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
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.
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.
I think this idea of fighting the enemy within is sort of more interesting than fighting an external enemy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The last thing you want is to be desperate in Hollywood.
People, they don't know how to bend; they just break.
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.
The great thing about an anthology is that each year is its own 10-hour movie, and the only requirement is that it's the best 10-hour movie that I can make out of the story.
As for my schedule, I tend to go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning, and I try to be as productive as possible. Some days, I can devote to one specific thing. Other days, it's a catch-all day.
I'm a big believer that the structure of stories should reflect the content of the story.
Bringing back stamp collecting and bringing back bridge seems like a pretty good way to fight the modern world.
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?'
Everyone always says that conflict is drama, and I agree, but I also don't think you need drama everywhere. Or conflict everywhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the things that I've always appreciated about the 'X-Men' style of storytelling versus other Marvel stories is how fluid the line between good and bad and right and wrong is.
The thing that scares us the most is when familiar things operate in unfamiliar ways.
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.
'Legion' is meant to be a show that is a state of mind. But the problem with TV is that there are commercials. There's a hypnotic quality to the way we put it together. I need to get you out of your life in the first seven minutes of that show.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a storyteller, you have the story that you tell, and you have the way you can tell it, and both are equally important.
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.
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.'
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.
A book is full of ideas. You just live with what you read for so much longer. A lot of the times, nowadays, with a movie or TV show, it's like, 'Oh, it's entertainment!' And you never think about it again.
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?'
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.
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.
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.
I'm Kubrick without the O.C.D.
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.
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 makes something tragic is that it could've been averted at multiple points.
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.
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.
It's a human desire to be scared. On some level, that's how we survived - that sense of fear and danger. Our lives are much safer, so we gravitate to those stories that makes us feel those things and learn lessons, even if it's just, 'What are you doing? Don't go in the basement!'
One of the things I've always loved about genre, comic books, science fiction and fantasy is that there's a certain level of playfulness to them, and pure imagination and creativity.
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.
