Noah Hawley: creator, Legion, Fargo (TV series)
“When you are thinking about writing a place or setting a show in a place, specifically, you have to think about how the show is going to grow over time. Just because, just as you don’t want the characters to become static, you don’t want the place where they are to become static.”
“I’m happy to write dialogue, but if I can figure out a way to tell the story with a camera, that’s really, that’s the ultimate for me, and especially in a region where people are so inarticulate and unable to communicate with each other. What are those dialogue scenes getting you other than some, hopefully, you’ll understand what they want even though they can’t say it out loud, but yeah, and a lot of that was scripted, a lot of the most noticeable camera moves, a lot of that was in the script.”
“For me, plot is never enough to tell a story, and certainly, in this world, the drive always had to be a character drive and not in a schmaltzy way. I mean, the biggest rule, forget what lenses or whatever. It’s like, melodrama was not available to me.”
“That’s the hard part of a dead body, starting with a dead body, right. It’s because there’s this whole story that you’re not showing, which is, in some ways, is the story that’s really going to invest you the most in the case that these guys are so desperate to solve, is who is this person and how did they die, and it’s a mystery that you can only solve at the end. For me, to have every crime occur onscreen and everyone involved to know them in advance, I mean, it makes it more character-driven and less plot-driven, I think.”
“You can kill characters, you can reveal things. There’s none of this vamping that you have to do, you don’t have any filler episodes. Everything is steps toward the conclusion of your story, and I think that’s really exciting.”