[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - The best response you can have to a payoff in a thriller is someone goes, "Oh, right, I forgot, of course..." [multiple voices chattering] [Narrator] On Story offers a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

All of our content is recorded live at Austin Film Festival and our year-round events.

To view previous episodes, visit OnStory.tv.

[projector clicking] [typing] [typewriter ding] [projector dies] [Narrator] On Story is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] From Austin Film Festival, this is On Story .

A look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

[paper rips] This week's On Story , Legion and Fargo creator, Noah Hawley.

- The act of writing has to be what inspires you to write.

There's no muse.

It's like the TV, it's a machine.

You've got to keep it moving.

You've got to feed it and the scripts are due when they're due and it's not like you have a grace period.

And so you know if you go, "When am I gonna write?"

and somebody tells you you have between four and six today, that's when you write, and it's got to be good.

[paper crumples] [typing] [typewriter ding] [Narrator] In this episode, Noah Hawley discusses the creative decisions behind his two critically acclaimed television shows.

[typewriter ding] - I come from a family of writers.

My grandmother was a writer, and my mom was a writer.

My mom never went to college, so I never thought that writing was something you needed any actual qualifications to do.

I just thought that it was an identity that you sort of called yourself a writer, and then eventually if you worked hard enough you would be a writer.

I started writing fiction and then... That was when I was living in New York.

Then I moved to San Francisco and published my first book, and I was working on the second one and I had some friends there.

I was part of this collective called The Writer's Grotto that's still up there.

We had 21 writers and filmmakers in our own office space and I'm not sure why I ever left.

We had a basketball hoop and I brought my dog to work and it was great.

Then one of the guys was doing some-- he'd fly down to LA and he had a movie project and a couple of TV projects.

I'd help him break story and figure out what the show would be.

I just took a break from the book and I wrote the script for that movie Lies and Alibis .

I happened to be represented by ICM for my fiction, and they also have a film arm.

They sent the script around and they said, "Well, people liked the script and you should come down because people want to meet you."

In that first set of meetings I went and I pitched an idea and then that idea sold.

So it was like a six-month period where I went from the novelist eating cat food to someone who had three movie projects at the same time.

Then, my motto is, "What else can I get away with," so I just started-- they said, "Are you interested in TV?"

And I said, "I own a TV.

Let's have a conversation."

And it went from there.

- But what was the appeal of writing for TV when you have the autonomy of novel writing?

- It's the only medium, really, where you live with these characters for as long as you do.

That's the traditional model.

I just started making the second season of the show Legion , and I've never made a second season of anything.

I was like, this was the same characters and just different stories?

That seems so weird to me.

But that's traditionally what television is, right?

It's 13 seasons of Bones , or 81 seasons of Grey's Anatomy , or something and...

So, yeah, to me, it's serialized storytelling and you know what's interesting to me now about it as a sort of 10-hour movie format that Fargo turned out to be, which is it's not really a TV show and it's not really a movie.

It allows you to do things structurally and switching points of view, and including the parts of the story that you couldn't put in a two hour movie because they're just not as important to the central plot.

[typewriter ding] You know what makes that movie so powerful is A, it says it's a true story at the beginning, and B, it ends the way it ends which is like you know two more months and she's going to have a baby and he got the three-cent stamp and she goes to bed and you think oh well, she saw this terrible thing but tomorrow's a normal day and that's her reward but if she wakes up tomorrow and it's another crazy Coen brothers case, A, you can't say it's a true story anymore and B, you just lose what makes it poignant and so... You know I went in and I said, "Look, it's not a television series.

It could be an anthology."

And they had had the first year of American Horror Story so you know they understood that idea.

You know and what I said was, "Why is the movie called Fargo ?"

It takes place in Minnesota, right?

Except that the word Fargo is so evocative of a place.

This sort of hinterland, frozen tundra.

But after the movie it's also, it also represents a type of story right?

This truth is stranger than fiction true crime story.

So I said, "If you think about Fargo that way, "then it kind of becomes a state of mind "and then the question is like, "well is this story a Fargo story?

"Does it fit?

Can you feel those elements to it?"

And you know we just went from there.

You know it's what I liked about that first year was you watch for the first three hours and you go oh I see, it's not connected to the movie at all and then in the fourth hour we find the money that was buried in the movie, and there's something to that delayed connection that feels like a reward on some level?

Like people accept that it's its own thing and then there's the fun of the connection, you know?

Which we just did with this last season bringing back Mr. Wrench in the seventh hour.

I mean we waited all that way, and so I like that idea of letting it be its own thing but also it's fun to have these connections if it's believable.

[gentle piano music] [door slams] [drums and cymbals clash] [engine starts] [typewriter ding] You know when I go to the canon, right?

The urtext of the Coen brothers work and I go, "Well is there a corollary," right?

So, you look at The Man Who Wasn't There, it's like there's a UFO in The Man Who Wasn't There , and a lot of UFO imagery and it takes place in the 50s when that was a big kind of paranoia.

But the late 70s was also a time of paranoia where the conspiracy did go all the way to the top and Close Encounters had come out the year before and Star Wars and there was a lot of this sort of UFO mania, and I also found a story with a Minnesota state trooper who had had what he claimed was a UFO encounter, et cetera, and so, I don't know, again, it felt right, you know?

I remember the MGM executives coming to take me to lunch in the early days of the writer's room and they said, "What can you tell us about season two?"

And I said, "Well, we're going to make three fake Ronald Reagan movies and there's a UFO," and they said, "No, really, what can you tell us about season two?"

So, I kind of know that I'm doing it right when I'm scaring some people.

But yeah, I mean it's I don't know this last year you know we end up in a bowling alley, or do we, that's where we see a guy who may or may not be an eternal sort of elemental figure and part of that for me was just about, the whole season was about how reality can be manipulated and what we, you know I mean we know as the audience that this guy was killed randomly because he was hired by an idiot, basically, but that idiot was hired by the parole officer who was trying to rob his brother.

We know that, we've seen that, and she knows that, the cop.

And then David Thewlis you know invents this Stussy killing serial killer who, and he finds a guy to confess and the guy goes to jail and now that's a fact.

That happened.

According to a court of law, it's a fact.

So there's no justice in that case, right?

There's only...

I started to say irony without humor is just violence, right?

And there's just the irony without humor to it, right?

And so all we really have is cosmic justice, and so that idea that there's this place where this Cossack can go where he's gonna get cosmic justice for his sins and the sins of his forebears.

You know that seemed really important to me so that the audience just doesn't feel like it's just a bleak, humorless reality.

- Yuri.

You are Yuri Gurka, Cossack of the Plains.

Grandchild of the Wolves Hundred.

I have a message for you from Helga Albrecht and the Rabbi Nachman.

[eerie music] [typewriter ding] - You said in a GQ interview that, " Fargo is the people we long to be.

"Simple, kind, neighborly versus the people we fear the most."

And in reading that, I wondered if that also meant the people we fear that we are the most.

- Yeah, I think, I mean certainly in the world of Fargo there's a sort of fascinating moral spectrum where you sort of have Marge on one end and she's all good you know?

And then you basically have, I would say, Peter Stormare on the other end who is one of these elemental characters that the Coens like.

The lone biker, the apocalypse or Anton Chigurh where you think they might not even be fully human, but they're sort of on the pure evil side.

And then in the middle, what's always really interesting, is you have this Bill Macy character, right?

Who has this moral struggle of he's gotta choose, right?

He made a bad choice, and now he could make a good choice or he could double down on the bad choice, and what's fascinating in the movie is watching him just continue to make bad choice after bad choice, you know?

That terrible scene where he goes in, he's forgotten all about his son.

Like he's literally has a son.

He had mom kidnapped.

He's forgotten all about him and he comes in and Scotty's in his room and he has this scene with him where he's just talking about Stan Grossman says, "We shouldn't talk to the cops," and you know it's... And so that was interesting to me in that is that there's this moral struggle, right?

You've got good and evil and someone in the middle who's which way are they gonna go?

In the first year, that was sort of Martin Freeman's character.

And then the second year I thought well you know we can't just do that again.

So Ed and Peggy became both sides of that.

It was a relationship story about, you know, he wants to do the right thing and she wants to do the wrong thing for complicated reasons.

- I ran over him, hit and run!

And then you stabbed him with a gardening tool.

The cops, do you think they're gonna believe us?

- I don't know, but people are gonna look for him.

- But look, I was careful.

I drove the back way all the way home.

- You drove the-- Hon, a man's dead.

- You know and then in the third year, there was sort of a sleight of hand 'cause I think you thought, "Okay, well Ewan McGregor with the mustache versus Ewan McGregor without the mustache."

You know the parole officer and his girlfriend, they're the Ed and Peggy of this year, and then, you know, about halfway through the season without spoiling anything, it switches and you realize, no actually, it's the rich brother who's the one that we're following you know?

So and that's the challenge of the show right?

Is that there's a paradigm to it of what the kind of story that it is, but you can't just tell the same story again.

You have to find well what's the new way to approach these ideas that makes it feel like you're not just repeating yourself?

- Well and I just love that even though you have these evil or villainous characters that whether for Freeman or Peggy that they're, I mean, ultimately, they're the ones who are responsible for their own undoing.

- Yeah, no, it's true.

I think a lot about that, mostly because of Patrick Wilson and Kirsten's performance, but that last big scene in the car where you know she's talking about how it's not fair because she knew there was more to life than just being the small town wife and she was so close to figuring it out and then this stupid guy walked in front of her car, and she hit him and... And of course we know that dozens of people have died since then because of her, and she's just so fixated on her own-- I mean you'll always hear in Fargo somebody say, "I'm the victim here," and they're always the worst person in the show, you know what I mean?

But you know, and then Patrick says, "People are dead, Peggy," and you know I mean the miracle of Kirsten is like, what happens on her face in the next 15 seconds, I've never seen from an actor before.

You just see the complexity of feelings as she processes that, and then can't look directly at it and there's a lot of self-denial you have to go through in order to be a villain who thinks they're a victim.

- It's a lie okay?

That you can do it all.

Be a wife and a mother and this self-made career woman like there's 37 hours in a day.

And then when you can't, they say it's you.

You're faulty, like... Like... Like you're inferior somehow.

And like if you could just get your act together until you're half mad-- - People are dead, Peggy.

[sighs] [typewriter ding] - Just tell me what happened next.

- Look...

I don't know, it's fuzzy.

- You went off your medication?

Why?

- We're just looking for the truth.

- Steven!

- Which you promised to tell.

[Man] He believes he's mentally ill... but he may be the most powerful mutant we have ever encountered.

- Can we take a break?

Please.

- Of course.

Let's take a break.

[sighs] [intense music] - Look at me, I know what I am.

- What's that?

- So with Legion , I just wrapped that first year of Fargo and FX kind of came to me and said, "There's corporate energy toward X-Men for television, and is that interesting to you?"

And I said well I read those books when I was younger and I do like the fact that the morality in that universe versus a lot of other comic universes is really kind of gray, you know?

The movie starts in a concentration camp so you know it's concerned with the real nature of evil and then you have these characters who kind of go back and forth, like they do bad things, they do good things, and there's a little more real morality to it.

You know, I went in and met with Lauren Shuler Donner who was a producer on those movies and a producer on the show, and she talked about well there are ideas to take the sort of Hellfire Club from First Class and expand that.

I was like yeah I'm not really interested in sort of doing a continuation of something you did in the movies and...

But I was interested.

This was before all the Netflix, you know, before there were 500 superhero shows.

And so I just called Simon Kinberg, who's the writer and producer on all those movies and I thought let me talk to the writer and just kick things around and say you know I'm interested, but I don't know what the story would be and my feeling was it's gotta be a story that even if you took the genre out of it would be a show that you wanted to watch, right?

And... You know and I had this idea which was this sort of origin which is not necessarily what the show is meant to be, but I thought well what if Walter White became a supervillain instead of just a regular villain on some level?

Like, that's interesting to see the origin story of that kind of character.

And then, I found my way toward this David Haller character who in the books is suffers potentially from schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder and I thought well that's interesting that you could make a show about a character who doesn't know.

Like does he have mental, a mental illness or does he have these powers?

And then I thought well what's fun about that for me, having made this objective, this is a true story show where the camera is always very objective is well let's make the show subjective because I always feel like the structure of a show should reflect the content of a show.

So if you have a story about a guy who doesn't know what's real or what's not real, then that should be the audience's experience and you know that became interesting to me because now you sort of had this unreliable narrator.

If you'd read the script, you would have no idea that it would end up looking like a Terence Stamp movie from 1964, and I don't necessarily know why it did, except when I went to produce it and direct it that's what it seemed to want to be.

The network was surprised as well, because they had read it with the idea that this is contemporary and it's whatever an American city or something like that and I just thought that it was more, 'cause you get into those questions of like, well is it a world where the X-Men are?

And what's, when they move around in time and I had at first flirted with the idea of setting it in the 90s like they choose a period, time period, each one of those movies.

And then I just thought well it's sort of more interesting if it's a parable or a fable almost, you know?

Now you don't have to worry about that other world necessarily and I also thought again it's subjective right?

So this may not be what the world actually looks like, but it's what it looks like to him.

And so the more I thought about that idea, the more interested I was in it and I kind of came to this rationalization which is that really this is a show about people who are defined by society one way, and their differences are what makes them outcasts and they're working really hard to reclaim their own identity and say, "No this is my weakness.

What you think is my weakness is really my strength," and what is that if not a teenager, right?

It's someone who is always struggling against I'm not that kid anymore that you think I am and who are the original teenagers really?

It was rock and roll in the 60s.

It was the British invasion, and so somehow that all was in there to go, the music should be The Kinks and it should be The Who and it should be that sense, and stylistically so yeah it just sort of worked its way in that direction and then TV does a lot of things now, but one thing they really don't do is the surreal, right?

I mean Hannibal did it to some degree.

Obviously Twin Peaks came back and did it, but there wasn't really anybody who was saying "Well look, let's take some of the show and let's divorce imagery from information," right?

I mean story is basically an information delivery device, right?

It's about clarity, right?

Otherwise you don't understand the story, but if you're saying well I'm okay with you not understanding now, everything, you can see these things.

I mean it's sort of how horror works in a way right?

Is like, you're seeing this monster but you don't know what the monster is yet.

And so there was a similar dynamic of saying this is a haunted house story basically with this guy, and I understand why he's haunted and what's haunting him, but I don't need you to understand it now.

I just need you to be experiencing it so it's an experience delivery device now.

You know, and the love story was really critical to saying all right well he has this epic love.

He meets this girl, and she's what's going to determine which way he goes.

Is he going to be a hero or is he going to be a villain?

And a lot of it has to do with she's his grounding to the world, but she's also the one thing in the show that has to be real, right?

And if that one thing is real, then the audience-- everything else can be flexible, right?

Because they're in, this makes sense.

We want this for him, you know?

It has this aspirational quality, and so yeah sure, if you want a guy in a diving suit or a guy in a, you know, in a safari suit who lives in an ice cube, that's fine.

We can do that as long as he's got something that he's fighting for, and that became the fun of it.

And it was never about the sort of J.J. Abrams mystery box of like I'm gonna distract you from this question by asking you another question.

I always knew that as the character got clarity, we would get clarity.

So I mean that was sort of the process of that.

- All I'm saying is that thing they tell us is crazy?

How I don't want to be handled.

Or you see stuff and hear whatever voices.

That's what makes you you.

- Do you want to be my girlfriend?

- Okay.

But don't touch me.

- Okay.

(typewriter ding] [Narrator] You've been watching a conversation with Noah Hawley on On Story .

On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story project including the On Story PBS series now streaming online, the On Story radio program and podcast in collaboration with Public Radio International and the On Story book series available on Amazon.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival visit OnStory.tv or AustinFilmFestival.com.

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