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" 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
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" 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. "
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You
Interesting
Writing
" 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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Book
Writing
Up
" 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. "
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Around
Sweater
Did
" The thing that scares us the most is when familiar things operate in unfamiliar ways. "
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Most
Ways
Us
" 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
" 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
Me
You
" 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
" 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
" 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 best strategy for making people care about what happens is if they empathize with both sides. If you just have a Villain with a capital V, it becomes very two-dimensional. "
Noah Hawley
Best
Strategy
Villain
" 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
" 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 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
" It used to be for writers that that six seasons and a movie thing, that's the holy grail as writers - your series goes eight, 10 seasons, you're set for life. "
Noah Hawley
You
Used
Life
" 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
" 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 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 come from a family of writers. My mom had been a writer, nonfiction books, and her mother was a playwright in the 1930s and '40s. And my twin brother, Alexi, is a writer on 'The Following.' "
Noah Hawley
Family
Mother
Mom
" 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'm attracted to ensembles: you get a lot of really good moving pieces. It's sort of like a horse race in a way, especially when you know that everyone is on this collision course. It's like, 'Who's going to make it?' And you can put people together in unexpected pairings. "
Noah Hawley
Horse
People
Moving
" 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
" Writing is this odd act, right? To sit and type, or write by hand, or whatever people do. And it requires a real discipline because it is really a sheer act of will that you're creating something, and you're doing it by yourself. "
Noah Hawley
Writing
Discipline
People
" 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
" Bringing back stamp collecting and bringing back bridge seems like a pretty good way to fight the modern world. "
Noah Hawley
Back
World
Good
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Noah Hawley
Just
I Can
Fun
" Let me be clear. 'The Good Father' isn't a handbook on how to assassinate the president. "
Noah Hawley
President
Father
Good
" 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