It's the Seymour Demonstration Forest (SDF). Forget those typed datelines in the left-hand screen bottom, familiar to all X-Philes, reading "Arecibo, Puerto Rico" or "Collum National Forest, Oregon", or whatever leafy wilderness where the alien lights gleam green. They should really read "In another part of the forest"; because they were almost all shot in the SDF under the needles of Douglas firs. . . OK, for a rugged bugs-and-loggers episode, the Files production company Ten Thirteen did shift a few miles to the slightly more roughy-toughy Lighthouse Park.
The version of America in the five X Files series so far has been as much an imagined construct as Shakespeare's Arden or "wood near Athens".
The SDF is Vancouver's managed water resource, a short drive from North Shore film studios - or less than an hour from the city centre. On Sunday afternoons, frail Cantonese grannies wander up the paths around that deep, still lake remembered by fans as where Dana Scully once floated in a boat between life and death. Newish arrivals from Bosnia or Ethiopia picnic expansively on its fishing jetty, relieved now to be Canadians.
The SDF doesn't even quite feel like arboreal Washington, the nearest US state, because British Columbia - the Canadian province in which Vancouver is located - has an intelligent conservation policy and the locals are comfortable pedestrians. Comfortable. That's Vancouver. Not comfy, but easy with itself in a loose-shouldered way.
Which is why it's such a paradox that Files creator Chris Carter's house brand of paranoia was staged here. (He was originally looking for a forest Los Angeles could not provide in which to film the pilot show. Used the SDF, then complimented the city, where film-making is cheap, as "Hollywood's biggest back lot", moved in and took his Millennium series there as well.)
A wet yellow radiance comes off the ocean on late afternoons, glinting onscreen on Fox Mulder's apartment block. That apartment block, by the way, is another cracking joke. It's The Wellington at 2630 York Avenue, Kitsilano, a relaxed district over a cyclist-friendly bridge from downtown.
Mulder's home is fictionally in Alexandria, Maryland, but nowhere within driving distance of Washington DC has Vancouver's wide, repaired and inhabited pavements. US sidewalks have almost atrophied nationwide. It's the lack of such free, public, communal spaces in the US, and the resulting death of human trust, which probably caused the suspicion on which Carter and Co base their whole mythology.
You might ask did I really belt round BC with checklists of Files locations, the first three series cribbed from Ken MacIntyre's guide Reel Vancouver published in Canada by Whitecap Books, and updated info courtesy of a BC fellow fan? Oh, you bet. Immediately on arrival caught a bus full of skiers with their kit in tidy zipped bags, then a cable-car, up to Grouse Mountain, cast in the show as Skyland Mountain, Virginia, where Scully was abducted, or not.
I didn't do it only because I'm a Files addict. It's more that I'm fascinated by the way that location filming affects our perception of the world. The truth that's out there is seldom what a film-maker wants onscreen. They want to adjust reality to shape a fantasy not of physical locality, but of a state of mind. It's an alchemical process. Film displaces the substance of the real.
Carter is suburban Californian and has surfed the world's coasts, while most of his writers are brilliant geeks - and they all imagine their scenes in a generic America, I suspect because they usually only view locales through their car windscreens. A Mall. A Motel. A Basement Garage. An Alley.
Canadians just don't do sleaze or tackiness with any conviction. I cite as evidence the way the room-numbers on doors in their motels are always complete, and even polished up. The Files' favourite overnighter stop for Mulder and Scully on the road was Lion's Gate Travelodge on Marine Drive, near the studios. In management manner, Vancouver is half motel, half boarding house. "Are you sure you've everything you need? Have a nice time, then." Not "have a good day". Have a nice time. Quite different. Very BC.
Everybody at the top end of the Files team used to scout locations, and, unusually, they required visiting writers to venture out of the studio offices to check that location exteriors fitted their scripts. Symbiosis happened. Vancouver itself suggested visual metaphors; the plot of a crucial episode depended on the waterfall neon sign (alas! since smartened up) of the Niagara Hotel, and an "angel of stone" - a war memorial to drowned mariners.
Some BC buildings are the equivalent of character actors who are so versatile they don't need prosthetics; like Woodlands, erected as the "Provincial Lunatic Asylum" or Riverview, a war veterans' psychiatric hospital; both were repeatedly hired for Files use as clinic, penitentiary or glowering lab for a Frankensteinian monster-breeder.
And sometimes a house or an interior was so grotesque, so irresistibly Files, that it was kept on hold to cast in a suitable part, like the Ovaltine Cafe in Hastings Street, a tarnished relic of the 1930s fad for milk bars, which deserves an Emmy for its scene as a nightmare-scape diner in the barmiest ever episode, by writer Darin Morgan.
Warehousey but innocuous, even past midnight. Not in the Files, though, where its not-at-all-mean-streets represented the Washington district where FBI personnel died, or were at least seriously wounded.
The lugubrious Victorian decor of the Meatmarket restaurant provided chiaroscuro for the attempted murder of our heroes' boss. ("Great people to have around," said a waitress of the Ten Thirteen crew, "they never left any mess. Not like some. . .") And the cute little Bureau lab-rat with the crush on Scully met his onscreen bullet in the pub down the road. Gastown was both a frequent Files location and tourist town, so some minion in Ten Thirteen's editing suite must have been working full-time for the last half-a-decade just re-arranging the image pixels to delete tell-tale soft-toy mooses in mountie hats, maple leaf flags, and Japanese posing for group snaps around the steam-driven model of Big Ben.
In fact, wandering Vancouver, I wondered why they didn't tap its authentic peculiarities more often while they had the chance. Carter and Co sprayed a BC gravel quarry ochre-red to resemble New Mexico, because they wanted to set a three-parter in a state that's home to those fashionably spiritual American Indians, the Navajo. But nothing could be more evocative of a spirit world than Vancouver's own tribal carvings, totem poles rearing up beaked and clawed and picked out scarily in scarlet in every park, a Jungian background behind cricket pitches.
It must have been a pleasure to dress Files sets with eccentric props chosen from the city's junk shops, which aggregate together souvenirs from the Pacific, sad remembrances from the Euro-homelands of reluctant migrants and Brit stuff (old tins of Sharp's Toffees): Graeme Murray, the Files designer, and his team were always resisting temptations to arrange a complete collection of, say, 1937 Coronation commemoration mugs on Mulder's window sill. There was a terrif b-and-w retro episode premiered in the US last winter, which owed much of its wit to tat pulled in from charity shops.
Now for the tag scene to this story. As with most Files, it has a downbeat ending. Just as I arrived in town, Carter told his crew (at another untacky motel where they were filming a final instalment of the present season) that his bosses, Fox TV, had decreed next year's series would be made in Los Angeles to placate the homesick David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson: this summer's movie had already been shot there.
The city accepted the betrayal with a shrug of those easy shoulders, the BC Film Commissioner simply totting up that 25 other TV shows are now employing local crafts-people. But Philes are gloomy worldwide. The limitations of Vancouver mattered. No more Mountain View cemetery, where all the bodies were buried, whatever the dateline read. Never again The Tea Shoppe on Britannia Beach walking-on as a roadside caff on an interstate.
Yeah, LA car lots and LA beach light have a fine unreality of their own, but it's a known unreality. Beautiful lies, but all too familiar. We've been there, seen through that.