The Big Picture

Fargo has a unique ability to reinvent itself each season while maintaining the same tone that audiences love. The show explores the tension between decency and corruption, often focusing on characters who lack hope. Noah Hawley, the creator, has expressed a desire to continue making Fargo as long as he can top himself and find new stories to tell.

Fargo is that rare property where the 1996 movie from the Coen brothers as well as each season of the Noah Hawley created FX TV series can live on their own, but each feel like pieces of a larger world that coexist in harmony. With wit, humor and violence, there are always characters you love and characters you fear, all of which feel human in their own right.

The latest installment of the series, Fargo: Year 5, is set in Minnesota and North Dakota in 2019 and follows Dorothy “Dot” Lyon (Juno Temple) as she finds herself in a bit of trouble involving her past. Being on the radar of North Dakota Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), someone she very much does not want back in her life, has turned Dot’s simple Midwestern existence upside down, leading her to want to fight for her family by any means necessary.

During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, showrunner/writer/director/executive producer Hawley talked about the show’s dance between decency and corruption, the desire the audience has for a relationship they can feel safe in watching, why it’s important to leave room for the actors to do their thing, his decision to no longer outline anything he writes, how the season ended up taking some inspiration from A Nightmare Before Christmas, shaping Roy Tillman, the stand-out dynamic between Dot and her daughter, and his desire to continue with future seasons. He also talked about tackling the Alien franchise for his upcoming TV series and the way he’s approaching the storytelling.

Fargo Various chronicles of deception, intrigue, and murder in and around frozen Minnesota. All of these tales mysteriously lead back one way or another to Fargo, North Dakota. Release Date April 15, 2014 Main Genre Crime Rating TV-MA Seasons 5 Studio FX

Collider: This is a particularly interesting project because every season is different, but it still always feels like Fargo and it blows my mind how much it always feels like Fargo. Do you approach each season like it’s the first, meaning do you always want to start from a place that’s fresh and new, or are you always keeping in mind what’s come before? How do you handle that each time?

NOAH HAWLEY: Some of it is an instinctual process. It’s a tone of voice. It’s also about understanding the elements required, in terms of this overall dance between decency and cynicism and corruption – the forces of the criminal element – which is basically just about people who don’t have a lot of hope versus people who do. Whether it’s Ed and Peggy, or Ewan McGregor and Mary Winstead, or in this case David Rysdahl and Juno Temple, I think audiences like to have fun and feel safe in a relationship. There’s a lot of talk that’s given to conflict equals drama, which is accurate, but I don’t think that you should have conflict everywhere. You want the audience to feel safe somewhere and have something to root for. What’s interesting to me is that the amount of law enforcement is really adjustable, like to solve or not solve the case. In Season 4, we had one corrupt cop and one racist cop, and then our real detective was a 16-year-old girl. It’s really about those forces of good with a small g, that are trying to figure out what’s coming for them.

Image via FX

Reinventing Themselves Each Season While Keeping The Same Tone
When you have a successful show, obviously the studio and the network and the producers want to keep it going. And with a show like this, that delivers every season and always has such an incredible cast, I would imagine that everyone wants to just keep making it while you want to keep making it. Have you started to think about whether a Season 6 could be a possibility? Have you thought about continuing, at all?

HAWLEY: Yeah. Who am I fooling? It’s such a joy to make this show. I can’t really think of a comp for a show that reinvents itself every time, yet somehow stays exactly right in the same tone that you want it to be. Each time I tell the story, there has to be a criminal element, but what that criminal element is can basically be anything. It’s just a thematically rich show. It’s a time machine. I’m able to move around in time anywhere I want to go. And it’s really an exploration of America, which as we’re discovering, is a subject you can’t really run out of interest in because it’s a really complicated place. The complication of it is exactly this tension between the lofty idea of what America is, and the cynical forces of capital and violence and bullying that are always in struggle, in one permutation or another.

Have you ever gone into a season of this show, fully convinced that it would be the last season, or does it always feel open in some way to you?

HAWLEY: To be honest, I started this season thinking that. I had said to FX that I felt like this was the last one. But then, it really changed on me, and it changed on me pretty quickly in starting to make it. I really realized how lucky I am. There’s always this amazing moment where I’m a couple of episodes in and I think, “Well, this has always been what Fargo is. It’s been Jon Hamm, Juno [Temple], Joe Keery, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. There’s no other Fargo.” It’s an amazing thing to do that and to look around and go, “Right, we had Alison Tolman and we had Patrick Wilson and we had David Thewlis.” Every time, I feel like, “This is the best I’ve ever done.” As long as I feel like I can top myself, why wouldn’t I keep going? That said, I don’t know when. It’s always about, the story has to reveal itself and I have to get excited about it. I have a tiny indie show called Alien that I have to make. But I imagine that, as soon as I can, I’ll make another one.

Image via FX

How Taking on The Alien Franchise Compares to Fargo
Are you more nervous about taking on the Alien franchise than you were with Fargo, or is it an equal amount of nervousness?

HAWLEY: Both franchises have their rabid fan bases. The Coen brothers certainly are a genre of film all to themselves. The reality is, when you get right down to it, there are three science fiction brands – there’s Star Trek, Star Wars and Alien – and they each have a completely unique look. You would never confuse Star Trek for Alien, or Star Wars for Star Trek. I don’t know that it’s intimidating as much as it is a challenge that is an exciting challenge. When we started Fargo, I felt liberated because I thought, “Well, this is such a terrible idea to try to make a show called Fargo that is adjacent to the movie, but it has nothing to do with the movie, that three people will watch and two of them will hate watch it.” On some level, it felt like I was liberated to give it my all and really go for it. There was no playing it safe. Since then, I was gonna make a Star Trek movie, and I have been talking with FX about Alien for many years. I’ve gained confidence in my process and this idea. All I do is go back to Fargo the movie, or Alien the movie, and I think, “Well, what did I feel while I was watching it?” And then, I try to create those feelings in the audience while telling them a completely different story, but it’s not really about, “What are the elements from the movie that I need?,” or “They had a car salesman, and I’ll have an insurance salesman.”

It’s really about that moment at the end of Fargo where he got the three cent stamp and she’s gonna have the baby, and you feel this amazing sense of, they’re safe now. It’s that feeling. We need to build to the power of that feeling so that it really lands. And Alien has its own set of feelings, and a sense of dread and discovery. It’s a deeply unsettling movie, but strangely, I look at it almost like Waiting for Godot. You’ve got Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton. It’s about a group of people who are going to a place they don’t know where, to do a thing they don’t know what, for someone they don’t know who. It’s such an existential blue-collar journey. But if you copy it precisely, then just watch the movie. You have to do something with it that’s, on some level, totally different and yet feels similar. As you said, every time you watch Fargo, you’re like, “How does it feel the same, but totally different?”

Fargo feels like such a remarkable achievement. Every season, I got into it thinking there’s no way it can top the prior season or even be as good, and then within five minutes, I’m fully into the world again and loving every minute of it.

HAWLEY: You need a good script, and you need good actors and filmmakers, and you need to know where the joke is and where the feeling is. It still surprises me, too. I had this moment in the second season where I had written this scene. In the first hour, Patrick Wilson has been to the crime scene, and he comes home and his daughter’s asleep and Cristin Milioti says, “Your daughter made you something today,” and it’s an ashtray. And he’s like, “She knows I don’t smoke, right?” He’s looking at this ashtray, and Patrick just started to tear up. His wife’s got cancer and he’s just seen this brutal thing, and it wasn’t scripted that way, in any way. It was just a simple scene. You just realize, as a writer, you’ve gotta leave room for the actors. Don’t overwrite it, let it be simple. And then, in the moment, you really find what’s grounded and real about it, which I think is the other tension of Fargo. There’s something heightened about it, but there’s something so grounded about it, at the same time, in a way that you don’t find most things. Either it’s a farce, or it’s a drama, or it’s a comedy, but to be able to move between those tones, when I feel like I’ve done that successfully, I think that that’s the definition of the show, really.

Do They Have a Set Plan For Alien?
Fargo is so unique, in that you’re approaching every season as if it’s a new thing. When you do Alien, is it something you’re approaching more traditionally, in the sense that you have a three-season plan or a five-season plan, like you would with a traditional show, or is it also different in that way?

HAWLEY: There’s definitely a place that I’m going, which I had with Legion, also. I just don’t necessarily know how long it’s gonna take me to get there, and on some level, I don’t want to know too much. Once you remove the play and the potential and the imagination, that’s why I’ve stopped outlining anything. First of all, no one ever said, “That’s the best outline I ever read.” And second of all, it’s just a different part of your brain, honestly. It’s a different part of your brain that thinks about story that way versus the part of your brain that is writing the story. What we do is we get the writers in a room and we’ve got the whiteboards and we start big picture. We start to write stuff in, like “Episode five, this might happen.” We get a loose structure to it and a sense of, “All right, this is the episode where this needs to happen.” And then, the writing process allows more discovery and allows the characters to live on the page in a way that doesn’t stifle the creativity. That said, in order to make things feel random and have coincidence and those real-life elements that we have, you do have to plan that pretty profoundly, but within that, I like to leave room to discover.

There’s something so sweet and beautiful about the purity of the relationship between Dot and her child. How tricky is it to make a relationship like that work in a show like this? Did you start bringing more of that in, when you saw Juno Temple and that kid together?

HAWLEY: That was a big part of why I cast Juno in the first place. If you don’t get an actor who is mischievous and fun with this kid, you’re gonna call Child Protective Services. She’s in a state of denial about what’s happening while simultaneously preparing for another assault. That feels like it’s endangering her family because it is endangering her family, and yet she’s still winning in doing it and you can’t help but think, “Man, she’s a great mom.” That was the biggest hurdle, in terms of thinking, “Who could be this Dot character?” If you cast it wrong, she’s just someone who seems like she’s putting other people in danger. And of course, Sienna [King], who played her daughter, had to be equally fun and have faith in her mother that her mother was gonna protect her. That’s the success of the season, really, because that family unit is so strong. Even Wayne, the husband, just trusts her. Even when he realizes she’s not who she says that she is, he’s like, “Well, if she did that, she had a good reason.” I tried to avoid the clichés and emotions that you would go through and the expectation that, if you have a story about an alpha male ex-husband and a beta male new husband, at some point, the beta male is gonna have to stand up to the alpha male. Well, no, the goal of masculinity should not be, “I’m not a real man unless I’m acting violently.” Wayne is totally comfortable with the fact that his wife makes most of the decisions and it doesn’t make him less of a man.

Image via FX

How Minnesota Nice Isn’t Really Very Nice At All
What made you want to start the season with the slow-motion fight that happens all around Dot?

HAWLEY: A picture is worth a thousand words. It’s that central idea of Minnesota nice, which is so pivotal to what Fargo is. You have a culture of people who pretend that everything’s okay, no matter how bad it gets. There’s humor in that and charm in that, but also, it’s maybe not good for people to swallow that much. And then, you contrast that with the last five years when no one’s pretending to be nice anymore, like these school board meetings that result in violence and people screaming at school teachers. And so, I just thought the couplet, the joke of defining Minnesota nice and then immediately seeing the opposite of Minnesota nice, tells you exactly where you are in this moment. And then, finding Dot there, who’s not engaged in any of that and who’s trying to protect her kid from that, tells you exactly who she is and that there is still some decency left, and how is it gonna survive in the face of these forces?

Along with the Lyon family this season and Dot, you have Roy Tillman and his world. He’s such an interesting character because he can be terrifying, and then he has nipple rings and doesn’t mind being naked in front of strangers and has a towel with his own face on it. How much of that character did Jon Hamm bring to the role, and how many of those details were in the pages of the script?

HAWLEY: All that is in the script. The nipple rings are in the script. The re-election campaign towel is in the script. It’s a very visual process for me, writing these scripts. I love writing dialogue, but I might love even more, if I can have multiple pages without dialogue where the cameras just telling the story. You’re always gonna get people with physical humor because it cuts through the intellectual part of your brain. And then, Jon was just game. He was game for it all. He definitely had a process of finding this guy and creating that tension between the snake charmer quality and family values that are pretty twisted. What I said to him, early on, is that this isn’t the old school moral majority, this is Tiger King America. This is Warrior Jesus, it’s not turn the other cheek Jesus. There’s a certain amount of hedonism in this community that, to outsiders, seems totally contradictory to the proselytizing message, but is in there and I think makes the character harder to dismiss as just a buttoned up moralizer.

Image via FX

Why Is There So Much Nightmare Before Christmas In This Season of Fargo?
With Episode 4 of Fargo this season, which is the Halloween episode, you have the actors wearing Nightmare Before Christmas masks. As a huge fan of that movie, I have to ask how that came about? Are those real masks? Were they created for the show? Had you considered any other masks?

HAWLEY: No, I never thought about other masks. There’s something very personal about the work to me, with the fact that I’m having this career at the same time that I am raising children, and that we have dynamics in my family that stick with me. My kids, my family, really loves that movie. It’s a yearly movie to watch. It’s a Halloween movie about Christmas, and Fargo is a winter show where we always hit Christmas. There just felt like a bit of an overlap in my mind. I like that idea of bringing that other story into our story on some level. Those masks are available, you’ll be happy to know. I had to get Tim Burton’s permission, which luckily one of our executive producers, Steve Stark, also produced Wednesday. It’s just specific. That’s what I like about it the most. It’s a very specific choice. Yeah, you could wear any Halloween mask and it might be creepy, but why that one? Why is there so much Nightmare Before Christmas in this season of Fargo, I think is a great question for the audience to puzzle over. Also, what’s amazing is that the Disney corporation will spend all this money to allow me to do something that I think is funny. How whimsical is that? As long as I feel like I’m getting away with something, I think we’re making the right show.

Fargo: Year 5 airs on Tuesday nights on FX and is available to stream at Hulu.

Stream at Hulu.