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" I'm a big believer that the structure of stories should reflect the content of the story. "
Noah Hawley
Story
Structure
Big
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" 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
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Great
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" 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
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" 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. "
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" 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
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" As a storyteller, you have the story that you tell, and you have the way you can tell it, and both are equally important. "
Noah Hawley
Important
Way
Both
" 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
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Job
" Obviously, when you do something with drama and comedy in it - and by that, I mean a scene that has drama and comedy in it - you know the minute you introduce music, you're either scoring the drama or you're scoring the comedy, and therefore the scene becomes either dramatic or comedic. "
Noah Hawley
You
Comedy
Drama
" The thing that scares us the most is when familiar things operate in unfamiliar ways. "
Noah Hawley
Most
Ways
Us
" 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 guess I still have this motto: 'What else can I get away with?' And unpredictability in film - that's the hardest thing there is. "
Noah Hawley
Film
The Hardest Thing
Away
" 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
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People
" 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
" 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 makes something tragic is that it could've been averted at multiple points. "
Noah Hawley
Makes
Multiple
Something
" 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
" 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
People
Work
Control
" 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
Good
You
Movies
" The anthology format is completely normal to me. That's just how TV works in my experience. "
Noah Hawley
Normal
Experience
How
" 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
War
Think
People
" 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
End
Heart
She
" When I took on 'Fargo,' I thought, 'Well, this is just a terrible idea. Four people will watch it, and they'll hate-watch.' But that allowed me to just go for it and take the risks. "
Noah Hawley
Go For It
Risks
Me
" The 'X-Men' stories are the stories of outsiders: people who don't fit into normal society and are ostracised; it's a metaphor for gender, race, or sexual orientation. "
Noah Hawley
Society
Gender
Normal
" A novel is a relationship, you know? When you read a book, the writer has done half the work, and you're doing half the work. You're providing the imagination; the words are turning into pictures in your mind. There's an active relationship that's going on. "
Noah Hawley
Book
Work
Relationship
" Making a new season for 'Legion' is not something you just switch into. It's not something you do between dropping the kids off in the morning and having dinner at night. That's a retreat into the woods for six weeks with some mushrooms, and trying to come back with the answers. "
Noah Hawley
Night
Woods
Back
" 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
Movies
Seeing
People
" There have been days where I've had two writers' rooms or three writers' rooms going, and you walk back and forth. And then you sort of throw yourself on the sofa, and you go, 'Just talk at me for, like, 20 minutes,' and my brain will catch up with this particular story. But I find that exciting. "
Noah Hawley
Walk
Story
Me
" 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
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Story
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" I try to approach the film medium as a novelist and the novel medium as a filmmaker on some level. It's that question: Do we think in pictures, or do we think in language? And the novelist believes one thing, and the filmmaker believes another thing - and I'm fascinated by that balance. "
Noah Hawley
Think
Try
Balance
" 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
Television
Good
Film