“It's all failure to me,” says David Duchovny. The Golden Globe-winning actor has led the kind of life most people would regard as a home run — a Masters degree from Yale, a string of iconic television roles on series including “Twin Peaks,” “Californication” and “The X-Files,” a lengthy and creative resume as an author, director, producer, podcaster and musician. Yet from his podcast “Fail Better” to the new movie he wrote, directed, co-produced and stars in (based on his novel “Bucky F*cking Dent”) there’s something about losing that he’s drawn to. And what more fitting metaphor for it than the famed 86 year-long “curse” of Boston Red Sox?

In “Reverse the Curse,” (now streaming on Amazon Prime, YouTube and other platforms) Duchovny plays Marty, a terminally ill Sox fan trying to make peace with his adult son Ted (Logan Marshall-Green) with the help of a “death specialist” nurse (Stephanie Beatriz) over the course of one of the team’s most memorable seasons. During a recent “Salon Talks” conversation, Duchovny opened up about his “instinctual distaste for win at all costs mentality”— including Trump’s — the eternal appeal of “X-Files“ and why a man who has graced the cover of GQ wrote himself a nude scene that “I think we can laugh at."

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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This takes place in 1978, an historic year in baseball, and baseball forms the backdrop of this father-son story. Tell me about the curse.

The literal curse in the movie is the curse of the Babe, which is when Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold the rights to Babe Ruth to finance a Broadway play. He sold Ruth to the Yankees, and the Sox never won again. They hadn't won in 1978, when this movie takes place, when the book takes place. That's the curse of the Babe that needs to be reversed.

More metaphorically, it's a curse between a father and a son, and reversing the curse in their life. One of the things I talk about in the book and in the movie is how we tell the stories of our lives. I know it's become popular in therapy recently, seizing the narrative of your life and recasting it in a certain way that's healthier, or more loving, or more fair in whatever way. Instead of being a victim, you're something else. Instead of being a hero, you're something else. That's really the reversal of the curse. Aside from the baseball backdrop is this curse between fathers and sons that I'm dealing with in the film.

I love seeing a story that is about how we parent adults. Our kids don't fly out of the nest the moment they turn 18 and then stop being our children and our responsibility. But what happens is the dynamics when you're both adults change, and this is a story that is very much about that, and the reversal is also caretaking.

The son in the movie and the story starts to treat the father like a child in a way, because he's taming the world. He's lying about the world, because in the story, the father's health deteriorates every time the Red Sox lose. So the son takes it upon himself to fake certain outcomes and to keep that truth from his father. That's something you would normally associate with a parent for a child, to keep them in a bubble until they can handle the truth of what can happen in the world, or failure or disappointment or heartache.

It's his version of Santa Claus.

He's like the baseball Santa Claus.

Speaking of reversals, I heard that this movie started as a movie, and then became the novel, and then reimagined itself again as a film. What happened? This seems like a long journey, because you........

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