Best known for his small-screen adaptation of a Coen brothers classic, Noah Hawley is also a bestselling author. Cassie McCullagh talks to the creator of Fargo to see how he works.

Your latest novel, Before the Fall, is being made into a feature film. You're its screenwriter. Working across three formats—television, film, books—at the moment, what's distinct for you about TV?

A movie, by nature of its length, is a plot delivery device.

You have the beginning of the movie to set everything in motion, but by the time you're in the middle of the movie you need to be moving towards the conclusion where every scene is a step along that path.

When you make it too easy for a viewer to root for someone, it becomes a little formulaic, I think. Noah Hawley

In the 10-hour movie—which is how I think of Fargo—yes, there's a beginning, a middle and an end.

But there's room along that way to focus on the details that are smaller or obscure or more character-driven, details that wouldn't fit in a two-hour movie, and can expand the work both thematically and on a character basis.

They give you that sense of perspective and multiple points of view, in a way that when the final collision occurs, you've really seen the story from multiple sides and it becomes harder to know exactly what you want to happen.

It allows you to be unpredictable.

Your television adaptation of the 1996 film Fargo uses the anthology format. Each season covers a different storyline, with different characters and a handful of continuing elements. Does that give you creative freedom?

Every year is its own self-contained story, with some unexpected connections to either the movie or another season of the show.

This does allow me to say each year: what is this movie that I'm making? Because the second year of Fargo was very different in both scale and composition to the first year.

The second year, set in 1979, we used a whole split-screen approach. Cinematically, there were a lot more moving pieces—it was a period epic about a crime family, about the death of the family business and the rise of corporate America.

There were so many things that we were doing, the scale of which was much more ambitious than the first year.

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Now, looking at the third year the question becomes, 'Well, what does that movie want to be?' It's set in 2010, it's a more intimate story, and I won't know until I'm making it exactly what the real tone and visual style of that version is.

But you look at Joel and Ethan Coen's movies—A Serious Man, No Country For Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Raising Arizona—each movie is a perfectly executed version of that movie that has very little to do with what they've made before.

Here we have a crime story at the heart of it, the region [the American Midwest] makes it connected, but otherwise we really have a lot of leeway.

Where are you with the third season of Fargo?

We're writing now, and we'll start filming in our winter on the idea that we'd be on the air in the US in the spring, and hopefully in Australia at the same time.



You've also got a TV adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat's Cradle.

I'm a huge Kurt Vonnegut fan. There's something timeless and universal about his voice, and his approach.

He's one of the most inventive stylists of American novelists. He mixes genre from science fiction, he jumps around in time, he mixes tone—his books are very comic, but they're also very morally serious.

Because of that two-hour format of movies-as-a-plot-delivery-device, it's very hard to adapt Vonnegut's work for feature film.

But it felt to me that this 10- or eight-hour movie is the best possible version because you can take those diversions and digressions.

Cat's Cradle is a historical science fiction novel about a guy who's writing a nonfiction book about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

In investigating that, he finds the family of one of the scientists and goes off on this journey that is very odd, and unexpected and comic and also really tragic at the same time.

I'm really excited about it.

Your latest book, Before the Fall, debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. It centres around a plane crash with only two survivors. Why?

We used to have—or, it used to be—one story. Someone does something heroic and so they're a hero. But now we has two parts: one when we build them up, one when we build them down.



It's interesting to look at this idea: here was this man, he was a perfectly innocent guy who was in a plane, and saves a boy. You can't do anything more heroic than save a child.

And then questions start to arise. Well, why was he on the plane in the first place? What was his relationship to the other people on the plane?

Very quickly, this innocently-heroic act becomes questions in a way that seems very consistent with the way our world acts these days.

But it's also a media critique, and an exploration of extreme wealth.

I wanted to look at the impact that money has on people's lives, especially once you reach that point where you literally no longer have to spend time with people that don't have hundreds of millions of dollars.

People who can travel from their penthouse apartment in a private car, to an office with their own elevator, and then fly privately.

You almost without realising it stop living in the world that everyone else stops living in with.

You don't write one-dimensional characters.

Part of the come-away from Fargo for me is, I am attracted to stories with a large ensemble, with a lot of moving parts, that are all kind of in a collision course.

When you make it too easy for a reader or a viewer, to root for someone or against someone else, it becomes a little formulaic, I think.

It's much more interesting when you have mixed feelings, and the reality is that other than the great evil psychopaths of our time, most people have their good qualities and their bad qualities, and they have a point of view that's just as valid.

When you don't make it easy for people to write something off, the book becomes more interesting.

This is an edited extract of an interview that first aired on TV Club.

Hear the full interview Wednesday 22 June 2016 Before the Fall is a spine-tingling thriller that demonstrates Noah Hawley's storytelling skills transcend mediums. More This [series episode segment] has image,



