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" Let me be clear. 'The Good Father' isn't a handbook on how to assassinate the president. "
Noah Hawley
President
Father
Good
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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
Same
Great
Greatness
" When you're a writer on a show, your job is to write in the show runner's voice, really. "
Noah Hawley
Job
You
Writer
" 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
" America is a huge country, filled with great tracts of open land. If you're not careful, you can get lost in it - lost emotionally, mentally, spiritually. "
Noah Hawley
You
America
Country
" In the TV business, you've got to write fast, and someone will tell you, 'Can you rewrite this episode before... 6 P.M.?' So that's when you rewrite it. You can't wait for the muse to show up. "
Noah Hawley
Fast
You
Wait
" 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
" 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
" The prospect of being a father made me ask myself a question. How do you know what kind of adult your child will turn out to be? And how much can you control that? "
Noah Hawley
Control
Child
Myself
" 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
" In 'The X-Men' world, one can be a hero one day and a villain the next, which means there's a constant battle for a character's soul that's dynamic. I find that really fascinating. "
Noah Hawley
Day
Soul
World
" 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
" 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
" 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
" For some reason, I tend to take on the stuff that people are really passionate about. If you make a list of people you don't want to offend, it's Vonnegut readers, comic book fans, and Coen brothers enthusiasts. "
Noah Hawley
Book
People
Want
" Half of a broadcast show, in my experience, is things happening, and the other half is people talking about how they feel about the things that happened. And so there's this sense of everyone saying their subtext out loud. "
Noah Hawley
People
Show
Feel
" 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
" Tension is all about, 'Why is this taking so long?' The interesting thing about that is that it's also the tension of comedy. The tension of drama and comedy is similar, and that's why usually you can get a big laugh in a really tense moment because people need that release. "
Noah Hawley
Long
People
Interesting
" 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
Love
Problems
Room
" Anytime you want to create something different, you have to convince people that it's O.K. 'We'll be O.K. It's going to work out. It's going to be great.' "
Noah Hawley
Want
People
Great
" 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
" The job at broadcast is to figure out what the dumbest person in the room is going to think. That's not the case at FX. "
Noah Hawley
Dumbest
Person
Room
" We're used to a story in modern terms as an information delivery device. Certainly on television and even with the studio films, there's really only one note that you get, and that's clarity. And people will sacrifice everything for clarity. They'll sacrifice the joke. They'll sacrifice the moment, or the romance. "
Noah Hawley
People
Sacrifice
Story
" 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
" 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
" Everyone always says that conflict is drama, and I agree, but I also don't think you need drama everywhere. Or conflict everywhere. "
Noah Hawley
Think
Agree
Conflict
" 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
" 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
" You've got to give an audience something to root for. The minute you get into more dystopian shows, where everything's really dark, and no one has any hope, and there's no positive goal we're working toward, it's a bummer. You run out of gas with them. Because you need to know, 'What am I in this for? What am I rooting for?' "
Noah Hawley
Positive
Hope
Goal
" 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
" 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