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" I am a salesman, I am an executive, I look at budgets, I think about power politics, but then I am also a creative person. "
Noah Hawley
Power
Politics
Creative
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" My feeling is there's a lot of straight drama on television. My goal in life is to try to create something unexpected, and genre is the tool in doing that. "
Noah Hawley
Feeling
Doing
Goal
" I always feel like you can take a genre that has a familiar structure to it and then reinvent it as a character piece. Suddenly, what's old is new again. With 'Fargo,' I adapted a movie without any of the characters or the story. Yet somehow it feels like 'Fargo.' "
Noah Hawley
Story
You
Feel
" There's this common sense idea that in order to appeal to the biggest number of people, you have to write something very general, but my experience is the more specific you make something, the more people respond to it, in a very odd way. "
Noah Hawley
People
Common Sense
Experience
" 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
Work
Page
Powerful
" 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
Enough
Me
Job
" I would have loved to have been in the room with the ABC executives when they watched David Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive' TV pilot. You know that had to be a long silence after that thing stopped. "
Noah Hawley
Silence
Drive
Know
" The '50s and the '70s are sort of similar in that they're both times of major paranoia in America. "
Noah Hawley
Paranoia
America
Major
" When Fox asked me if I'd consider taking on The X-Men universe for television, my first thought was, 'What would you do with those stories or that genre that hasn't been done?' "
Noah Hawley
You
Thought
Universe
" What success has done is present me with a lot of opportunities, and I haven't necessarily learned to say 'no' as well as I should have. "
Noah Hawley
Opportunities
Me
Success
" 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
Crime
Universe
True
" I'm on a lot of airplanes. There are definitely times when I just vapor-lock. I'm on the plane, and I have so much to do, I just don't know what to do. It never lasts for very long. It might last for the flight. "
Noah Hawley
Never
Long
Just
" The first conversations I had for 'Legion' were right as the first year of 'Fargo' was ending. 'Daredevil' hadn't even begun then, so when signing on, I had no real sense of the onslaught that was coming. "
Noah Hawley
First
Real
Right
" 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
Dog
Day
Cat
" The thing with making your art your business is: It's a business. You can't sit around waiting for the muse, especially when you run a show, and you're in production, and an outline is due, a script is due, and a reshoot is due. No. You look at the calendar, and you go, 'OK. I can write from 4 to 6.' So you write. "
Noah Hawley
Run
Look
Business
" Let me be clear. 'The Good Father' isn't a handbook on how to assassinate the president. "
Noah Hawley
President
Father
Good
" There's a degree to which music bypasses our rational brain and accesses our emotional core in a way that's really visceral and allows you to make a strong impression on people without necessary delivering information. "
Noah Hawley
You
Strong
People
" The most dangerous thing, when you have a serious mental illness, is convincing yourself that you don't have it. And you see it all the time. People get on medication, and they feel better, and they stop taking it. And some flirt with unreality on some levels. But it feels so convincing to them that it feels real. "
Noah Hawley
Better
People
Time
" I'm Kubrick without the O.C.D. "
Noah Hawley
Kubrick
Without
" The danger of writing a so-called thriller is that in your last 100 pages, all of these really interesting characters you've created are just running away from something or toward something, but they're no longer capable of innovation or discovery. "
Noah Hawley
You
Interesting
Writing
" What's great is that each medium has a unique set of things that it does and does well. Film is a visual medium, and obviously, you can't fit a whole book into two hours unless you're really economical about it. Obviously, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and on some level, it's sort of true. "
Noah Hawley
You
Words
Unique
" 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. "
Noah Hawley
More
Camera
Great
" 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
Around
Sweater
Did
" 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
Start
You
Television
" I'm a big believer that the structure of stories should reflect the content of the story. "
Noah Hawley
Story
Structure
Big
" The anthology format is completely normal to me. That's just how TV works in my experience. "
Noah Hawley
Normal
Experience
How
" One of the things I love about Joel and Ethan Coen's movies is that there is this element of the ethereal and the mythic that they play with. "
Noah Hawley
Element
Love
Movies
" 'Fargo' is a tragedy with a happy ending. So you need to have that tragic underpinning, that all of this could be avoidable, and that's what makes it tragic. It's about the use of violence, and the fact that the tension in anticipation of violence and the tension in anticipation of a laugh are sort of the same. "
Noah Hawley
Ending
You
Violence
" 'Fargo' becomes a metaphor for a type of true crime case where truth is stranger than fiction. So, there's no reason that there isn't another 10-hour true crime story that could be told in this region. "
Noah Hawley
Truth Is
Truth
Crime
" TV is all about learning to write in someone else's voice, so if you do it long enough without selling your own project, they assume you don't have your own voice; you're just a good mimic. "
Noah Hawley
Voice
Long
Learning
" I think that we're pattern-seeking animals, and what we like best is a story where everything fits together, where there's no puzzle pieces left over. "
Noah Hawley
Together
Story
Animals