Ask Me Anything: Highlights from Noah Hawley’s Reddit AMA
I’m Noah Hawley, creator and showrunner of FX’s Fargo and Legion and author of Before the Fall. Three weeks ago, I held my first Reddit Ask Me Anything. Below are highlights from the session.
Tension is a product of time, adding up the pieces one by one. it’s about telling the story with the camera and staying focused. Characters can move in and out of stories very economically as long as they’re clearly drawn.
As to public disasters, I guess it’s not a conscious choice, but I’m attracted to taking stories of a certain scale and then humanizing them, taking what would normally be a plot-driven story and turning it into something character and theme driven.
The weekly anthology is another degree of difficulty. It’s hard enough to tell a good story in 10 hours.
The answer is, I don’t know yet. It is an adaptation of the book, but the book leaves a lot of details unexplored. So most likely it would be an expansion, where, like the Supreme Court, I must decipher the original intent of the author and extrapolate what is a Vonnegut moment and what isn’t.
We start by making offers to bigger name actors, then hold casting sessions, with tapes coming in from around the world.
The accents are always a balancing act. We never want to devolve into parody. We have a dialect coach on set all the time to help out.
What made it work was that I didn’t try to remake the movie. I was tasked with creating a story with a similar feel and point of view, but wasn’t a carbon copy. This allowed me to bring my own eye to the work. Believe me, nobody felt the pressure more than me.
I have to thank VFX wizard John Ross for most of the blizzard sequences. Though we had snow on the ground, the skies when we filmed them were mostly clear — sometimes even sunny. John was able to create a blizzard where none existed. In fact, there are shots of Mr. Numbers searching for Malvo that are literally all filmed on the same spot, just using different takes, and we rotoed him out and placed him in the blizzard.
I take it one year at a time. I have a sense that there is a larger universe, but I haven’t mapped it out.
I chose the character to focus on. I wanted to create a subjective world based around a character who has a hard time knowing what’s real. In this way the structure of the story could reflect the content. I also wanted to take a swing at an epic love story. So there’s that.
I’d love to take a crack at Peaky Blinders. I’m a big fan of slow motion walking to songs by the Pogues (plus it’s a great cast and a very fun show)
I’m writing a script. In my mind it’s a mini-series, 6–8 episodes.
Noah Hawley’s novel, Before the Fall, is out now from Grand Central Publishing. Copyright © 2016 Noah Hawley.
Available everywhere: Barnes & Noble, Amazon, iBooks.
