CraveOnline: What is the tone of Fargo dialogue where it makes people laugh, but I don’t think it’s meant to be funny?
Noah Hawley: There’s just a dryness I think to people. I think there’s a vernacular to it. It’s not always what’s said. Sometimes it’s the way it’s said and I think one of the things that I love about their dialogue in a lot of their movies is its deadpan, it’s dryness. You don’t know, for example, in No Country, Tommy Lee Jones’s character is so funny but you don’t know, is he kidding? Is he joking around? You can’t really tell. I just think that there’s an intelligence that’s there that smart people are often funny people. Then there’s unintentionally funny elements as well. We have some dumb people in our show also.
They do say things that are only said in that region.
Warren Littlefield: Without a doubt. That’s the specificity of the world and survival can be funny. It’s a cruel environment to live in. We are set in the dead of winter in Minnesota.
Noah Hawley: And we’re filming in the dead of winter in Calgary. It goes down into the way negatives. There’s a stoicism I think that is both part of what makes that culture so great and part of what makes it so buttoned up.
Movie-wise, I remember Die Hard 2 was set at Dulles airport in winter and they actually couldn’t find snow that year. Are you having any snow problems in Calgary?
Noah Hawley: No, not substantially. We had one day we had to push because we didn’t have enough snow, and then the day it landed on was minus 40 so we couldn’t shoot it. Then we picked it up on a day, but not substantially.
Warren Littlefield: Our special effects is not creating snow. What you see in our episodes is the world that we’re inhabiting. It’s the frozen tundra in the dead of winter.
Is there a sense that these are all stories that could be taking place concurrently in the world of the Fargo movie, even if it’s 13 years later? What we saw in that movie isn’t the only thing that happened in this area.
Noah Hawley: Yeah, I think that’s the mindset is that season two or three, four if we’re lucky enough to make those as well, the time period could jump, the location could jump. We’re not intending to go back to Bemidji, MN. It could be a different town in Minnesota. It could be 1971 It could be 2000. The idea is that truth is stranger than fiction and there are these kinds of cases spotted throughout the history.
Is there an actual true case this one’s based on?
Noah Hawley: Like the movie, it is a true crime that is not true. And I think the reason that they did that and the reason that we keep that up is that when you say something is true, it allows you a truth is stranger than fiction approach. The whole Mike Yanagita character in the movie, that whole storyline about the guy from high school who calls her, she sees him and he tells her his wife died and it turns out he’s just kind of crazy. You see that in the movie and you’re like, “Why is this in the movie? It doesn’t have anything to do with anything.”
But it adds to the sense that it’s true because if it didn’t actually happen, why would it be in the movie? There are those elements as well, those very Coen except the mystery elements that we play around with as well on the show.
Warren Littlefield: And it builds character rather than plot. It’s one of the things you’re allowed to do in cable television today. You’re not just servicing plot. You’re exploring character. It just makes for a much more interesting narrative rides.
The Coen Brothers have a number of different tones and genres. Do you have to stick within the Fargo framework?
Noah Hawley: Yeah, I decided early on that I could do Fargo, I could do No Country, I could do A Serious Man. I can’t do Lebowski, I can’t do Raising Arizona. Tonally I feel like I need to stay in that wheelhouse there because I think the movie is actually, when you go back and watch it, it’s sort of more comic than you remember it. It’s broad in a lot of places and I felt like if we had done the actual tone from the movie, people might’ve thought it was too comic, like we got it wrong.
I actually think the movie is more dramatic than people seem to remember. Would Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing or Barton Fink fit in the right tone?
Noah Hawley: Yeah, I think so. Those do. They have made farces and we’re not interested in making a farce. I think we want to ground it as much as possible and make it feel real.
Warren, if you think back to the height of NBC comedy in the ‘90s, how might you have taken advantage of social media back then to build those phenomena?
Warren Littlefield: Well, look, in the mid-‘90s, Thursday night was averaging 75 million Americans were coming to NBC. So that was a third of the country back then. So there was this sense that you wanted to participate in a collective experience. So I think we were ahead of the social media today, in a world of infinite choices where we find product when we want it, where we want it, on whatever platform we choose. Social media helps bring people together and unite that experience.
At that unique moment in time, we didn’t need it. Thursday night did that. So in a world that’s changed, social media helps unite I think in a way that network television once did.
