There is a difference between movie actors and TV acting, especially with movie stars, which is they know their face is 20 feet high on the screen. They know they don’t have to do much. – Noah Hawley
I come from a family of writers. My mom had been a writer, nonfiction books, and her mother was a playwright in the 1930s and ’40s. And my twin brother, Alexi, is a writer on ‘The Following.’ – Noah Hawley
I love the idea that the editing room is the final time you write. You should still be creatively solving problems even at that point. It’s not really until you’re locked that you can call it quits. – Noah Hawley
The ’50s and the ’70s are sort of similar in that they’re both times of major paranoia in America. – Noah Hawley
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. – Noah Hawley
Let me be clear. ‘The Good Father’ isn’t a handbook on how to assassinate the president. – Noah Hawley
I pitched the idea to FX that there’s this larger ‘Fargo’ universe where there’s true crime in the upper Midwest, and I can tell stories from any era of that. Maybe they connect to the first season or the movie, or maybe they don’t. It’s just a style of storytelling. We’re under the auspices of being a true story that isn’t true. – Noah Hawley
Making ‘Fargo’ for FX has been the highlight of my career. A writer can search his or her whole career for a network partner who truly understands and encourages their vision. For me, the search is over. – Noah Hawley
I’m not that guy who thinks I have all the answers. Writing is a means of communicating, and if enough people say, ‘I don’t get it,’ it’s worth looking at. – Noah Hawley
Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning ‘The Good Father’ into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically. – Noah Hawley
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. – Noah Hawley
I was part of a writers’ collective with 21 writers and filmmakers called the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. We had our own office space in this old converted dog and cat hospital, and we had a basketball hoop outside. I’d bring my dog to work every day and write. – Noah Hawley
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. – Noah Hawley
‘Downton Abbey’ didn’t have the impact it had just because it was a good story about people. It was something about that period and that world that was fascinating to people on a level that wasn’t just as an entertainment. – Noah Hawley
Experimental film by the ’70s had become much more mainstream after ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and stuff in the late ’60s, when you were seeing bigger movies where people were exploring the medium a lot more. – Noah Hawley
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. – Noah Hawley
In a traditional TV show or movie, your hero is always where the action is. But in real life, at the end of the movie ‘Fargo,’ when Bill Macy is arrested, Marge is nowhere to be found because it’s a different jurisdiction, and she wouldn’t be there. I took that to heart. – Noah Hawley
I think for really good-hearted people, that idea of putting yourself in the shoes of a monster to figure out why they acted that way, that’s a really frightening idea. – Noah Hawley
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. – Noah Hawley
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. – Noah Hawley
There are things we can control and the things we can’t control. I can’t control how people react to the work I do. – Noah Hawley
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. – Noah Hawley
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. – Noah Hawley
The anthology format is completely normal to me. That’s just how TV works in my experience. – Noah Hawley
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. – Noah Hawley
