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" 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. "

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" My goal is always to make something unpredictable that feels inevitable in the end. It's getting harder to do that. Audiences are so sophisticated and so smart. "

Noah Hawley

End

Goal

Smart

" I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft. "

" I'm Kubrick without the O.C.D. "

Noah Hawley

Kubrick

Without

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" I remain a huge 'Game of Thrones' fan. "

" 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. "

" 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

Success

" I'm a big believer that the structure of stories should reflect the content of the story. "

" 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?' "

" 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. "

" If there's one thing that television doesn't really do, and has never really done, is to tell a surreal story. "

" The anthology format is completely normal to me. That's just how TV works in my experience. "

" You need a good James Clavell novel, I think, to make a good miniseries. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" My mom never went to college, so she just assumed the writer identity, and that was always really inspiring to me. It's not something you need nine levels of education for. It's really an identity that you claim for yourself, and then you have to make yourself one. "

Noah Hawley

Yourself

Identity

" I think the age of the modern media campaign has created a new icon, the celebrity-in-chief. Political elections have become wars fought by candidates with opposing values. "

" The great amount of fun that I have is I can cast dramatic actors to play comedic roles, and I can cast comedic actors to play dramatic roles because, really, there's no such thing. There's just actors. "

" 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

Book

Writing

" 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. "

" 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? "

" I did some feature work, then tried TV. I was always very aware that the only power that you have is the power of options. If the film industry dries up, then you focus on the TV or the books. For me, it was always about what story do I want to tell next? "

Noah Hawley

Power

You

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" What makes something tragic is that it could've been averted at multiple points. "

" 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. "

" 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. "