Excerpted from FARGO: THIS IS A TRUE STORY by Noah Hawley. Copyright © 2019 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. Reprinted with permission from Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.
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NOAH: As you said, we sent you that first script and I came in to pitch you what the show was. And my memory is I started it and you were like, “I don’t want to know too much. If you wrote this we’re good.”
BILLY: Exactly. The fact of the matter is you can tell. When I read the script it’s like, yeah, who in their right mind wouldn’t want to do this? I loved the character. So the thing about it was that I really loved what you’d written, and when I met you and Warren [Littlefield] it was like, wow. The energy is right and the script is amazing.
The thing I always tell people when they ask what attracted me to it is that Noah managed to make a new thing out of something that was revered. And yet, keep what the thing was that was revered. I said you’re not tackling Saved by the Bell, you’re tackling fucking Fargo. Anybody can write a script and I read it like I’m reading a brand-new thing. And yet I felt like I had just read Fargo. That’s a fucking magic trick.
And so I knew I was dealing with people who were, creatively, people I could be on the same page with. The funny thing is that, all you do is look up Charles de Gaulle’s birthday and the next fucking thing you know you’re in a chatroom and you see yourself on it and you’re like, how the fuck did I find this? I got on something one day and it was a Fargo deal and a bunch of these creeps are rating Fargo. It’s like the movie, season 1, season 2, and season 3. Pretty much across the board the number one was season 1 or the movie. That was usually the order and then a couple people liked season 2 better than season 1. But the fact that it became a thing that they would even consider rating as opposed to saying fuck you guys we love the movie. That’s not what they did.
So it really became a phenomenal piece of art, this thing. Everywhere I go now, it’s always been Sling Blade, Bad Santa, and Monster’s Ball, and now Fargo is a thing that people come up to me about and go, “My God that character in Fargo is literally the best character I’ve ever seen on TV.” I mean, I get it all the time.
NOAH: You can’t ask Joel and Ethan how to make a Coen brothers movie. They don’t want to talk about their work. Also, they write a lot of scripts that other people direct that aren’t Coen brothers movies. So there’s clearly something in the transformation that I had to figure out in the process. For me a big part of it was realizing they write a lot of things they think are really funny but aren’t meant to be comedy on-screen.
BILLY: I talk to Jim Jarmusch sometimes about why I left Arkansas and why he left Ohio. And I said to tell you the truth, when I was eleven years old and I heard my first Mothers of Invention album I was like, there’s something else out there. In other words, I already knew the Mothers of Invention—never heard of them. But when I saw it and I heard it I was like, that’s what I do! So, somebody does do this. So, Steve Martin comes along and nobody had done that. And you go, oh okay. Nobody had done All in the Family, whatever it is. All the things that sort of haven’t been done before, people are out there who are already that and they understand it. It’s their sensibility and their sense of humor and when it comes along they come out of the woodwork. And that’s what people did with the Coen brothers. It’s like, oh here’s that thing that I can’t explain to anyone, but these guys do it and I plug into that.
NOAH: And a lot of people try to do it and they do it terribly. Because they always make it too comedic and think that’s what it is.
BILLY: They were the executive producers and I think wrote the final draft of the first Bad Santa and they wanted nothing to do with it. I think a lot of time, when people aren’t in charge of something, you have a feeling you want to distance yourself from it. Maybe out of self-protection and also a little bit of envy. What if it works and we didn’t do it. They wanted to do a stage Broadway show of Sling Blade. Not with me, with some other guy, and I was like, I don’t know about that. You know what I mean, even though it may be brilliant. Who knows.
“What is your process?” I don’t fucking know. How am I supposed to tell you what my process is? And by the way, if I did know what it was, if it was a formula or a trick, I wouldn’t tell you.
But yeah, they [the Coen brothers] are different kind of guys. But it’s like when people ask you, you mentioned earlier, when people ask me as an actor “What is your process?” I don’t fucking know. How am I supposed to tell you what my process is? And by the way, if I did know what it was, if it was a formula or a trick, I wouldn’t tell you. But they want to hear it, they want to hear how I can be like you. What is this thing that you do? You tell me the secret. Like in acting class, it’s like when they are interviewing an actor for some over earnest talk show, they want to hear the actor talk about that shit. “Well, what I did is I took my grandfather and I would go at night to this diner I would go to . . . ” It’s like they want to hear that shit because they want to believe that there aren’t people who are born with it. They don’t want to know that.
NOAH: Yeah, where it’s actually just a thing that happens when you go in.
BILLY: With Lorne Malvo, I had critics call him the protagonist and they would ask me how I did that. What am I going to say to that? “How can we feel that way when he is so evil?” I didn’t particularly see him as evil. It’s like, do you think Lorne Malvo is evil? You didn’t get all the references to the animal kingdom? Lorne Malvo was eating.
NOAH: And playing with his food first, fascinated by “How far can I push this guy?” And with Lester, it was the first time he was ever surprised. Where he was like, “Oh this is interesting, I’m willing to shoot these three people I’ve been working with for six months, because this guy is interesting.”
BILLY: Yeah exactly. He was like, “How does a guy like this make his life interesting?” And he did. I even looked at Malvo as almost like Santa Claus or a ghost or something. Where it’s like, is Lorne Malvo even real? Or is he just this force that came into all these people’s lives that fucked them up.
NOAH: There was this Richard Matheson short story, “The Distributor,” that I read right around the time that I was writing this. It’s about a guy who moves into a suburban neighborhood who just starts screwing with everybody. He takes a guy’s lawnmower and puts it in the other neighbor’s garage. And it just seemed like a great subversive element for a character because the world is full of antagonists. I never wanted him to be one of those Tarantino, mustache twirly, articulate guys. I think it was something about the guy that goes in and they go, “Do you have a pet?” And he’s like, “A fish? How about a cockroach? How about a bacteria. You’ve got this dumb rule. Let’s talk about it.”
BILLY: Well, Ed Crane, in The Man Who Wasn’t There, could have easily been Lorne Malvo. It’s almost the same guy, but one guy did it and the other one wanted to. I mean, their morals were pretty much the same. I think Ed actually was probably darker in a lot of ways because he was pretty humorless. But people say, and I guess it’s a thing to be flattered by, it’s like asking John Lennon if “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is LSD because that’s the initials? And it’s like no, my kid drew a picture in school. And so they would say to me, well, why is his name Lorne Malvo? I said, well, I don’t know for sure, but I can tell you this, when I look at that guy, his name is Lorne Malvo. That’s all I can tell you. I would not be affected by this guy as much if his name were Peter Johnson. He’s Lorne Malvo. And they say well, we think Noah called him Lorne Malvo because of Malvo the sniper in D.C.
NOAH: No, not at all. That’s news to me.
BILLY: I said, “I don’t know for a fact because I didn’t ask him. But I can tell you for a fact that I’m 99.99 percent sure that that’s not true because it’s too easy. I think his name is Lorne Malvo because when you are writing the characters, they tell you what their name is.”
NOAH: Yeah, and there is something about the mouth feel of it. The long O and the guy from Bonanza. There is something funny about the guy and he needed to have a throwback name. You can’t really analyze it. I didn’t really. You never know. If you’re lucky they speak to you and if you’re not, you have to name them and then those names never feel right.
BILLY: Well, Karl Childers in Sling Blade. You look at the fuck and you go, his name is Karl Childers.
NOAH: Yeah, and I mean it was. That first year [of Fargo] was really a great experiment. And it’s sort of an odd thing structurally now that I have some distance from it. When Malvo comes to town we have this huge episode with you and Martin Freeman. And then you drive off into this whole other movie with Oliver Platt for four hours. And then finally the original movie crashes into you when Wrench and Numbers show up shooting. But yeah, it’s interesting looking back. I like that idea that it feels more realistic—this was a stop on the way somewhere. And then what is nice is that Joel and Ethan have that theme you see a lot in their work, which is consequences and the past is going to catch up with you.
I remember seeing Glenn Howerton, who played Don Chumph. It was after the episode aired where he met his end and you taped him onto that thing with the gun and called the SWAT team, et cetera. He told me that he watched that episode with his wife and during that scene she started crying because it was so awful what was happening to him. And he said, “You know I was such a minor character and you gave me this operatic death that was so disproportionate to my importance to the show.” I never wanted the violence in the show to be entertaining. What I liked about that moment is that it seems fun, “Oh, it’s Malvo, he’s fucking with these guys and the cops, he shoots out the window and tapes him up and he backlights him.” And it starts to play out and there’s part of you where you’re like, “This is great” and then, at a certain point, things slow down and the Gregorian chant comes in and the glass is flying. This guy is scared out of his mind, he finally gets the tape off and the cops kick open the door and then they just drill him. And then it’s just a tragedy. What’s comedic becomes tragic in a way that makes you really uncomfortable.
BILLY: Oh yeah, it was like a whole opera. It was fucking amazing. I loved that. And the thing about Malvo, he never indicated anything that he was going to do. So, there was never a moment looking around like, “Oh, I know what I’ll do.” Every time I was in a scene, you never wrote it. That’s the thing that drives you crazy, if you write the descriptive stuff and directions in the script it’s like, who’s going to do that. And then you get back actors and they’ll do it and then you’re fucked. But Malvo just did his stuff. So it was a very methodical thing. The thinking had already been done and then he walks away.
NOAH: You talk about indicating and it’s the one conversation we had about that last hour. Where you said, “I haven’t said anything all year, I just think there are easier ways to get close to these guys.” Because in the original version of the script, he went to all this trouble to pretend to be an FBI agent to get close to these FBI agents. You saw what the plan was, you saw what was going to happen, and then it happened. Yeah, so it changed and it became the kidnapping of the car lot guy and the car pulling in while these guys walk out of the woods while these guys were distracted. It was much better.
BILLY: That brings all those scenes back to me. I have to say, it was such a good experience on all levels. Somehow, if you are shooting in the cold and you are doing something shitty, it’s colder. If you’re doing something great, it somehow becomes your pal.
NOAH: It’s never been that cold again. The second year was balmy and the third year was kind of cold, but it’s never been that cold again. And that was crazy. The guy who was supposed to climb out of the trunk in his underwear and run through the snow. The first day we were supposed to shoot that it was forty below.
BILLY: I asked that fucking guy, he was Canadian, and he just said “Oh it’s okay.” Just like the guy on the show.
For something that was that high degree difficulty of a dive it just felt right. It didn’t feel stressful. It felt like we were all doing what we were supposed to do.
NOAH: You’ve got to protect him from himself. For something that was that high degree difficulty of a dive it just felt right. It didn’t feel stressful. It felt like we were all doing what we were supposed to do. We had the blueprint and it was relatively easy honestly. The hard part was in the conception. Once I had you and Martin and Allison Tolman and Carradine. You had that scene with Carradine. “I haven’t had a piece of pie like that since the garden of Eden.”
BILLY: I loved that scene with Keith. Every second of the scene you feel the crackle. A lot of that has to do too with the fact that it was me and Carradine who instantly have a natural thing together. Also, two guys who have been around a long time are suspicious of people anyway. I loved working with him.
NOAH: You and Allison didn’t have a single scene together through the whole [season].
BILLY: I saw her through the snow once. Absolutely, it worked perfectly.
NOAH: It was a process to get her too. Through MGM and FX because I think they worried that she was too comedic and they had certain ideas in their heads. So, I had to kind of game the system to get her to New York for callbacks. And then when they saw it, they saw it. I agree I think she and Colin, that combo was . . .
BILLY: Oh, I think it was great. Speaking of Colin, do you know the most talked about scene in season 1? Me in the car with Colin pulling me over. That scene struck a chord with people in such a way. And what I say to him is something they point out. That dialogue and that story, it’s chilling.
NOAH: There will be dragons . . .
BILLY: Once again, that is so finely tuned because you put that dialogue in another character’s mouth, it’s not right. That’s the great thing about good writers, they know tone. It’s like you get a fucking amplifier and put two AC30s next to each other and play through both of them. But it’s like, “You know what, this one’s got something. I know it’s the same year and the same fucking amp but something about this one . . . ”
NOAH: It’s also the fact that it’s very unorthodox the way that hour is structured. You have this whole movie with Martin Freeman and then you drive out of town, and it’s only then that you see Colin Hanks in one scene. And he’s just some cop in a car, we shouldn’t care about him at all but because we’ve seen what you’ve done to this town, we know he’s in real danger.” We shot that scene onstage and then his side of it outside.
BILLY: I think it was colder onstage than it was outside. That was one of the coldest scenes I did. I swear to God, I had to put the heater on in between takes because it was fucking freezing.
NOAH: Well you weren’t there when Oliver Platt took a blood shower on that stage. You’re like, close the goddamn door. The water can be warm, but it’s twenty-five degrees in this stage.
BILLY: I loved Oliver, I loved what he did with it.
NOAH: Well, he was funny, because the first conversation that I had with him when he came on board was like, “I just want to apologize now because I’m not going to say a single line that you wrote.” But he said every line that I wrote but there was a process. There were the crickets, and the store, and this moment at the beginning. This flashback where he said “God is real,” and he was like, “I don’t want to say that I don’t want to say it, I think it’s a different line.” Take after take it was this or that and then he’d land back on the line that was scripted. And it’s like just say the line in the first place.
BILLY: Sometimes guys have to come in and kind of piss on the rug.
NOAH: It’s fine but it is a funny process.
BILLY: I have to say it’s the least I have ever done in terms of saying, “Hey maybe this scene should be this or that.” I said a couple of things the whole time and if I didn’t think it was a good idea I would shut up then. But people ask me a lot because I have a reputation of doing different dialogue and I tell them, “Ask Noah Hawley, I didn’t change his shit.”
NOAH: I say, “What do you mean you’re having a problem with Billy? Billy is easy.”
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(Author photo credit Leah Muse.)
Excerpted from FARGO: THIS IS A TRUE STORY by Noah Hawley. Copyright © 2019 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. Reprinted with permission from Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.
