Noah Hawley

Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996 masterpiece, Fargo, opens with the lines, “This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.” While there is still confusion about Fargo’s basis in fact, there has been no doubt about the film’s legacy. With the FX series of the same name, creator and showrunner Noah Hawley pays homage to the Coen brothers, taking the world of Fargo into brand-new “true” stories. The in-demand writer—who just released a new novel and who has an overall deal with FX Networks—weighs in on managing multiple story lines against a wintry backdrop in Fargo.

WS: How did Fargo come to be a series for FX?
HAWLEY: FX and MGM had had a conversation about doing it. There was no writer attached. I had worked at FX before, and they asked me what I thought about turning Fargo into a series. I thought about it and said, “I don’t think it’s a television series because of the way the movie ended. Marge [Gunderson, the local police chief in the movie] solved this crazy Coen brothers case and then tomorrow was going to be her reward, so if she woke up tomorrow and there was another crazy Coen brothers case, it would lose its poignancy, and you also wouldn’t be able to call it a true story.” I said it could be an anthology series, where every year is a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story. They liked that idea.

WS: Were you inspired solely by Fargo or by any of the other works by the Coen brothers?
HAWLEY: It’s all in there. The film itself, the sensibility of it, is the driving factor, but one of the things that make their work so unique is how inventive they are cinematically and in tone, and with structure and point of view. Taking a two-hour movie and turning it into a ten-hour story, we needed a dramatic infrastructure that was larger—we needed more moving pieces. When you’re going to your canon of material, you have to expand past Fargo [the movie], because it’s a single story that addresses what it addresses. It’s our goal not just to write scripts that feel like Coen brothers scripts, but to make a [ten-episode] movie that feels like a Coen brothers movie. You can’t always answer that with direct correlations, so you have to trust your instincts.

WS: Why did you decide to make season two, set in 1979, a prequel of sorts to season one, which was set in 2006? Will there be characters we’re already familiar with in season three?
HAWLEY: I wasn’t 100 percent sure if I wanted 1979 to be the second season or the third season, but I knew that if we laid in references to an earlier story it might pique the audiences’ interest. I thought that was a good thing to do in solidifying the second year of a show, to create some continuity on that level. Even though it’s a completely different story, it has some connection. Now that the show is established, we’ll reinvent it; this third year is not connected directly to either the movie or the first two years of the show. It’s more of a stand-alone story. That said, there will be a few connections.

WS: Season three is not set to air till 2017, more than a year after season two wrapped. Why was it important to give yourself that long gap between seasons?
HAWLEY: We found this recipe for making the show in the first year that we repeated the second year: we break the show and write it entirely before it’s filmed. That’s essential. Every step is leading toward the end of the story. Because our second year of production moved to February and we didn’t wrap till June, we just didn’t have time to write and prep the show to shoot last winter. And winter is an important component. So I said, “We need to take the year and make the show as good as it can be.” Luckily, the network agreed. If it is an anthology series, if it is an event and it’s not a TV series in the way that everything else is a television series, then you don’t have to hit that same airdate every year. The minute you are hitting that same airdate every year, how are you not just a TV series? We’re going to take our time. It was crazy that we made something the first year that people loved and crazier that we managed to do it again by doing something completely different. The degree of difficulty just gets harder, so why wouldn’t you take the time to get it right?

WS: Tell us about your writers’ room. How do you break stories? How do you determine which episodes you’ll write yourself?
HAWLEY: It’s an interesting process. We’ve learned that there are certain facets of how you tell a story like this that are essential components. You need a certain amount of moving pieces, and certainly we had many more in our second year. Because you’re saying this is a true story, a certain amount of randomness is essential. If you have a number of moving pieces on a collision course, you’re never exactly sure which ones are going to collide and when. You’re in something that is a little more unpredictable. In a writers’ room, there are a lot of times where I’ll hear a great pitch for a twist, but it feels like a movie twist, it feels like something that doesn’t ring true in a real-life way. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a big action set piece or a moment of betrayal that’s hugely satisfying, but it needs to have a certain unpredictability to it. So a lot of what I do with the writers is that kind of thing. It does start for me very much thematically. The first year was really about civilization in the wilderness and this idea of a frontier town, a small exclave of people surrounded by the tundra. [It was about] what happened when a civilized man, in our case Lester Nygaard, put on his mukluks [snow boots] and went out into the wilderness and what he brought back with him. Then it becomes about thinking through the story and the character implications. In the second year it was about how you turn 1979 into a crime story, and looking at what was going on in the country and how the free-love ’60s became the radical, violent ’70s and all the disenfranchised groups who thought they were going to get a seat at the table. So you have Jean Smart’s character saying, Why can’t a woman be the boss? Bokeem Woodbine’s character saying, Why can’t an African-American man be the boss? A lot of it, for me, is about finding my way to the fundamental underpinnings of the show, and working with the writers. It becomes about, how do we engage the audiences’ imagination? That is not normally a requirement for filmed entertainment, right? It’s more of a passive story-delivery device. I like that sense that it’s about what’s happening between the things you’re seeing, those elements of randomness and truthiness and the human struggle to find meaning in everything, which is a staple of Joel and Ethan’s work as well. That sense of, from A Serious Man, you have to accept the mystery. Sometimes there’s a UFO, and sometimes fish fall from the sky—it’s not to be clever but to push the boundaries and make the audience have to think, what does it all mean? That is our everyday struggle. We look at world events and try to make them mean something. Sometimes random things happen. Ultimately they mean what you want them to mean. So there have to be those elements as well. What’s exciting every year is that it’s not a formula. You think, What’s the story this year? And then, How is that story also Fargo?

WS: What kind of creative environment have you found at FX Networks that allows you to tell the stories you want to tell?
HAWLEY: They vigorously engage, creatively and intellectually. I think for John Landgraf [CEO of FX Networks] it’s the favorite part of his very corporate job to think it all through with me. I like having a sounding board. FX has a motto, “Fearless,” which is more than a motto over there. They get excited when you come in and pitch something different than what everyone else is doing. But they’re not interested in gimmicks. It has to be character driven. Everything has to add up. You have to do your homework. I have a huge amount of creative freedom, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to get on the phone sometimes and justify what I want to do. Sometimes it’s not that I want a ten-minute parable sequence, but it is a Coen brothers movie, so, I kind of need one! I’m usually doing my best work if I’m having fun. There’s a certain amount of improv to writing and creating and creative problem solving. It’s a team sport, and you’ve got to rally a lot of people to a unique vision that’s going to be almost impossible to execute. So we’re going over that hill, and we’re going together. There’s a general-leading-an-army quality to it. If you turn that into a positive experience for people, they work harder and they get more excited than if you force them over the hill at the point of a bayonet.

WS: You’re also a published author. How do you manage those two creative processes, of novel writing and television writing? Can you be doing both at the same time?
HAWLEY: I can multitask to a point, but a book and a TV show are just different. You’ve got to do them in different rooms at different times. I certainly have had moments when I’m going between two or three writers’ rooms talking about two or three different shows, and that’s doable. It’s not easy, but it’s doable. You have four or five other writers, and their collective brain is working the problem, and you can walk in and say, OK, just talk at me for 20 minutes, let me get into this mind space and then I’ll start to engage.

A novel is just all me, and it just requires time. Sometimes working on a novel is really mowing the lawn. Honestly, the hardest part of writing [Before the Fall, released this year] was the fact that to write a book you have to read the book, right? So you’ve written 300 pages, now you need to take four days and just read the book. Who has time to sit and read a book for four days? [Laughs] That becomes the challenge of it. You know you do your best work when you give yourself that time. And yet there is this pressure to multitask. But that’s the craft. You spend 10,000 hours building the muscle to do your best work under pressure, so that every time you sit down to write, you have access to that, as opposed to waiting for the muse.

WS: I remember enjoying your first show, The Unusuals, and being disappointed when ABC pulled the plug after just one season. With that being early in your television career, what did you learn from that experience, of having this show that you believed in but that for wha­tever reason didn’t find its legs on the network?
HAWLEY: You learn a few things. The first thing is, you’ve got to give it your everything. If you’re trying to do something different, it is going to be a harder road, and that has a lot to do with who your partners are and who your network is and how much they’re interested in making something that you can’t just find on any other network. John Landgraf has said, “I’d rather make something great for some people than something good for everybody.” I share that sensibility. It was a struggle at ABC to execute the show that I saw in my head. You’re always fighting clarity. And there were things I wanted to do on that show. It was called The Unusuals, after all—you would think you’d have certain leeway genre-wise, but there was always a lot of pushback. Broadcast TV is 50 percent things happening and 50 percent people talking about their feelings about the things that are happening. That’s not the kind of writer I want to be. Never having run a show before, it showed me that I could put together an amazing cast, that we could tell some challengingly fun stories and play with tone and the inventiveness of the imagery we used and rally everybody and create that team spirit that I talked about earlier. The other thing it started to teach me, and which my second show, My Generation—which was on the air for two episodes—finished teaching me, was, that’s how it works! You get ten episodes, and then you move on to another story. When I got to Fargo, I had no intimidation. I had written three novels by that point and done some movie work. For 12 to 18 months you give that story your everything, and then you move on to the next story.