FIELD OF SCREAMS X-Files director Chris Carter (at right, on the set with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson) won’t reveal details about the movie, but film stills (below) seem to indicate a computer is involved.

First, the bad news: After talking to X-Files creator Chris Carter about The X-Files: I Want to Believe, we can offer no hot scoop on plot details. We can’t tell you whether Mulder and Scully get it on. We can’t tell you about the characters played by Amanda Peet and Xzibit. Carter won’t even tell us where the film is set.

And the good news? The long-awaited second X-Files film, which for years looked as if it would never get off the ground, is indeed premiering this summer. The first reports that Carter was working on a sequel to the 1998 film The X-Files came in late 2001. Starting in mid-2002, Carter periodically popped up like a groundhog to announce that he was still working on a script. He said this in 2002 and again in 2003. In November 2004, Carter said the whole project was in “negotiations.”

The truth, in this case, was about money. “There was a…I’d call it a profit-sharing disagreement between Fox and me,” Carter explains. Carter and Fox finally reached an agreement over the disputed television syndication rights from the series in early 2007, and things kicked into high gear.

“It was almost like I was hanging up the phone with my attorneys telling me it was resolved, and the other phone was ringing, and it was Fox saying, ‘Let’s do this film. It’s now or never,’” he recalls. The sense of urgency was justified, and not just because the show had already been off the air for five years. “Fox saw a Writers Guild strike looming in the next year. SAG [the Screen Actors Guild] and the DGA [Directors Guild of America] also had the ability to strike, which could make this a movie that wouldn’t be made for two years. Basically, it was now or never. So we chose now.”

Beyond the fact? that the story is a stand-alone “monster-of-the-week” not entangled in the show’s elaborate conspiracy-theory mythology and takes place somewhere with snow (you can see the white stuff in the film’s trailer), details about the film are hard to come by. While for most filmmakers a “top secret plot” is just a promotional ploy and “leaks” to Internet gossip sites are the norm, Carter plays the game his own way. You’ll find not a murmur on the usual fan-boy sites like aintitcoolnews.com, and even more focused sites like xfilesnews.com have been reduced to leaking such revelations as the name of the film’s production company.

From the beginning, Carter knew he wanted the film to be a stand-alone to welcome in more fans, and he wanted to shoot around Vancouver, where the television series was mostly shot. “We needed a certain mood for this movie,” he says. “I think in Vancouver, the darkness and the mist and the weather and the environment lend themselves beautifully to the kind of storytelling we were doing.”

After a six-year silence, during which Carter has no film or television credits to his name, could this film signal his readiness to get back in the game? Working on network television seems out of the question. He speaks with frank envy of cable’s more leisurely shooting schedule: “When The Sopranos came to their last season, they had shot 80-some episodes. Wow, that’s the way to do a TV series. We shot 202 episodes in our run.”

But even at cable’s pace, Carter isn’t so sure he’s ready to commit. “There’s just a lot of things that are changing the way someone like me—as a 51-year-old man—wants to look at spending, if you’re lucky, five years of your life producing something.”

If Carter has any ideas about a possible series, he’s not saying anything about it. Years ago, when Carter was pitching the X-Files series around Hollywood, he got a piece of advice from noted production designer Rick Carter (no relation). “When he read it, he said, ‘I like this, but do yourself a big favor by not showing anything. Keeping everything in the dark and the shadows.’” That’s advice Carter clearly has taken to heart.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe opens July 25.