Interview (Written): Noah Hawley

A Q&A with the executive producer of the TV series ‘Fargo’.

A THR interview with Noah Hawley who for three seasons has exec produced and been the showrunner of the FX series ‘Fargo’. His other TV credits include ‘Bones’, ‘The Unusuals’, and ‘Legion’.

The first two seasons started with these actions of shockingly serious violence that felt very unplanned and spontaneous. But the big act of instigating violence here is both precise and almost kind of Looney Tunes-y in its humor. Does that sound right to you, and is that part of the tone of the season in your mind?

The Looney Tunes tone? No. I knew from that first year that because we’re making a 10-hour movie and not a two-hour that if we did the actual tone of Fargo — which is a more comic movie than people remember — then people might think we got the tone wrong. I said to myself, “If you look at the whole array, tonally from Ladykillers or Raising Arizona on the one side to Miller’s Crossing to the other side, I think we have to lop off each end.” We shouldn’t ever devolve into farce, but I also don’t think we want to be earnest at any real point. What I ended up settling on is this idea of making No Country for Old Fargo, where we need a dramatic crime infrastructure that sustains the level of threat throughout, where you’re always a little worried about everybody and the threat of violence is always there. And within that, you can have these comic moments.

This year, there is whimsy to the setup and Ray and Nikki have a certain lightness to them that makes us really like them. And obviously, what happens at the end of that first hour between them is both horrific and entertaining. So it’s a balance, but you’ll find overall that there is a lot of comedy this year but the stakes are really high as well.

In terms of storytelling and experiencing the way that a TV story can be told, how did the Legion experience bleed into Fargo?

I deliberately kept it out. When I was behind the camera shooting the first hour of this year’s Fargo, there were a couple of moments where I thought, “Oh, the camera can do this,” and then I thought “No, that’s not a Coen brothers move.” The great thing about Fargo is that it’s a more objective style of filmmaking, the camera moves in very classical ways and the most interesting things normally are the characters. And that said, I started in season two to enhance some moments with a more obvious camera move, but in general, it was nice to go back to that language, the cinematic language of just trusting your story and using the camera to tell the story but not drawing attention to it.

So even after two, into three seasons now, the What Would the Coen Brothers Do? bracelet is still something you look at? It’s not something where it’s become your Fargo at this point in your mind? Or at least not completely?

Every year there is a little bit of a relaxation, I would imagine. For two years, I never allowed us to pull focus between characters in the sequence. I always thought, “Well, we’ll do two passes and we’ll have the focus deep on one and focus near on another and we’ll find a way to cut around that.” But this year because so much of this show is about pairs of people, it was just natural. I mean, the story was in the focus shift, the story was when Emmit and Sy are facing off against [David Thewlis’] Varga, and Varga is saying, “It’s an investment, not a loan.” And Emmit looks over at Sy, the story is what happens on Sy’s face. You want the camera, the focus to shift. So, I relaxed that. We still shouldn’t do it melodramatically or anything. But yeah, I’m always trying to think about. It has to be consistent with the filmmaking of No Country for Old Men or the filmmaking of Fargo or A Serious Man. This isn’t about pyrotechnics of the camera, it’s about telling a story.

For the rest of the interview, go here.