The lure of espionage seems to be capturing audience’s imaginations on both the big and small screen at present. What, for you, is the enduring appeal of spy thrillers?

The first thing is that spy thrillers capture something that cinema does uniquely well – that is suspense and action. That’s something a movie can do that a book can’t do, it’s one thing that cinema excels at, so I think it’s a natural in that respect. Aside from that, I think spies lie for a living and present themselves as one thing when in fact they’re something else. And I think that resonates with all of us, even though we’re not spies, because all of us have a face we present to the rest of the world that is not identical to who we are inside. We all withhold, even from our closest loved ones, there are things we don’t tell them. The space between the face we present and the person we are inside is really interesting to us.

That’s so true – we have so many different faces to use for the different roles in our lives.

And there’s this anxiety about the people around us, about what they’re really thinking behind what they’re saying, and that to me was really interesting about Sam Hunter. And I thought to maximize that by having her be under cover for the entire series, because she’s always playing two things at once. In fact even when she’s not Alex Kent, when she’s Sam around the rest of the team, she’s withholding she’s not telling everybody everything she knows. She’s not telling them the circumstances of her disappearance, she withholds from Aiden as well, so she’s always got deception going on.

There’s that suspicion of each other running as an undercurrent between so many of the characters, it’s interesting that professionally and personally they have so many faces to show the world.

That’s right and the hardest part about plotting the series, and it’s a very dense plot as you know, is that no two characters have the same understanding about what is going on. And as the plot changed from scene to scene and episode to episode it was very tricky trying to track each character’s understanding of different lives [laughs] because they all had access to different information.

So much so, that they have to play different games with each team member. I mean it’s so complicated – the emotional relationships and games in play – that to keep track of it must have been daunting?

It was! I think it’s one of those shows where if you were so inclined to watch it again, once you know the answers, I think it would be more rewarding. Because you realise how all these things were woven into the series from episode one…

*HUG spoiler klaxon rings*

Things like Sam’s baby – you see it in episode one, you see it on the pavement when she leaves the coffee shop to get her newspaper – she stops and she greets the child-minder and the baby…

No way? I had this theory – I had friends [who’d watched the first episode with me] phone me and say “I don’t understand this ending at all” and ask me how I knew about the baby from the start – but I thought the tip-off was Sam in the bath, I thought she was in labour when she was in the bathtub timing contractions with the hourglass so I was convinced there would be a baby at the end!

You’re one of the significant minority who guessed the baby had survived from the very beginning, but the bigger clue was that we cut to a year later and why – alright she got shot in Tangiers – but why would she disappear for an entire year? And why is she still in physical training after a year? That to me was what I was afraid was going to give it away to a lot of people in the beginning. A lot of people were completely floored and confused about who were the parents of the baby and how could that have been!

I took two calls from friends, knowing I was covering it, watching the finale on the BBC saying “Why is the baby alive, how did that happen??”

If you watch it again, knowing where it’s going, you’ll see that there are all these signposts throughout the episodes hinting the baby is not dead. Starting with Aiden in her flat episode one, he asks if the baby survived and she doesn’t answer him. Then in episode four he asks whether the baby was a boy or a girl and she hesitates a very long time, unsure how to answer the question, then says it was a girl. And then in episode seven he [Keel] reveals that he found her medical records – she was in hospital in Istanbul under an assumed name – and he says “I know” and she freezes. And what he’s saying there is I know you have a child. Those are things that at the time you couldn’t know what they meant, but if you went back and watched them, you’d know.

I very smugly told the cat at that point “He knows she had the baby!” He was my only witness to the grand solving!

*Spoiler klaxon ends*

That brings me nicely to my next question. There was a classic whodunit thread running through all eight episodes of Hunted as Sam tried to uncover the motive behind her shooting. During the writing process, how do you decide what information to withhold from the audience and what to share? Do you consciously plant ‘clues’ or do they naturally evolve?

This was a unique opportunity for me – I’ve never had this before in my career – the ability to plant things and sprinkle them through the story like you would if you were writing a novel. I wanted those episodes to have that quality of circularity like a great book or a great story has. You start an idea at the first episode and it comes full circle by the last. To some degree with every one of the characters I tried to do that. It’s part of the reason why the narrative is so dense because it’s loaded with these things. I had the luxury of being able to know where I was going and make sure that all the episodes leading up to the final episode set up the destination.

How does writing for a female protagonist differ? Does it alter the dynamic of a show?

It did. I’m enormously moved by her, and her character, because she’s damaged by her past. That idea to me was really powerful. I think we all are. Even if you have the best parents and the best start in life, there are things that happen to you that set you in a direction. Obviously the things that happened to Sam were horrific and they made her into the cold, emotionally isolated adult she is and the violent deceitful adult she is. I was able to, without moral judgement, feel a great deal of empathy for her. That’s what the series is really about – Sam having the courage to look back at her past. I really believe for a character like her it’s easier to kill people, to have all these violent encounters than to go back and look at these terrifying events of her childhood that changed her. That’s frightening. If you could go back to when you were ten or twelve years old you’d feel like a little girl again, that same feeling of helplessness returns, and that’s what Sam is trying to avoid with her violence, deceit and emotional aloofness. I was very touched by her and it was moving to me that finally Aiden was able to say what she needs to hear, in the last episode at the coffee shop. And that was not scripted actually – when she cried after he left – that was her emotional response as an actress to that, intuitively.

The other thing, about making her a woman, is that you’re automatically an underdog. Sad to say but true, especially in this field, physically she’s always at a disadvantage. I liked that she was always climbing uphill as it were.

It was wonderful to see her take the lead because Aiden had equal mystery in his story line and it would have been easy to have him take a stronger role. It was refreshing to have Sam and her journey take a lead in that way.

Thanks, that’s ultimately what it was about for me. It’s hard because the show was such an odd genre, it’s an action thriller and action was part of my brief – I had to service the needs of the broadcasters for having action every week – and that’s not easy. But at the heart of it, it was a character piece about this damaged woman facing her greatest fear, which was her childhood trauma. I loved that last episode where we got to see the cracks in Sam and that vulnerability come to the surface.

In classic spy thriller style there are still question marks remaining at the end of the series. You obviously have a clear picture of all their paths. If Hunted comes back for another season, or special, what answers would you seek to provide?

It’s about Sam reclaiming her life, making sense of all that’s happened to her and being able to choose how she want to live the rest of her life. In order to stay alive Sam has to look at her past, the hardest thing she can possibly do, and when she’s done that she’ll be a better person. She may be a worse spy actually because the thing that makes her so efficient is that she’s emotionally repressed. She doesn’t think about morality too much, doesn’t access her emotions too often, she just represses, represses. When she’s forced to look at these things she’s opening up colours emotionally that she has refused to see.

It’s going to change somewhat now, and I’m sorry for the BBC viewers, because we had a high degree of hope this was going forward everyone was so encouraging and positive when we were writing the scripts and shooting them. The show is going forward, just not with the BBC, so it’s a changed format. The good news is that we will be able to answer all the unanswered questions plot-wise, in the spin-off that we’re developing right now and Sam’s emotional journey will continue to be a story lead.

And do we get to find out what’s in the P.O box?

ALL the questions will be answered!

As a point of personal interest, will the Blank- Faced Man return? He was just the most incredible character!

I love him too! But I can’t say anything else…

As great fans of both The X-Files and Millennium we’re delighted that you have been so vocal in your enthusiasm for their big screen returns. This summer you talked to Collider about the “cultural crime” of not making a third X-Files film. Now that there has been a change of management at 20th Century Fox, are we any closer to justice for that crime?

I don’t know I would like to think we are, but I don’t know. 20th Century Fox is aware of all the fan campaigns, the Twitter and postcard campaigns and all the things fans are doing around the world to bring about a third film. But I have not heard them say “Yes, we’re gonna make this movie!” and until I hear them say that, it’s hard to gauge how much progress we’re making.

Would you see a third X-Files film as a full-stop on the phenomenon or the opening of a new chapter?

For me it would be the end. I very much, emotionally and intellectually, want to tell that story. I don’t feel the need to personally continue beyond that but I couldn’t speak for Chris, David and Gillian. If it performed well commercially, and I’m sure it would there might be leanings to go down that route but that would be my goodbye and I’d be thrilled to be a part of it.

The viral marketing campaign HBO launched for Hunted was incredibly creative and social media played a very big part in the publicity. How have fans reacted?

I’m so thrilled by that campaign. It was so brilliant and so clever. Steve Coulson and Campfire were the ones who designed it for HBO/Cinemax and they were so smart because they didn’t do something that was part of the series, it was part of the world of the series, they actually expanded the Byzantium universe by creating this website and this personality test. It added to our storytelling and it had entertainment value in and of itself. It wasn’t just advertising or marketing for a TV show, it was an experience people enjoyed, I enjoyed it – I did it more than once. It has that magic trick at the end where it looks at the picture you’ve drawn. I don’t even want to tell you how they did it because it’s so clever. It’s one of, if not the, best viral campaigns I’ve ever heard of. I wish I could take credit for it, but I can’t, I was just able to tell them bravo!

You are very present behind the scenes as an authorial voice. What were the challenges of bringing your working style and experience to the UK?

It was challenging because the way television is organized here is so different. Starting with the fact that the show runner doesn’t even exist in this television culture. It was challenging at times to work within the system that’s here and get my voice heard not just by producers and directors but also by department heads and the crew who are just not used to having a writer/producer playing the role I traditionally play. The crews here are amazing and the actors – I’ve seen British actors at work onscreen here and in the states – but to work with a whole cast that were all British, apart from Melissa who’s Australian, you’re really struck by the discipline and the craft British actors bring to their work. It’s very thoughtful and analytical, to the point where I found I could see the decision making. They felt it emotionally but they also looked at it analytically in the sense that they think about the best way to nuance it, what inflection to give it, that detail. That was really exciting for me and gratifying. I learned a lot and I think going forward that I’ll make more series here – and I hope I will, starting with Hunted – and try to take the best of both television cultures.

I was so struck by the use of your London locations, there is a tendency to use stock shots of the same landmarks in drama but use of old and new architecture and undiscovered corners of the city felt very fresh. How did that come about, did your location team come to you with those places as options or did you have very specific sites in mind as you wrote those scenes?

It was a very conscious decision to show the London that people really live in and to show the city as they see it. We kept thinking: What can we do that’s British, what can we do that’s British [laughs]. We didn’t know – if the series continued – if we’d ever be shooting in London again and we wanted to use everything we could find. That’s why we went to the country hotel in episode three and we had Sam abducted and held in those oast houses – which are also very British, I don’t think they have those anywhere else in the world – with the fabulous distinctive roofline. We wanted it to be visually exciting. It’s gratifying that you’ve commented on that, very few critics have picked up on it; it was a big part of our identity.

It was so authentic that it actually gave some of the characters a back-story without them speaking – particularly the scenes in and around the working men’s club. It was an unusually accurate portrayal and I think that’s what made me pick up on it.

That was another conscious decision to use as little dialogue as possible and to tell you just what you need to know about the characters and no more. Some people were confused by that and others got it. It was a show that required patience I guess, because we didn’t just lay it all out. Characters revealed more and more about themselves as the show went on so you felt you knew them pretty well by the end but a lot of it in the beginning was telling the story of the questions. And hopefully the questions were compelling enough to keep you watching.  

Can you give us an idea of when we might be able to see a continuation of the Hunted story?

I’m hard at work on it right now and I’m very optimistic that this time next year you’ll be seeing the spin-off. That’s the goal I’m working toward right now.

And that will be with HBO?

Yes, exactly. They’re the ones that turned over every stone to make sure this happened. They’ve been huge supporters of the show from the very beginning.

Hunted is available on DVD now