Noah Hawley Photo: Leah Muse
Screenwriter and author Noah Hawley is behind the television adaptation of the classic Coen brothers movie, Fargo. He is a much in demand film and television producer and scriptwriter.
His latest novel, Before the Fall, tells the tale of a fatal private jet crash, with two survivors, a man and a child. On the face of it an accident which evolves into a thrilling yarn weaving in the stories of each of the passengers, and examining who might be responsible for the crash.
He speaks with Kathryn Ryan about translating a film to television screen, juggling multiple writing projects and his new novel.
Read an edited excerpt from their interview below:
I would love your thoughts on what it is about Fargo, that made it so unique. What was it that you saw in that particular film?
It’s interesting on so many levels. First of all, it’s a true story that isn’t true. It starts out by saying this is a true story, but it’s not. Because it’s saying that this is a true story, Joel and Ethan Coen were able to include these peculiar and very regionally specific details that made the movie feel truth-ier. There’s this Mike Yanagita character who calls Frances McDormand’s character out of the blue, they went to high school together. They have this meal together and he tells her that he married the girl from high school and she died of leukaemia and it turns out that that story is a lie and this woman had a restraining order against him. And you think, why is this in the movie, it has nothing to do with this investigation into the death of a state trooper and the kidnapping of this woman. Except it’s the kind of detail that you would include because it happened. I love that sense of it, which is that truth is stranger than fiction.
The language and the specificity of the characters in the world… it seems like a very ambitious thing to do and a terrible idea to turn this movie into a show, except the network was open to the idea that we do it without Frances McDormand’s character, by which we agreed that none of the characters in the movie would be in the show, at which point you’re adapting a movie without any of the characters or the story – what are you doing? Except creating an homage in a way to a type of true crime story. That was really interesting to me, this idea that I could create anything I wanted as long as it made you feel the same things you felt watching this movie and that was a really fascinating challenge.
What for you is the main difference between writing the novel form or the scriptwriting form?
I’m a firm believer that the structure of the story should reflect the content of a story, so what was exciting with Before the Fall is that it is a story that starts with a bang, literally. A small plane goes into the water and two people survive and eleven people don’t survive. So at a certain point, once we’ve got through the survival part of the story and Scott and the boy are safely on land, then the question was, why did the plane go into the water? What was exciting to me was you solve that mystery by solving the characters. By looking at everybody who was on the plane and telling their stories and trying to add up the clues as to why that plane might have ended up on the water. I then ended up with a book with a very strong central narrative but then I digressed from time to time into these chapters about these different people on the plane.
With Legion it’s a show about a man who is either schizophrenic or has these extra-sensory abilities, so therefore he’s a character who’s never really sure about what’s real or who’s real and therefore that should be the subjective experience of the audience. I always look for, what is the story about and how can we tell the story in a way that really puts the audience in the character’s mindset?
