Noah Hawley Quotes

The great amount of fun that I have is I can cast dramatic actors to play comedic roles, and I can cast comedic actors to play dramatic roles because, really, there’s no such thing. There’s just actors.

Anytime you want to create something different, you have to convince people that it’s O.K. ‘We’ll be O.K. It’s going to work out. It’s going to be great.’

There is the moral spectrum in ‘Fargo,’ and you see it in other Coen brothers movies, where you have a very good character on one end and a very bad character on the other.

What makes something tragic is that it could‘ve been averted at multiple points.

The most dangerous thing, when you have a serious mental illness, is convincing yourself that you don’t have it. And you see it all the time. People get on medication, and they feel better, and they stop taking it. And some flirt with unreality on some levels. But it feels so convincing to them that it feels real.

Tension is all about, ‘Why is this taking so long?’ The interesting thing about that is that it’s also the tension of comedy. The tension of drama and comedy is similar, and that’s why usually you can get a big laugh in a really tense moment because people need that release.

It’s a human desire to be scared. On some level, that’s how we survived – that sense of fear and danger. Our lives are much safer, so we gravitate to those stories that makes us feel those things and learn lessons, even if it’s just, ‘What are you doing? Don’t go in the basement!’

When I sold my first book, ‘A Conspiracy of Tall Men,’ it was part of a two-book deal. It wasn’t hugely lucrative, but it was enough money for me to quit the paralegal job I had in San Francisco.

I am a salesman, I am an executive, I look at budgets, I think about power politics, but then I am also a creative person.

The last thing you want is to be desperate in Hollywood.

Let me be clear. ‘The Good Father‘ isn’t a handbook on how to assassinate the president.

There’s a degree to which music bypasses our rational brain and accesses our emotional core in a way that’s really visceral and allows you to make a strong impression on people without necessary delivering information.

TV is all about learning to write in someone else‘s voice, so if you do it long enough without selling your own project, they assume you don’t have your own voice; you’re just a good mimic.

‘Fargo’ is a tragedy with a happy ending. So you need to have that tragic underpinning, that all of this could be avoidable, and that’s what makes it tragic. It’s about the use of violence, and the fact that the tension in anticipation of violence and the tension in anticipation of a laugh are sort of the same.

My mom never went to college, so she just assumed the writer identity, and that was always really inspiring to me. It’s not something you need nine levels of education for. It’s really an identity that you claim for yourself, and then you have to make yourself one.

The ’50s and the ’70s are sort of similar in that they’re both times of major paranoia in America.

I think that we’re pattern-seeking animals, and what we like best is a story where everything fits together, where there’s no puzzle pieces left over.

We’re used to a story in modern terms as an information delivery device. Certainly on television and even with the studio films, there’s really only one note that you get, and that’s clarity. And people will sacrifice everything for clarity. They’ll sacrifice the joke. They’ll sacrifice the moment, or the romance.

The first dumb idea was to do it at all – to take ‘Fargo,’ this beloved classic, and turn it into a television show. The second dumb idea, when you do it and it works, was to throw everything out and start again.

It used to be for writers that that six seasons and a movie thing, that’s the holy grail as writers – your series goes eight, 10 seasons, you’re set for life.

The danger of writing a so-called thriller is that in your last 100 pages, all of these really interesting characters you’ve created are just running away from something or toward something, but they’re no longer capable of innovation or discovery.

I think people used to read ‘War and Peace,’ and now they don’t; now they sit around with their tablets and watch ‘Downton Abbey‘ and ‘Breaking Bad‘ or whatever, and they want the things that they watch to be better so that they can feel better about themselves for watching it.

One of the things I’ve always loved about genre, comic books, science fiction and fantasy is that there’s a certain level of playfulness to them, and pure imagination and creativity.

When I took on ‘Fargo,’ I thought, ‘Well, this is just a terrible idea. Four people will watch it, and they’ll hate-watch.’ But that allowed me to just go for it and take the risks.

When you’re a writer on a show, your job is to write in the show runner‘s voice, really.

I always feel like you can take a genre that has a familiar structure to it and then reinvent it as a character piece. Suddenly, what’s old is new again. With ‘Fargo,’ I adapted a movie without any of the characters or the story. Yet somehow it feels like ‘Fargo.’

Half of a broadcast show, in my experience, is things happening, and the other half is people talking about how they feel about the things that happened. And so there’s this sense of everyone saying their subtext out loud.

The ‘X-Men’ stories are the stories of outsiders: people who don’t fit into normal society and are ostracised; it’s a metaphor for gender, race, or sexual orientation.

In the TV business, you’ve got to write fast, and someone will tell you, ‘Can you rewrite this episode before… 6 P.M.?’ So that’s when you rewrite it. You can’t wait for the muse to show up.

I drove around New York when we did the upfronts and when we premiered ‘Fargo,’ and they crocheted a sweater for a double-decker bus and drove it around.

Making a new season for ‘Legion‘ is not something you just switch into. It’s not something you do between dropping the kids off in the morning and having dinner at night. That’s a retreat into the woods for six weeks with some mushrooms, and trying to come back with the answers.

The great thing about making an ensemble show is it becomes modular. It might work on the page to cut from one scene to another, but on the screen, it’s more powerful to take that second scene and move it first or move it later.

The thing with making your art your business is: It’s a business. You can’t sit around waiting for the muse, especially when you run a show, and you’re in production, and an outline is due, a script is due, and a reshoot is due. No. You look at the calendar, and you go, ‘OK. I can write from 4 to 6.’ So you write.

The great thing about an anthology is that each year is its own 10-hour movie, and the only requirement is that it’s the best 10-hour movie that I can make out of the story.

Greatness and fiasco is the same. You’re reaching for something just out of your grasp, and if you get it, it’s great, and if you don’t, it’s a disaster.

America is a huge country, filled with great tracts of open land. If you’re not careful, you can get lost in it – lost emotionally, mentally, spiritually.

A book is full of ideas. You just live with what you read for so much longer. A lot of the times, nowadays, with a movie or TV show, it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s entertainment!’ And you never think about it again.

My feeling is there’s a lot of straight drama on television. My goal in life is to try to create something unexpected, and genre is the tool in doing that.

I don’t think we have to suffer personally to make great art. If you’re prepared and organized, and you know what you’re looking for, you can make great art and then go home.

I sat down to take a break from writing a book and wrote a spec feature that would end up being the movie ‘Lies & Alibis’ with Steve Coogan.

The idea was always going to be that each year is a stand-alone story, which did make it easier on some level. It also requires the network to have the creative imagination to say, ‘This is also ‘Fargo,’ you know what I mean?

Writing is this odd act, right? To sit and type, or write by hand, or whatever people do. And it requires a real discipline because it is really a sheer act of will that you’re creating something, and you’re doing it by yourself.

Obviously, when you do something with drama and comedy in it – and by that, I mean a scene that has drama and comedy in it – you know the minute you introduce music, you’re either scoring the drama or you’re scoring the comedy, and therefore the scene becomes either dramatic or comedic.

There’s a sense you get from the Coens’ work, like ‘No Country for Old Men,’ where you put these characters in situations, and you just let this painful amount of time take place. Part of the tension is just how long it takes to get out of that scene.

The job at broadcast is to figure out what the dumbest person in the room is going to think. That’s not the case at FX.

Everyone always says that conflict is drama, and I agree, but I also don’t think you need drama everywhere. Or conflict everywhere.

The thing that scares us the most is when familiar things operate in unfamiliar ways.

‘Legion’ is meant to be a show that is a state of mind. But the problem with TV is that there are commercials. There’s a hypnotic quality to the way we put it together. I need to get you out of your life in the first seven minutes of that show.

I’m a big believer that the structure of stories should reflect the content of the story.

I try to approach the film medium as a novelist and the novel medium as a filmmaker on some level. It’s that question: Do we think in pictures, or do we think in language? And the novelist believes one thing, and the filmmaker believes another thing – and I’m fascinated by that balance.