"Noah Hawley"

Hey, I'm Sean. And I'm Will. And I'm Jason. Hey, Will. Do you like golf? Oh, I love golf. Let's talk about golf. I hit a Ford. I hit it out of the park today on my Niner. Well, that's awesome. That's better than I can. You guys, it's time to talk. Do we have to do a SmartList episode? Ah, Sean, shut the fuck up. Ah, yeah. What do you know? Welcome to SmartLess. SmartLess. SmartLess. SmartLess. Shani, are those classes new? Yeah, what do you think? Yeah, they're not bad. Let's go higher and higher. Well... Do you not like him seriously? I just put him on like five minutes ago. Lean closer to your camera. Do you like him? Oh, not that close. Yeah, another good. What do you think, honestly? You look great in everything. You know, I was noticing you on Kimmel last night. Me too. You look great on Kimmel. I was thinking the same thing. All right, everybody. Are you working with a new stylist or something, Shana? I am, actually. Are you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't dress myself like that. Shani, you look really good. Thanks, you guys. That's so nice. You did for real. It's true. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I, it's a- And you're a great guest. It's like building a boat. You're a very good guest. You are a great guest. You know, I don't know how you guys feel about talk shows and stuff. Like, I get so nervous. I talk fast. Well, that's, you know what's bad? A guest that talks slow. Slow, right. Isn't nervous. Yeah. So wait, Will, are you still in New York? I am, yeah. Wow. And it's still press for the movie? Still doing press for the movie, yeah. Still, like, just kind of getting going, really. And, yeah. Yeah, because it comes out. Well, I don't know when this episode. December 19th is when the movie comes out. December 19th. Yeah, is this thing on? I can't wait for everybody to see you in it. It's so exciting. And what about you? You're in it too, mister. And Sean, you're in it too. Sure. Sean, he was doing press for it last night. My favorite line I had in the movie is, does anybody want to play Bananagrams? Yeah. Yeah. That's it. What I loved about it was your line, the way you read it was, is if you had said that a million times. yeah by the way totally i know you know we don't often do these records here in the mid-afternoon here it is 3 p.m here on the uh on the west coast 6 p.m there in the east um and um you know listen i think the audience is aware that the three of us are not in our 20s okay what um well i just what i want to say is i get a little tie-tie right now at three this is not an ideal time for us to We do on the Chnappy Gagos. Well, you got to find it. Well, hey, listen, save it, okay, Nappy Poo? How do you guys get through the late afternoon? Okay? Sean, I've already explained your strategy. Will, how do you do it? You know, I just do stuff, you know, whatever. Schnitzy LaRue. Or do you guys go to like an espresso at a certain time every day? No, I do. What are you waving at? There's a nab in there? There's a fly in here at Doc on it. like an old gramp, like the guy from Up. He's an old man. He's grumbling about the time. He's waving at a fly. I've had a real high protein shake with spirulina and everything in it. I should be vibrating right now, but no, I'm supplementing it with the ice green tea and I'm still sluggish. But if I don't have anything going on, I'll feel sluggish about this time and I will listen to my body and I'll lay down for sure. Wait a second, there's an if there? How often do you have shit going on at three in the afternoon? But I mean, like, if I keep, if I keep, if I'm, if I'm busy enough, I'll keep, it'll keep me awake. You know what I mean? Like if I have a meeting or whatever. I'm coming off of four consecutive Zooms right into this thing. So I've been, I've been up, I've been at it, but it's still. Did you work out? I did work out. That's the, that's my problem. JB, it's not the problem. It's the Zooms. They suck, they suck the energy out. Staring at the screen for those meetings. I'm telling you, it's the worst. In-person meetings. We should all get back to the office, right, Will? Yeah. Absolutely. You hear that, America? Well, you know what's funny? I will say, because I have been on the East Coast more this fall and summer, is because being in the city, I feel like kind of just more energized in general. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, that's New York City. I always feel like that in New York. Never sleeps, never sleeps. Yeah. It's got a heartbeat. It really does have a heartbeat. Do you have a t-shirt that says I Heart NY? It's a thong. That doubles into a T-shirt. Yeah, go ahead, Jason. Do you have something you want? Today we got a big brain, okay? He's not one of your fancy, dancy celebs that are going to clue you into the life of the rich and famous, okay? No, Sean will. This today, we've got someone who's given you some of the best television available over the last 20 years. This is a writer, producer, director, and often all three on the projects that he gives us, giving us the kind of specific and singular experience that we look for on television nowadays. He's got the nominations, the awards. He's got the education, the credentials. He's also got the looks, the taste, the kids, the wife. The wind at his back. And he's going to tell us how he keeps it all together while bringing us top entertainment with shows like Bones, Legion, and the massive hit Fargo, and the new and spectacular Alien Earth. Folks, Noah Hawley. Bring it out here, Noah. Take it easy, Sean. Don't attack him just yet. This is exciting for me. Good afternoon, Noah. Good afternoon. I'm not nervous, and I'm going to speak very slowly. Good, good, good. Okay. Now, you're right in the middle of the country there. Aren't you in Texas? I am. I'm in Austin, Texas, yes. So you're two hours. I married a seventh-generation Texan. I didn't read the fine print, so. She said we're going back to the motherland. Yeah, but it's good. I'm happy. I like it. It's my kind of place. You're not missing. Where'd you come from? Where'd you move from? Well, I'm a New York City kid originally, and then there was a little San Francisco. There was some L.A., and yeah, now I'm here. You're not missing those places. You're into Austin. I mean, I was in New York last week. It's, you know, you reach a certain point where you're rarely home anyway, so. Word. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's W-E-R-D, Sean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Welcome to the show, Noah. This is a long time coming. Thank you. We know each other a bit. Do you guys know him at all? How do you guys know each other? Just through mixers, you know, get-togethers. Mixers. Yeah. Someone set us up once. Jason described you, and how did it feel, Jason? is like not one of your celebrity, like he was, that felt like a real shot across your bow, if I'm being honest. It's good. I mean, he's not one of these, like these, you know, tabloid celebs, you know, that sometimes we're looking up to book on this show. That's you. I've never been on a tabloid. Okay. Unless I'm caught in the background in one of Jen's shots, you know? I will say, you know, living in Austin, you know, I'll go to LA sometimes and I'll think, oh, right, I'm somebody. Sure. But at the same time, the second you leave, You're nobody. Right. Well, but no, sometimes there, I feel like it's the only place I've ever been where you can feel like nobody also, right? It has that status game that is very specific. But talk about that, though. Like you are, for a lot of the people listening to this, and maybe only Tracy will be like, well, this Noah Hawley, you know, who is this fellow? For most people, they know exactly who you are and you're enormously well-known and very, very powerful in this industry. But is there a part of, let's put it this way. I've got a writer friend of mine who likes to also act. Is this you? No. Okay. He's an enormous writer but couldn't give a shit about the writing. Just wants to act. Do you see the kind of weight and power in the writing that you should and deserve? Because he doesn't. Like, he doesn't get that. Like, he's already got the gold medal there by being an incredibly successful writer. That's so hard to do. No, I'm very – look, I love all the parts of the job. I like to sit in a room and write a novel and the phone doesn't ring. And I like the writer's room element of it. I love to get on set and direct and the team sport of it all. You know, I think what makes me happiest is the fact that I don't have to do just one of those things, that I can get my isolation and recharge and then I can go out and be in public, you know, and sort of command the ship and, you know, try to elevate everyone to do their best work. And you're creating these projects. You're creating these jobs. You're creating all these many, many, many people with employment. And that's not something that often an actor or a star can do. I mean, they can generate heat for a project. But you're literally filling up blank pages and creating a story and a world and a project. And I just think it's just incredible. Well, thank you. Jason's not unlike our current president. He's just enamored with men of power. You know what I mean? Yes. And so he's just in awe of your power. You see the aura. I appreciate that. He can come over and tell my wife how powerful I am. Yeah. Now, what about that? Right? What about, how old are your kids? 13 and 18. Okay. Now, so they're old enough to give it up. That's exactly the same age as mine. Yeah. Do your kids give it up? Like, do they get what you do? Do they like what you do? Yeah, I think so. You know, I don't know how it is with you, but probably one more than the other. You know, I think, you know, my son loves to, he's the 13 year old he loves to come to set give me a headset I'm going to sit on the camera rig oh that's cool I call him the mayor of childhood and then my daughter's a little more retiring a little less I don't know she appreciates it in a different way I think I think he's like where's my director's chair is either one of them interested in the industry? early too early to tell i feel like yeah i mean my son did ask me on on alien earth he's like is there any role like could i do anything in there and so i did put him in the in the show just in a sort of improv he plays the young alex lawther character and you know i wasn't going to write a scene but i wanted that kind of feeling of that the kind of maliki feeling of of the childhood thing and I was like I can't hire a day player to be his dad and then I got he's never acted before and so you know I'm always the guy who's like maximum creativity maximum efficiency I was like the easiest thing to do is if I just get down on the floor and I play the dad and I'm there with him and you did that I did I did it was a really kind of special day certainly and it did I loosened him up we you know we had a good time and it's so great I've seen every episode At the end of that day, were you like, hey, the dad character might need a spinoff. Exactly. Because, you know, this guy's really guts. Exactly. But can you tell me, because I'm a massive, massive fan, and my husband, Scotty, of the Alien series. We've seen every movie, everything in between, and all incarnations. And then when we saw this show coming up, Alien Earth, we're like, wait, finally somebody's doing a series of it. And how did that come to you? And did you feel the weight of it? Because we're like, we did the nerd stuff. We're like, let's find out where it falls into the storyline, you know, and the history. And it's really cool. I love it so much. It starts before the original Alien, correct? Yes, it's a couple of years before. And after the Prometheus and the Covenant, right? In between? Yeah, I think that's accurate. You know, I felt like I wanted... I mean, Sean, don't mess up your microphone here, okay? Put some plastic over it. One of us is an expert on Alien, but I don't think it's me. Okay, okay, yeah. Because, Sean, according to your timeline, actually. It's the glasses. I got the new glasses, so they make me Alien smart. No, but yeah, did you feel the weight of it? And how did it come to you? And how did you create it? Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I've now had this opportunity a couple of times, right, to take a classic film and turn it into a TV show. And, you know, for me, it's never about going back and re-watching the film, right? It's about thinking about, well, how does that film live in my imagination? And what are the feelings that it brings up in me? And how can I create those same feelings in an audience by telling them a different story, you know? The thing with an alien movie is it's a two-hour survival story. but a TV show has to be the opposite, right? You have to invest in 10 or 30 or 50 hours about characters who don't die, right? And so, well, what is it if it's not a two-hour survival story? And so there needs to be, even if you have 60% of the best action in horror, you still have 40% of what are we talking about, right? What's the show about and everything. So that's where it started for me and it came down to this one moment in Ridley's movie where the monster's out and Sigourney's in the communication room and the computer is telling her that the crew is expendable and she leans back and Ian Holm is there and you realize he's an android. And I thought, well, that moment in which humanity realizes it's trapped between nature and technology and they're both trying to kill us, that feels like the moment we're living in. Right, totally. And that feels like what the show is about. Yeah, for sure. I got that. I got all that. Skye, lock the doors. Yeah. But also this, also that one creature that you created in the show was just the one eye, you know? Yeah. And that inserts itself into other animals and humans. It's just the one eye. Like, it's so creepy and clever and it's like, and holds like all the mystery. Like, I think it's so cool. Yeah, well, like I said, what are the feelings that the original gave me? Well, the one feeling that the movie, the first movie has, right, is the discovery of the life cycle of the creature. Wait, it's an egg, and then the thing comes out and attaches to your face? I'm out, right? But then, no, it gets worse. Then it falls off, and you think, oh, I'm hungry, and you have a meal, and it pops out of your fucking chest. And then it grows to be 10 feet tall. But that's the one feeling we can never get back for an audience, right? Is that discovery. Right. Unless we introduce these new creatures, right? Right, right, right. Unless we go, all right, well, it's an eyeball with tentacles and how does it reproduce and what does it eat? And I don't like that, you know? Wait, wait, wait, wait. So how do you, this is a great point. This is about my mom. This is, no, no, Sean. I'm not going to reach for the low hanging fruit, even though it's still fruit. That's the thing about low hanging fruit. Okay, okay. No, is that when you come up with a creature like that, like what are the things that it's got, the tentacles and stuff, what is that process? Are you guys in the writer's room going like, are people pitching? Like, no, no, no, he's got eight tentacles because one of them, no, no, no, hang on a second. And like, how do you write that? No it really interesting You know the writer room you know I have a kind of love relationship with the writer room I had to figure out how to use it for myself And what I figured out about it is it's a really good way to help me think out loud, you know. So I don't tend to let the room tell the story. I tend to go in there and I go, here's where we are. And then if I can't be in the room tomorrow, I'll say, all right, well, you know, it's like, let's say assimilation is a big theme in this story. Why don't you talk tomorrow about how that theme plays into all the characters and then I'll come back and we'll talk about that and then we'll keep moving forward. Sure, but okay. So then let's say you have an idea for a specific creature. Yeah. And are you talking with the folks, with like some of the design folks and the people about that as you're coming up with it? And are they talking to you about limitations or are they like, well, we don't know if we can have it, you know, suck its own eyeball out. Eyeball out. Family programming. Jason was immediately like, can they do that? What planet do I need? But you know what I mean? Like what is that process of figuring that out? Yeah. I mean, first, it's a script process that, you know, that was my process. It's sort of function over form, right? It's, you know, what am I looking for out of this thing? And, you know, both in its how it presents to start and then, you know, well, okay, here's this other creature. And, you know, it's a horrible thing that sucks your blood. And then you realize that it lays its eggs in your drinking water. Well, that's worse, right? Yeah, right, right, right. And so then we go into a design process, which was with the folks at Weta. and yeah, we kind of worked through it. And how long from concept and writing to the time I saw the first episode? How many years? Oh, I mean, that was four years, five years. Wow. Yeah. I mean, we all remember being on strike, right? That was in the middle and so that was tough. But it was like a full year of post-production. By the way, and even after five years, still relevant, like the second you watch the first episode, you're like, oh, this is exactly what's happening in the world today. There was no chat GPT when I started. Yeah. So that's how the zeitgeist rose up to meet me. Yeah, it's wild. Really cool. Did you, when you were a young writer just starting out, and forgive me, I don't know your origin story, to put it in Sean's terms. Do you, were you, did you always have a bent for writing? Because you've done a lot of different stuff. You've written all kinds of genres, you know, in your professional career. And novels, too. And novels. So did you see yourself writing this kind of stuff when you were young? Did you have a hankering for this? Was this a genre that you were into? I'm speaking specifically about the alien world. Yeah, I mean, I'm a third. Like pre-Prometheus. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a third generation writer. Both my mother and her mother were writers. And, you know, my grandma had an eighth grade education off the boat from Ukraine. and my mother had a high school education. And so I knew early on that writing is just, it's something you call yourself and then you have to earn it. There's no special degree or anything. And I think that's liberating because you're not learning how to write from people who are judging your work. You know, you got to assume that you're going to write some bad things and then the next thing might be better and then the thing after that may be better. And, you know, I was, you know, I, I mean, the first writing I did was songwriting as a musician. Oh, wow. You know, I played guitar and had a band and then realized I'm not a night person, right? So that was not a line of work that was going to work out really for me. Jason's not an afternoon person. Yeah. What was that first, what was the first thing, the little hit you got on the hook that like said, okay, I'm good. I think I know how to write because, yeah, Well, you got a degree in political science, right? It wasn't in writing, was it? Or did you minor in that? No. Geez, man. No. Yeah, I was just studying things that were interesting to me and then writing on the side. It's interesting. There was in high school, there was an assignment. We were reading the book Catch-22, right? And a very specific voice in that book, comedic, satirical. satirical, and there was an assignment which is write your own chapter of Catch-22, right? And I remember that being the first thing. And kind of interesting considering I ended up, you know, write a Coen Brothers movie and write a Ridley Scott movie, that there was something to that exercise of Joseph Heller's voice, of finding it, going, oh, I know what that is and I know how to do it. That ended up being really seminal for me, I guess. Wow. will be right back. And now, back to the show. I just have a quick question from Scotty, if that's okay. Oh, sure. Oh, we're not really taking calls right now. But it's good. Open up the lines. He says, it feels like with your show, with the upcoming release of the movie Predator Badlands, which features a character from the Alien universe, that both the Alien franchise and the Predator franchise are finally being codified in the same universe. Do you see the world of Predator being folded into the world you created, Alienware? Now I've wrecked my microphone. Do you see them combined at all? Or Predator coming onto your show? No, not onto the show, I don't think. I mean, I think Dan Trachtenberg, who made Prey and has made the Badlands movie. And, you know, I mean, I loved Prey. I think he's doing a great job with that franchise. He clearly has a plan there. I've met Dan once. We're not kind of coordinating any of that stuff. Yeah, yeah. Okay, fine. It's not really my plan to do it. Sure. So just tell Scotty to stand down. He just comes in in a predator outfit. Yeah. Well, so, Noah, tell us about that moment, the switch from political science to writing. Was there a first job? Was it a school paper? What was that transition? I had done some fiction writing as a kid and then in college. And as I said, I was trying to be a rock star. But to make ends meet, I took a job working as a paralegal for the Legal Aid Society in New York City in family court. So these are the lawyers who represent children in abuse and neglect cases, termination and prone to right cases, but also juvenile delinquency cases, so both civil and criminal law. And what did you do, sorry? What did you do? I was a paralegal. I basically tried to help them, you know, case law, et cetera. And, you know, it was... If a dad took off in a, you know, in a car... In a Miata. Let's say we're talking... Let's say it's a Miata. I'd say there was a lot of wheel spin. It was an MG. And there was four or five kids in the rear view. Would you, you would take that case on? Yes? Even if it was in Chicago? Those kids deserve their day in court. Yes, they do. Amen. All right, all right. I'm going to tell my dad. I'll see you in court. Yeah. But, you know, in the family court, the family court building at that time was this huge black obelisk. It looked like Darth Vader's helmet. Yeah. Right? And so every day I'd go to work and these kids would come in. And, you know, it's obviously, it's heartbreaking. You know, it's outrageous, et cetera. And I started writing fiction as a way to kind of process. Yeah, escape a little. And, you know, when you're in a band, you're tied to these three filthy penniless men, right? And fiction writing was a way to, I could just do it myself. And, you know, when you wrote 10 pages, you had 10 pages, right? Was your material dark at that time? Was it a reflection of what you were going through? Well, no, I've always been playful, and I've always been attracted to genre and elevating genre as character pieces, et cetera. So I don't know. The first novel I published was called A Conspiracy of Tall Men, and it was about a professor of conspiracy theories whose wife is killed in a plane crash, and he finally gets the conspiracy he's been looking for, but of course it's no solace because he had to lose his wife to get it. And it has a bit of a thriller quality. It's also a little satirical. I'm always just trying to figure out how does the story want to be told? But the time as a paralegal and witnessing all of that horrible stuff to kids and the parents and the families, how did that affect you? And how did that change who you are as a person, as a writer, as a parent after being experienced and after experiencing all of that. Yeah, well, believe me, I tell my kids every day, you got it good, you don't know how good you got it. Right, for sure. No, it's interesting, you know, because my daughter is 18, as I said, and if I look back at the last 20 years of stories that I've told really, you know, I can't separate my identity as a parent from the stories I'm telling. You know, I look at Alien Earth, which is about these children whose minds are put into adult bodies, or Fargo season four, which is about these two crime bosses who trade their youngest sons. There's always something that ties into, like, who are we as a people? How are we raising our children? And, you know, what is moral and what is cynical? And how are we preparing our kids for the world? Right, right, right. I mean, Noah, how do you – do you have a structured way in which you divvy up your day to tackle these, to allow your brain to think, what do I want to do? What do I want to say? What should this episode be about? What should my next project be about? And then do you have a certain time, like in the afternoon, where you actually then do the writing and then another period of time? The time management of it all. I just can't imagine how you take on as much concentrated individual time along with all the time you need to spend with the teams that you're running? It kind of depends on what phase I'm in, right? You know, right now, you know, I can look at having to have scripts due in a few months and production coming up, and, you know, I'm sort of in a phase right now, which is every day I'm like, where does my brain want to go? Okay. You know? And so, and some days that's like, you know, I want to watch movies or I want to read this book. And other days it's like, oh, I guess I'm going to think about Alien Earth today or I'm going to think about Fargo today. And in that way, when an idea is new, you don't want to look at it directly. You want to side-eye it. You're like, it's fragile. You're like, I don't know what this is yet and I don't want to scare it and I don't want to tell anybody about it. And then after a few days or a couple of weeks, you start to go, okay, now I see a little more clearly. I think I can start to make some hard choices here. It starts chasing you. Yeah, I like that idea. I like to keep things out in a kind of a soft focus, I always say. Just keep it out there in a soft focus for now. Let it sort of marinate and come into focus on its own a little bit. Jason was saying you've got all these different things that you're working on. And when they're in production, I imagine they're in production in lots of different locations as well, which must also be a big issue. Yeah, you know, we love Canada. We film a lot in Canada. But no, I mean, I shot Alien Earth in Bangkok. We were in Thailand for, you know, what was probably a total of a year. You know, I wasn't there the whole time. I'm there for a couple of months here, a couple of months there. But yeah, it's hard. It's hard. and if I can time it to a kid's summer vacation, it's easier. And if not, we try to have a two-week rule. But can't come back from Thailand for a weekend, you know what I mean? I was just going to ask to mimic your son and say, look, there's a part in Alien Earth for me. I always say you can't come back from a weekend in Thailand, you know what I mean? Well, it's metaphorical and literal, yeah. Yeah. Jason, anything? No. No, it is a coincidence? No, but incredible that you have adapted, as you said earlier, two iconic films in a television series. Is that a coincidence? Well, let's start with Fargo. How did you have the moxie to say, I want to approach the Coen brothers and talk to them about turning their iconic film into a television series and then how did you do that again for Ridley with Ridley Scott? Yeah, I mean luckily these were both sort of incoming calls. I had written a couple of pilots for FX. I knew them. I was in talking to them about something else. They had optioned Fargo as a TV show. Joel and Ethan had signed on and they'd said if we like the script you can put our name on it and if not you know where to send the check. And, you know, so the first process was to sell FX and to go through, you know, that process and write a script. And then we sent that first script to Joel and Ethan. And that was when I met them. But when, sorry, when FX optioned it, was it always going to be an anthology or was the original concede to take the original characters and keep moving them? Yeah, they wanted to make a TV show out of it. But they also said, do you think we could do it without Marge? because how could you ever top Francis McDormand, right? And I said, well, first of all, everyone else is dead or in jail. So, all right, well, that's interesting. If you're adapting the movie without actually any of the characters in the movie, then what are you doing? And I said, look, it's not a TV show because the movie says it's a true story. And at the end of it, she's seen the craziest Coen Brothers case and tomorrow's a normal day and she's got two months left to have the baby and he got the three cent stamp. and you know what I mean? It's a closed-ended thing. If she woke up tomorrow and it was another crazy Coen Brothers case, you couldn't say it's a true story. No one would believe it, right? I said, but you could. You know, why is the movie called Fargo? It's set in Minnesota. Except that Fargo, the word is evocative of a place, right? What Joel and Ethan call Siberia with family restaurants. And, you know, but it's also after that movie, it's kind of a state of mind. it's a type of story. And so I said, you know, so you could tell this story about Fargo and this is a Fargo story or, you know, as proved out, it could also be a 1979 crime epic about the death of the family business and the rise of corporate America. Or it could be a 1950 story about, you know, the sort of alternate economy and immigration and et cetera. So every time I just try to push that envelope of what is a Fargo story. But it would all need to take place in Fargo though, yes? No, it all needs to, I mean, not even really. Fargo, North Dakota, yes? Well, but it needs to have some connection, you know, whether there's a character. I mean, the fourth season took place in Kansas City, but Jesse Buckley character was from North Dakota you know and you know this last season with john ham you know he was in north dakota oh yeah but um i don know how he gets fired honestly yeah no one just no one it's a new goddamn damn we get it all of that and funny now all of that needs to be trimmed out but i just needed to Yeah, no, I'm glad you got that off your chest. So, sorry. Okay, so we're back. Yes. So the fourth season was with the great Jon Hamm, right? Fifth season. Fourth season. Fifth season? Yeah. Yep. That's your back end. Fifth season was Chris Rock. And anyway, so yeah, so they came to me. But then, of course, I realized, look, you know, it's great. I wrote a script that the Coen brothers, you know, when I spoke to them finally, and they said, it's, you know, we hate imitation, but it was eerie reading this because it felt like you were channeling us, right? That's a great thing to hear. That makes my millennia, right? But then you got to film it. And we know that the Coens, they write or rewrite a lot of movies that they don't direct and those movies never feel like Coen Brothers movies. So there's something in the cinema, right, that turns those words into that thing. and I had to figure out what that was. Otherwise, I was going to fail on my face. Did you end up directing the first episode? I didn't because I wasn't really directing then, and so I had a director. Yeah, who was it? Did somebody come in and say, yeah, here's the visual component that is the Coen brothers? Yeah, Adam Bernstein came in, and he had shot a bunch of Breaking Bad, and we had a good collaboration. But, you know, he gave me his director's cut, and, you know, I recut it, you know. I recut it to find the tone of voice that to me felt like a Coen Brothers movie. It's not as comedic as you think, right? And a lot of the comedy is deployed, you know, like Anton Chigurh's haircut. It's deployed in a way where you're like, well, it's not funny. It's just really specific and kind of unsettling, right? Right, right. But it ends up being funny, you know. Yeah. Well, one of the first things I did was I took like half the edits out of the episode, you know, because nothing makes something feel like television more than cutting every time someone talks. Right. I mean, there's a scene in the emergency room where Martin Freeman meets Billy Bob for the first time. And I'm in this master shot sort of slowly pushing in. And, you know, Billy Bob gets up and moves over next to him. And that's the first cut, you know. but that's a long time, right? But that's what a movie feels like. You trust the audience. Wait, so who, like, because you're right. I love Martin Freeman. Sorry, I just had to say that. Have you seen his show, by the way? No, have you seen his show, The Responder, that he did? No, I haven't. In the UK? Yeah. Oh, my God. He plays a cop in Liverpool. It's unbelievable. He's so good in that show. Please, I... I'll watch it. Yeah, watch it. It's so, so, so good. So the comedy that, like, comes, like you were talking about, from the Coen Brothers, who was that for you growing up? Who was the show, the movie, the people, the comedians that you're like, you know what, I really like that kind of style. Well, I grew up, because my father had studied acting in the UK, he came back with a lot of Goon Show records, which was Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers and Harry Seacombe, this radio, half-hour radio show. It was that, it was Monty Python, it was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There was a lot of that British humor that really was seminal for me. And then, you know, because people ask me, when was the first time you saw Alien? And I say, well, I'll tell you the first time I didn't see it was a nine-year-old's birthday party where my parents were like, yeah, you're not going to that. And so we went to see The In-Laws instead, right, with Alan Arkin and Peter Fox. And I was like, I think that explains everything about me, right? Yeah, yeah, right, right. You know, so, you know, that's the sort of thing is the absurdism, but also, you know, the cinematic nature of it. Right, yeah. Go ahead, Jason. Well, the first television writing gig came on Bones, yes? Yeah. Yeah. So you're a writer-producer on that, and then you start to create your own shows. So the Unusuals and My Generation were those two of the first? Both for ABC, yeah. And was it a difficult process to get the networks interested in your ideas? I mean, were they receptive right away based on your time there on Bones? Was that kind of a tough transition into being a showrunner? I mean, I had come from being a novelist, you know, to writing an original spec feature film that I ended up selling. And my first novel had been optioned. And they said, all right, well, now you're a screenwriter, so give it a shot. So I did some feature writing and then, you know, the TV agents at the agency were like, would you ever think about doing TV? So I went out and I took some meetings. I ended up selling a couple of TV pilots that I wrote and I thought, well, if any of these ever get produced, I should know how to make a show. And so whatever it was, 2004, I was in San Francisco. I came down to L.A. and I staffed on Bones. And I did it because Hart Hansen, who ran the show, said, well, you're going to learn how to make a show. Yeah. There were other shows where they're like, you're going to be in the room the whole time. And I was like, well, I know how to write, but I need to know how to produce a thing. But then while I was on staff, you know, I was still, I published another book. I sold a movie script each season. I didn't write a pilot the first year, but the second year I went into ABC and developed a show with them that they really liked, but they didn't make, right? Because it didn't really have a genre, right? That was the broadcast days where they're like lawyer, doctor, cop, right? And so the next year I thought— Do you think that show would have been made today? Sorry to interrupt. I think so, yeah. It was a sort of white trash dynasty about a guy who had a used car empire and he had four families and everybody worked for him. And, you know, it was a really fun sort of— I want to watch that show. I see you as the lead on that, Willie. Yeah, for sure. And they really liked it and the character work. And so then strategically I thought, okay, well, I'm going to go back in the next year. What can I sell them that they would actually make? And I thought, well, let's sell them a cop show, not a procedural, but like a Hill Street or Barney Miller or something like that. And so that's the show I pitched them. And then, you know, we got it through the process with Jeremy Renner and, you know, Goldberg and Harold Perrineau. And, you know, we did the eight hours and then they said, thank you and don't let the door hit you on the way out. And then the next day, Jeremy Renner was nominated for an Oscar for Hurt Locker. I was like, you guys are real geniuses. Yeah. How did, talk to us about how the directing thing started to come about and where did your confidence start to, when did your confidence start to grow for that? Like asking for the wheel. Yeah, I mean, you know, what you realize, especially when there's comedy in the work, right, is that, you know, where you see the joke is different than where somebody else sees the joke, right? with a beat. And even the Unusual's pilot, right, is like Stephen Hopkins had directed it and, you know, he cut a much broader comedy than I saw, right? And so I would go in and, you know, so you start in the editing room to be a filmmaker. Right. You know, and where, you know, I'm not a big fan of melodrama. I like to keep the emotion sort of low until it's really earned. And then My Generation, it was a fake documentary about the high school class of 2000 and where they were 10 years later. And so I had to approach it like I was making a documentary film. So when you watch a documentary, you're like, well, the cameras weren't there. They've got an audio recording or they've got still photographs or they've got – or if the cameras were there and the couple had a fight and she ran off and he ran after her, well, the camera's not there waiting. Right, yeah. The camera's chasing, right? So there was a cinematic mindset of making that. And then, of course, as I said, with the Coen Brothers film, you know, I started doing a lot of the second unit directing on the first season of Fargo, and then I just started doing the episodic world creation in season two. Did you find it, I think most people can read something or watch something, and from the comfort of their couch, the safety of their couch, they can say, oh, I would do this differently or I would do that differently. And those are nine times out of 10, like really good ideas. They're good catches. They're good fixes. But if you give them a blank page or you give them a screen with no image on it or more pointedly on a set, standing in front of a bunch of actors and some cameras and a cameraman, knowing how to create from the ground up, you know, to put this thing into three dimensions. Like, did you find that change in the process from just from recutting stuff that's in front of you to actually creating it from the ground up on set? Was that a comfortable thing for you or did that have some growing pains? You know, I'm sure you had that moment the first time you're on a set and they go, what's next, boss? And you don't know. and 200 people are staring at you I've gotten comfortable with that feeling I just need a minute, I'm going to figure it out people start to offer suggestions which isn't helpful it was just about finding the feeling I don't have any training on this so a lot of it for me you know there's a moment on alien earth i did that that fifth hour which was the trapped in the spaceship um you know hour where where um you know you see what happened before the ship crashed and and you know this moment where richard morjani was running away from the the xenomorph and she was hiding and she was pressed against a wall and we could see down the hallway and the xenomorph came out and I thought, well, I want to do a push in here, but let's do a zoom. And what, what if we zoom on her and then we, you know, we do it as a lock off and then I do a longer zoom on the xenomorph and then I marry those two things. It's kind of an impossible shot. I don't know if it's going to work or not work, but I know it'll give you a feeling, right? Which is like, something feels wrong here, right? Which you don't know is a cinematic thing. You just feel that feeling and that's sort of how I approach it. Super cool. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. Did you find that once you got, kind of like JB was saying, you could create from the ground up in real time as a director on set, did you find that it took a step out of the process for you because as a writer, as a producer, as the showrunner, all these things, you're watching cuts or you're watching them shoot stuff and you're like, yeah, and you're trying to convey what it is that you want. And at a certain point, just being able to cut the middleman out as it were, was that satisfying? Well, look, my wife, Kyle, who I love dearly, she said, you know, at one point to me, do you have to direct two? Right? You know, and I said, but here's the thing. As opposed to just one? No, do you have to direct at all? Like you're writing, you're show running, you also have to be a director. And I said, well, here's the thing. I'd have to be there anyway, right? The first episode of a new season, a new series, whatever, I got to be there anyway. It's actually, you're going to see me quicker if I do it myself. Way more efficient. Yeah, way more efficient. Yeah, so that's that. And for me, look, it's all an act of play, right? There's a, you know, as a writer, I'm a sort of yes and improv guy. in the room. I'm like, okay, I like that. We're doing that. Now what? I've heard these stories about Vince Gilligan where he's like, that's good. Let's spend two weeks seeing if we can top it. That would make me crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For Tracy, he created Breaking Bad. So you get on set and I have a script I think is great and I get on the set with the actors and I'm not saying we're going to change the words but let's figure out what it would really be like and what it wants to be. And, you know, you've got to be open to play in that moment. Yeah. What about, so you wrote and directed a film as well, Lucy in the Sky with Natalie Portman. Was the film experience anything different than basically just a double length episode for you? And I guess the question behind the question is, is there a desire to do film or do you see it as just simply arbitrarily a different medium that is every bit consistent with what you're doing on television anyway. And one could argue much more sort of creative control on television. Yeah. I mean, it's its own unique medium, right? And I did like the experience of it. You know, I mean, one of the things that, you know, I'm such a use every part of the animal television filmmaker that, you know, sometimes a scene doesn't fit and you're like, I'll use it in episode four, you know, or I'll repurpose this. And then, but with the movie, you're like, there is no episode four. It's either in this movie or it doesn't exist. Right. And, and, um, you know, whenever I come into a project, my first question is always, what am I taking for granted? Right. As a storyteller or a filmmaker, whatever. And with Lucy, I was like, all right, well, this is a movie that's going to be shown in theaters. Well, Well, maybe I'm taking the movie theater itself for granted, the fact that you've got a giant rectangle at the front and all these speakers on the side, and you're taking for granted that you want to use the whole rectangle and all the speakers, but what if this woman goes to space and it's this huge, you know, spiritual experience and the screen is full and the sound is full and then she comes back down to Earth. We see her in the pickup line, you know, to pick up her kid, and now the image is small and the sound is in the front, right? But then, you know, she meets your friend Jon Hamm. And you guys want to grumble about Jon some more? I mean, he's all right. He's all right. He's okay. But she meets Jon and they have an affair. And so the feelings get big and the screen opens up, you know. So I'm always looking for those sorts of things. I think that the structure of a story should reflect the content of a story. And what was it about that story that you thought lent itself better to feature as opposed to long form in television? And how do you treat any idea that comes into your head, decide whether to write another book based on that idea, or actually this is something that could go into as a limited series or an ongoing or a feature? Some of it is how long you want to live with it. And the other, you know, TV, we're interacting with the culture mostly in real time. You know, you might be 18 months, a year away, like from writing to production airing whatever A book you know you might live with for five years A film you might live with for seven years before it hits the screen So it sort of like is this interesting enough Is this going to hold my attention enough? Is there enough there for me to live with for that length of time? And do I have enough to say? Were there any sort of creative babies that you had to let go, ideas that you loved for a long time? Is there anyone that sticks out that you're like, I loved this so passionately for a year. And then you read someone else's doing something similar. A year and a day later, you're like, or you just go, it doesn't really get me anymore. Will, I feel like you're looking for some free ideas here. I'm just saying, if you could DM me. All I'm saying is... What would it be and can I produce it? Yeah, I mean, there's always stuff, but again, I'm not dead yet. You don't have to say specifically the actual idea. Yeah, I think there are things, and there's scripts that I wrote that I love and I wrote this novel before the fall and Sony owned it and I adapted it. I think it's great, but it's expensive, right? It's like a $70 million drama thriller and they don't make those right now. So I could beat my head against a wall for five years trying to get it made or I could go, I'm going to bide my time. Or turn it into a limited series. Yeah, or turn it into a limited series. What about other people's ideas? Let me shoot you my number real quick. That'd be great, thanks. You're such an auteur. Do you even spend any time considering other people's work and adapting that? Yeah, it's interesting. Lucy in the Sky, I did not originate that project. Fox Searchlight brought that to me. It was a script that Reese Witherspoon was producing. The first draft, it's sort of like a dramatization of this true, you know, this tabloid story about this astronaut who has an affair and, you know, drives across the country allegedly in a diaper, you know, to kidnap the, you know, it's a very tabloidy story. And the first script was kind of a diaper joke script and I passed on it. And then, you know, and then they came back to me with a script that began through magic realism to explore her psychological state of how she went from being that one person to being that other person. And I thought that was really interesting. And so I signed on and I developed it with John Henry Butterworth. But in the end, I feel like if I had had the idea and written it from scratch, it probably would have been a different movie. When you get a script, you kind of can't see past what the script was. So I don't know. It was a $35 million magic realism astronaut movie. and it turns out people don't want to see those. I'm not sure what they want to see nowadays. It's such a crapshoot. It's really, really interesting. What about stuff for the stage or theater? Oh, here he comes. Did you ever forget a line on stage? Anybody ever have a heart attack? I think about it. Like I said, I'm a New York City kid. My dad had been an actor. I grew up going to all the shows and it's a different medium. It's an animal I haven't tried yet. Yeah, it's a good way to test the waters for bigger things. And so let's go back to music a little bit. Sean, will you be surprised to hear that he's a singer as well and has sung on some of his shows? Yes? I didn't know that. You do a little bit of singing. I think that's a big surprise. We like to know what the audience would be surprised about. Yeah, can you give us a little something? A little something-something? Just like happy birthday, you know. It's Sean's birthday today. Happy birthday. Day two. Okay, yeah. That's something you still do, yeah? It is, yeah. And, you know, like I said, I wanted to be a musician. It wasn't really in the cards for me professionally, but I found a workaround, right? That's what I try to do is what's the system and can I game it? And, you know, it started on season two of Fargo where I decided I wanted songs in the show that were covers of songs from Coen Brothers movies, you know. So Jeff Tweedy did a cover of the Jose Feliciano song from the movie Fargo. Oh, wow. You know, there were a lot of covers. And then I thought, well, why don't I do one? And so Jeff Russo, the composer, and I recorded the Go to Sleep, You Little Baby from Oh Brother. And then when I made Legion, which was a very surreal Marvel-inspired show, I wanted the songs to sound like score. I wanted it to go from score into songs without feeling like there was any difference. So he and I just started recording. Again, it's like I hear it in my head. I could try to explain it to somebody else or we could just do it, you know? And so that's what we ended up doing and now we do this. That's cool. Tell the audience a bit, the torture, the horror, or the pleasure, you tell me, of pitching. What a writer, well, you explain, what a writer has to do to get the people who write the checks to write the check. Like, you gotta basically tell them what's coming, right? And you gotta trick them sometimes. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating that this visual medium is still rooted in the oral storytelling tradition, right? Which is, I walk into a room, I tell you a story, right? And if I'm charismatic and, you know, I've got good timing, you're going to go, oh my God, that's amazing. I want to see that. Right. I did one pitch where I went in and, you know, I started to talk about the segue, right? The segue, of course, is the segue from small talk to the pitch, right? And we did the small talk and I was like, you know, I was thinking on the way over here about the segue of how I was going to get into the pitch. And I was thinking about how... Like, how are you? Yeah, I was thinking about how recently my house got broken into and they stole some guitars. And then I was thinking, no, maybe I'll talk about how I was watching TV last night and Stripes was on. And I thought, we don't have that kind of Bill Murray anti-hero anymore. And I went through a couple of other things. And then at a certain point, they realized, oh, the segue is the pitch, right? Because it is an anti-hero story about a crime, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. So it's, my feeling is always when you're asking someone to interact with the show in any way, whether it's an outline or a pitch, it's got to feel like the show. Yeah. And so I do these hair and makeup tests when we get on set where it's, you know, it's grown to this thing where I'll have like a, you know, a crane on my hair and makeup, you know, because I'll get the characters in. I'm like, let's not waste an opportunity just by looking at people in clothes, right? We have an opportunity to like, you know, let's get David Thulis and Michael Stuhlbarg and Ewan McGregor in a room and feel like what that dynamic is between them. And, you know, and so I end up cutting these things together with music. And when I show it to them, this is what the show is going to feel like, right? I love that. Yeah, because it's not, I mean, we're kind of past the point of talking, just going in a room and pitching and telling a story. You need shiny objects. and you need to excite them and you need to like, you know, sizzle reels or whatever. But it's great for the actors because they get to put the skin on without any pressure, right, for a day or two and then wakes the crew up, right? They're like, oh, we're pushing a dolly in the hair and makeup test. Like, I'm laying track and we're doing this for real. Yeah. Yeah. You know. We did that actually on our film last year on this movie that I did and we did all this camera testing here in the city outside just me and Bradley and Maddie Libatique and guys and we went out and shot for a couple of days during the day, at night, we went and shot all this stuff. And Bradley ended up cutting it together and putting together this reel that he was showing the studio and cut it with music and with stuff that happened. And it was so, A, it was great for them, but B, really for us, it really started to, it taught us the language of the film before we started. Yeah, you get to feel it. Yeah, and it was really, really helpful. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it is, it is. I find it, you know, and it becomes a sales document for them internally of like, look what this guy's making for us. You know, we're making Alien Earth and you feel like you're watching, you know, an alien movie for four minutes or whatever it is. Yeah, it's cool. We would be criminal if we let you go without giving you an opportunity to discuss with Sean what, to the extent you're comfortable, we can cut it if you're not. But what happened with Star Trek and will your participation with Star Trek be coming at any point? Yeah, because you're supposed to write and direct it, right? I did. I signed on. You know, after Lucy in the Sky, I thought, oh, I like this movie thing. I'd like to do another one. But I think maybe I'd like to try something a little bigger. And, you know, it's all franchises. And I thought, yeah, but everything's war, right? Star Wars is war and Marvel is war. But Star Trek isn't war. Star Trek is exploration, right? It's people solving problems by being smarter than the other guy. The best moment from Star Trek is in Wrath of Khan where Shatner puts on his reading glasses and lowers the shields on the other. It costs like 45 cents, right? But it's like, you see, oh, he's smarter than Khan. And so I went in, I talked to Paramount. I sold him this original idea. It wasn't Chris Pine. It wasn't anything. I wrote it. They said, we love it. Let's prep it. We were, you know, we were, I was going to move to Australia. We were booking stages, whatever. And then, you know, as happens in Hollywood, Jim Giannopoulos, who was running the studio at the time, he's like, I'm going to bring in somebody else under me and they're going to take over the film studio. And the first thing they did was kill the original Star Trek movie because they said, well, how do we know people are going to like it? Shouldn't we do a transition movie from Chris Pine, play it safe, whatever? And so it kind of went away. But I do. I mean, I talked to David Ellison recently, and I was like, you still haven't made a Star Trek movie. I'm just saying, it's in there. I love it. Yeah, it's sort of like with all this new ownership and administration over there, I guess you can just pick up the phone and say, hey, guys, want to dust this off? Right, right. You just wait five minutes in Hollywood for everybody to get a new job and then go pitch the same stuff again. Sean, what are you saying? Nothing. I mean, I don't know if you guys feel the same way, but to some degree you really have to declare, this is my next thing, this is all I want to do, all I want to think about, and then you can move the mountain, right? For me, I've got more Alien Earth I could make, more Fargo. It's a little, it's more like, well, what I learned from Ridley Scott, who I got to know some, he'll develop three movies at the same time and he'll say to Sony, I'm going to make the Fox movie unless you guys... You know what I mean? So you kind of have to try to get them to play your game as opposed to play their game. Create a little leverage there. Right, right. Uh-huh. Well, you've certainly done your part with that. Keep it coming, please, Noah. It's an incredible body of work already. And are you even 40 yet? I mean, you know. I am. I'm older than 40. Well, you've got so much. It's just impressive. It's so broad and it's so diverse and everything about it is just really something. And the degree of difficulty is high on this stuff. You're not. And the fact that you write novels. I know. All these novels that these guys will never read. Yeah. I am going to buy some of your books. Well, I appreciate that. Even if they're just on your shelf, it's meaningful to him. No, no, no. He reads these things. It's a very surprising element of Will Arnett. This guy knocks down books like Reese Witherspoon. Yeah. So I'm going to check out. Nice. All right, pal. Well, thank you for doing this very much. I'm glad we got this done. I'm glad you had time to squeeze this in in your busy, busy schedule. Thanks, guys. I really appreciate it. So nice to meet you. Yeah, nice to meet you, Noah. Thanks, man. Thanks, Noah. You too, guys. Talk soon, man. There goes Noah Hawley. I mean, I wish I was... He's something else, man. What an impressive guy. I like to think I work hard, you know? but I don't. What are you talking about? You're tired at two. Yeah. But I worked so hard until two. Yeah. I mean, like, I can't. You like to think that you work hard. And can I just say, and I want you to be honest, as honest as you can be. Okay, I'm ready. How many golf games do you have scheduled this week, including yesterday? I will be playing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Okay. But I work during the round. As you know, I'm returning emails and texts all the way through it. And I'm usually knocking down one of these goddamn things before I get out there. And then I make more phone calls when I get home. Sorry we're getting in the way of your golf. This fucking podcast, man. It's no good for my golf game. By the way, Sean, you know what my favorite thing about JB is sometimes we're playing golf and he won't pull out his phone, but you'll see him, all of a sudden he'll just wander off talking into his Apple, into his watch. My wrist. And he's talking to his wrist and he's like, yeah, well get them to send it, Tell them we'll look at the thing tomorrow. Period. New paragraph. Why don't we try to do an episode of SmartList while you're playing golf? You know, because I don't play that much. I work a lot. No, but while you're on the course, just bring your phone. Why don't we go out to Hawaii and play a round of golf? We've been invited. I know. We're actually, to be honest, we're all a little bit too busy to do that. I know. We're all doing a bunch of shit. Should we, I think, and I know, again, we should talk about this privately, but we might as well do it here. We've talked about it. We should go back and do some shows, some live shows. Yeah, why not? Get back out on the road. Yeah, don't you think? Yeah, why wouldn't we? Yeah, at a minimum, we should go and be on stage somewhere and doing it in front of a live audience. Why don't we do it like at the end of next year? Okay. We could. Okay. Could we do the spring or no? Is the spring off limits for us? I'm going to be in New York. Can you guys hold on one second? Shani, when are you doing the play? I'm doing the play January. I love that we're doing this in real time on the show. I know. I'm doing the play January to April. Like January, basically February. I say we do like pre-summer so it's nice out. That's what I'm saying is that we can get out to some nice places. Yeah, so it's not so cold. Sort of like September. Remember we were going to go. We were going to go. Yeah, I might have a little bit of work as well. Well, I know you are. You're not planning on doing any work, Will? Are you done? I am. I might. I might. You're going to pack it in now? I might. You know what? We can talk about it. We can keep talking about it. We don't have to decide now. We can make a decision. Bye, the end of the year. I know. God. No, Sean, what was yours going to be? Mine was, we can just talk about it. We don't have to decide now. We can go day by day. Or, you know what? Better still, we just play it by ear. I don't know what. Three by by. Triple by. Pass. Smart. Smartless. Smartless. Smartless is 100% organic and artisanally handcrafted by Bennett Barbaco, Michael Grant Terry, and Rob Armjarf. Smartless.