The Watch - Ep. 133: Interview With Noah Hawley of 'Legion' and 'Fargo'

Episode Date: March 16, 2017

The RInger's Andy Greenwald sits down with Noah Hawley, the showrunner and creator of FX's 'Legion' and 'Fargo,' to talk about last night's episode of 'Legion' (6:00) as well as the creative process of the show (11:30) and his upcoming projects (43:45). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Stand up and walk now. Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm an editor at The Ringer. and joining me live from Summerland, it's Andy Greenwald! Yo, I've had to be in this contained safe bunker ever since I took over the McDonald's Twitter account this morning. Andy is on the phone today, nursing a cough, and we're here just to do a quick introduction

because Andy got a chance to talk to Noah Hawley, the creator of Legion, and a show that Andy obviously has intimate knowledge of because he worked on it. Andy, you want to set up this interview a little bit? Yeah, so basically, Noah was my boss on. He hollered and said he wanted to chat about it. So I was excited because we're recording this Thursday morning last night, chapter six, the sixth episode of the first season aired. And for me, it was the most exciting episode to watch because that was a story. We spent a lot of time working on in the room.

And it was one I was really excited to see how it would play out. And it was also really part of, it was part of the whole experience for me in an interesting way, because when I, more or less, was the fourth episode, and then as things shook out, and Noah did rewrites and things ended up as the sixth episode. And it's the kind of episode that you kind of can't pull off unless you have a level of trust with the audience, and if the audience is all the way in and invested,

because this was an episode where, you know, it questioned the nature of reality yet again and put all the characters back to where they were at the beginning. So I was excited to see how it turned out, and I was excited to talk to Noah about it. So I went back out to his office in San Francisco, of Monica where I spent a bunch of time last year and spoke to him about it and it was very interesting. It was always interesting to hear him talk about his perspective and on how things

changed between when I was a small part of it and when the show got made. And we actually talked for so long. We basically ran that time to talk about things like Fargo because he's in the middle of shooting Fargo season three and sounded really positive about it. But it was a rare opportunity to sit down with him in general because this is a guy who lives in Texas, spends most was time shooting television shows in Canada and has his office here. So, I just don't even understand how he's so productive. I mean, he has a novel come out recently. Is that right?

Yeah, he had a bestselling novel come out last year. He's writing a screenplay of it. I was going to get it back into that. But honestly, the only time I've ever seen Noah's Sweat was when we were at lunch one time and I was just like, just conversationally, how do you do this? How do you get all this stuff done? And he was, that was the only time I saw him get a little sweaty. He was basically like, you're freaking me out by asking me.

I thought it were to see because it was revealed that he had like a thousand Mongolian bots writing all of his scripts for him. That's what we were. Yeah. No, that's the, he does not, as far as I know, do the Jeff Coon's model of art. He's actually way too involved in all these things. Yeah, like I was going to ask him about it again about his ridiculous productivity because he also just announced a bunch of screenplays that he's going to direct, including one by our friend Brian Brown, pale blue dot. but I was worried if I asked in that and I was somehow the one who tipped over the Apple cart then basically FX would sue me for $100 million and I just nobody wants that.

No, no. No, you've already got so much litigation going right now. Dude, I am active in so many circuit courts. You know that about me. So this is a very special re-up. It's just me chatting with Noah Hawley about Legion and which, by the way, Legion was renewed yesterday as well for season two, which should be interesting. Yeah, so we will be.

back to normal on Monday, right? You can, there's a bunch of stuff that you can listen to over the last couple of weeks. You got Andy with Lena Dunham, Andy with Noah Hawley, my podcast with Sean Fennacy from South by Southwest, our book club on Zoo Station. All that is in the watch feed, so please

just check out the archives when you get a chance. Also, we chatted with Gareth David from Los Campesina. That's right, music, television, film, books. But Chris, next week, we are back. I am back from leave. You are back from Texas. I will stop hacking fast food companies, Twitter accounts, and we'll get back into it.

Meet me on the sun deck, Celeste. I can't wait. Here's my conversation with Noah Hawley. I'm thrilled to be sitting here with Noah Hawley in his office. Noah, I'm excited for a number of reasons. That's good to hear. Can I enumerate them? Because you look excited. Yes, I want a list. Reason number one, you're in Los Angeles, which is a very rare thing these days. It's nice to see you here. They no longer have an extradition treaty with Brazil, so I can come here now.

Two, Legion was renewed for season two today, so congratulations. Got to help us all it was, yes. Three, we're talking on a Wednesday, my favorite episode of the season, Chapter 6, airs tonight, so we're going to get to talk about that. Yes. But mostly I'm excited because the last time we sat down for a podcast, the next day you hired me for a job. Yes. So I really want to know, first and foremost, what are you going to give me after this podcast? Well, my car is very dirty, so I was hoping, maybe if I gave you a few bucks.

I could watch that. That's not too dissimilar to what the job is in general, right? Exactly, yes. It's my favorite story. There was that great New Yorker article about Brian Grazier, where they talked about how he woke his assistant up at 4 a.m. to come to his house because there was a cricket in his house. So I try to rise to that level of bossmanship.

And now that assistant is the head of Universal. Probably. Right? So it works. Yeah. All right, well, we can TBD, what's coming my way. but your car did look a little shabby. Okay.

I feel like we can start with some one of chapter six specifics. Sure. That'll be fresh in people's minds. It was, that was my favorite storyline during my experience in the room. Good. It was, I think it was chapter four when I was there, and then it became chapter six and mutated around a bit. But to me, it was the most thrilling just when it was first being kicked around

because it was so rich with possibility. It was deeply disturbing and unsettling. even when we were just trying to crack it. But it was also rich with opportunity to do such great character work because you finally get to see all of these people who we've seen in their best selves in their super heroic state see that a lot of what makes them, quote unquote, special could also make them mentally unwell.

Yeah, that idea that, you know, these people have been defined by society a certain way to say that, you know, this quality that you have is a negative. You know, you hear voices or you see things or you can't be touched and that's a mental illness. And then, you know, they're taken somewhere and told, no, no, no, that's your strength, actually. But there's still that part of them that has a personality disorder because they've been treated that way. I mean, obviously for Sid, who can't be touched without consequences, it's not that she has an antisocial personality disorder. It's that she can't be touched without consequences.

but as a result, she's developed an antisocial personality disorder because she doesn't want to be close to anybody. And, you know, and Gene Smart's character, you know, her husband left 20 years ago and she's grieving. And there's a certain degree that all of those things, like that she's going to find him and get him back, there is a version of reality where that is her not being able to move on either. And so, you know, that's from a character's point of view,

that's the most exciting part of the show is it's not that these are people with powers who go around doing powerful things. It's is that we're using this show to try to crack these characters. Yeah, that's worth talking about because I think from the very beginning, certainly from when I first learned about the project, that was your way in, it seemed like. That was what interested you. You didn't have four-color comic book ink stains on your fingers, but you were interested in reading these aberrations. or superpowers, whatever you want to call them,

as extensions of psychology. Yeah, I mean, there's this existential identity to the show for me, which is, you know, what does it really like to be these people? And, you know, the carry-carry dynamic came out of a need not to have, I mean, it was a very practical need in the beginning,

which is like, well, how many characters can I have, right? Because you have to service all of them, et cetera. but now we're in the genre world, right? So what if there were two characters who lived in one body? And then, you know, then you could sort of, you know, you could have the two when you wanted or sometimes you could just have the one. And then I thought, oh, well, that's interesting. Like, what is it really like, that person who's living inside of him?

And what if it's a young, you know, Native American woman is living inside of him? And, and, you know, she comes out and she does the good stuff and then she goes back in. She doesn't know what it's like to eat a meal or sleep or take a shell. hour or, you know, as she says, whatever you people do in the bathroom. I think I said this a lot as a critic, and we don't need to name names of shows, because I wrote about them and name names, but all these shows about the world ending, remind me why it's worth saving. Show me one thing that is worth saving.

It's not just about fighting evil or not losing or not dying, because that's not dying isn't the same as living. You know, I mean, there's, I mean, look, I'll say my, our trailer, San Diego, Comic-Con last year, it dropped that weekend, and it dropped with all the other comic book movie trailers and, you know, and I watched them all, and there seemed to be this sort of universal approach to story, which is that all conflict is resolved through battle, right? And that might makes right. So at the end of the day, heroes and villains fight, and the one that wins is the stronger one.

You know what I mean? And it reinforced for me. I mean, the story was already there, but it reinforced for me how dangerous that can be if that's the only message that you're telegraphing to your audience. And how this show differs fundamentally

is the idea that, you know, as Jermaine Clement says in episode four, it's like figure your shit out. Like if maybe if we spent more time trying to figure out why we're so angry about things or so confrontational about things, maybe we wouldn't fight as much, you know. Maybe there'd be no need to fight. And this idea of diplomacy and this idea, you know, which is not inherently, I mean, it's not action, but it's dramatic, you know.

And it can feel like action if the stakes are high enough. Well, the thing that got me so excited last January when you first talked to me about this was I felt like you had pulled off this amazing trick. You would crack this code because we are existing in a world where, you know, IP is king, genres, superhero stuff. That's what people want. They want noisy. They want flashy. They want things that are in some way recognizable. Those things get made.

But you've somehow Trojan horse to show that is actually about psychology and a moment. motion into a show about people using their superpowers to uncover those things. I thought that was quite a clever trick. Well, you know, you start off and, you know, we introduce, there's a lot of structural landmarks that people recognize. I mean, you know, there's this Division III group that feels like they're our enemy and he escapes from them. He, you know, he escapes the empire to go off with the plucky band of rebels. And, you know, there's something very familiar about. that. And so your storytelling brain as a viewer goes, oh, I see what they're going to do. It's going to be,

you know, the underdog versus the overlord. And, and then, you know, and then Gene Smart says, well, just while we're building to that, we're just going to help you be the best you you can be, right? So we start to go into his memories and then weird stuff starts happening in his memories. And by the time you reach episode four, you're like, I don't think that's the story at all. I think the story is like what's going on with David and and that the enemy within is so much worse than the enemy without you know I mean part of the the fun for me of that fifth episode was like we're building to this big action sequence of he's going to go to division three and you know and then and then he goes but we don't go with him we go after he went you yada yada at it

yeah and then they show up and now it's forensic and now you have the this aftermath sequence where you start to see like, this, something really ugly happened here. And that guy we really liked did some pretty terrible things. And, you know, this group Division III that we were so afraid of, you know, you have possibly the most David Lynchian performance outside of a David Lynch movie, which was, you know, our Division III actor on the ground, you know, it wears the human face. You know, that sense of like, it became a horror movie.

It wasn't an action movie. You know what I mean? You thought, oh, it's going to be an action movie, and then it turned out to be something more viscerally unsettling. Right. I remember we talked about it in the room that this was a haunted house story, but the haunted house was his mind.

Yeah. And, you know, the production reality of building this show from a script into what it is now, you know, I kept saying to our production designer and to anyone who would listen, I mean, it's not, the comic isn't called the X-Men, It's called the uncanny X-Men.

And that word uncanny is a very specific word. And, you know, if you do any research at all, you see, you know, Sigmund Freud wrote an essay about the uncanny, which was about the power of the supernatural and why we're afraid of the things we're afraid of. And ultimately what scares us the most is not the unknown, but it's when familiar things operate in unfamiliar ways. So it's your haunted house, right? A house shouldn't do that, right?

Your daughter upstairs in her room shouldn't start speaking in tongues and her head spins around. Like, you know, when we see, you know, human creatures on screen who move in unnatural ways, it freaks us the hell out because we're wired that, like, things that we're familiar with should only act in ways that they're supposed to. And so this idea of uncanniness, you know, the idea that the show itself has to feel that way. and unsettle us. I'm thrilled. I have you on record now. That's the first time I've heard you reference the X-Men comic, despite making an X-Men-inspired show. Oh, yeah.

Which is good, because, you know, I walked into this. I remember I told my parents I was going to work on this show, and they were like, you're perfect for that because of all the comic books we had in the attic. And I said, actually, he doesn't care about that. But in keeping with that idea, one thing I do know from the X-Men comics is that one of the central themes is always they're hated and feared by society. the version of the story that the comics almost always default back to is from the perspective of those who are hated and feared proving themselves to be valiant and basically proving their humanity and their righteousness. What you've done on the show is you've populated the show with humans and mutants equally.

And what we see instead is maybe there's a reason sometimes where they're hated, certainly why they're feared. The sense of being struck dumb or in awe with terror at what they see. I mean, that's the scene you're describing it five when they see what he's done. We are hero, quote unquote, well, we're three-fourths the way through the season. Our quote-unquote hero might not be a good guy. Yeah, and my hope sitting down in the very first brainstorming sessions for this was, well, what if you took the genre out of entirely? Like, what is the great show here? And how do I end up with a genre show that puts me into these incredibly unnerving,

moral quandaries the way, you know, in these moments like, you know, in season one of Fargo, you know, we've seen Lester, Nygaard, go from the, from the sort of bullied husband, to killing his wife, to just trying to get away with it, to putting a gun in his nephew's backpack and framing his brother, you know, and there's, and beginning to feel like, oh, maybe he's not just trying to get away with it. maybe there's something really, like maybe this is a bad guy. Yeah. To the moment where, you know, he pulls up outside of his insurance office with his second wife,

and he's looking in, and he has a bad feeling. And he's like, actually, Han, I hurt my back. Can you go in? It was great. I got to watch that episode with an audience at the Paramount Theater in Austin. And, you know, there's three grown moments. The first is he sends her in. Yeah.

Then he stops her, and you think, oh, he's not going to do it. And then he tells her to take his orange coat. And he stops her again. And he tells her to put the hood up because he would hate to see her pretty face get cold. And by the time she goes in there, he is the worst monster you've ever seen. And so the question becomes in a genre show, you know, how do you create those Breaking Bad style moments where I'm the one who knocks? You know what I mean? where how do you take a character

when the stakes are sort of like you know save the planet kind of stakes like how do you have those visceral you know gritty human moral moments and and and you know that became the thing of saying like

well this character in the comics isn't a hero and and you know what I have always really loved about the X-Men is that that question of should I do good or should I do evil is not resolved once and for all. You know what I mean? And you see it with Fastbender or, you know, that character, Magneto, which is like,

sometimes he's really a villain. And then sometimes he can be convinced to be a hero, but he may go back, you know, and that makes him a more interesting character. Right. Well, the work of a storyteller is to give them reasons, right? And a hallmark of Legion and Fargo is being the worst person in the world is really a question of opportunity. Like whether you're put a position and then maybe who you are in that moment. And we're talking about David's, you know, ambiguous morality.

He does love Sid. As you said, as we said a moment ago, that is true. And that's nice. That's a good thing. That's a praiseworthy thing. And something we can latch on to. But what he does in the orbit of that is an open question. Well, and, you know, if you think about how,

ungrounded he is to the to the human world i mean he had his sister who put him there um or kept him there or didn't really fight to have him out so how connected is he really to her and otherwise he had lenny um and and yet you know because he's so unconnected you know because uh he doesn't have that human connection like his soul is really in question you know he's he's vulnerable to making bad choices. Obviously, we've established that, you know, he was a drug addict at a certain point, you know. So probably he, I mean, we saw him. I mean, he would lie and cheat and steal and, you know, I mean, he has this inherent desire, I think, to have something nice.

And then he meets Sid, and then she grounds him and she makes him want to be his best self. but you know the reality is like it's not a sure thing that relationship and and and the danger is if it doesn't work out then is it's worse isn't it i mean it's worse that he's seen the promised land but he can't live there and what does that do if it feels like love turns its back on him on some level you know what what does he have left you know what does what does he care if humanity lives or dies or any of it. Hey, this is Chris. Sorry to interrupt Andy and Noah's conversation, which we will get back to momentarily. But first, a quick break from our sponsor.

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I want to go back to something you alluded to a few moments ago when you were talking about the direction in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 and the impressive jobs that those two directors did and also not just on the screen, but in translating what you had imagined onto the screen. And just that idea in general, because especially for this show, I mean, this show operates with a very specific perspective,

a very specific sort of dream logic. We all know from real life when our friend tries to tell us about their dream. Yeah. It never works. No. And yet I remember one of my clearest memories from my experience in the writer's room was about eight weeks into it when at this point you were doing,

you were prepping the pilot in Vancouver, which you directed. I want to talk about that as well. And we saw the test footage, like color test, you know, and it was set some of the music you ended up using in the series. And it was the first time we saw the jumpsuits. And it was the first time we saw them interacting. And we saw Rachel and Dan, like with the bathrobe string, which was something that you had talked about as an image before. And it was like a thunderbolt moment because it was finally like, oh, now I could see into your head.

Because so much of a writer's room's job is trying to crack into the showrunner's head and try to service it the best of our ability. all of a sudden we saw it, there it was. Yeah. That is the hardest trick, and yet that's become more and more your job, especially as you move into a show like this, which is so visual and so specific. Well, it's the same with Fargo,

which is about the tone of voice, and the only way to teach people what the show is is to make the show, is to show them the show. It's not to give them a script or to pitch them a story, but how do you, how do the people, who have to make the show know what the show is.

Well, that's a conversation. That's a show, you know, that's, and that ultimately becomes why, you know, my job is to be a filmmaker and, and not just a writer, because if I'm going to go ahead and try to tell these unique stories, I have to be able to make them myself so that I can show you that, no, this is what it is. Yeah.

otherwise there's another layer of interpretation you know i mean there's sam s mail who's making mr robot but he doesn't do the pilot right so now he's got to convince that a very good director well you know i want to do all this headroom and and you know i want to short side these characters on screen and i want to you know i mean he as a filmmaker he he knows what he wants but he's not a lot to do it himself and so you know i'm sure they had a very positive experience but the danger is that a director comes in. You know, we had this on the second year of Fargo, where I pushed to direct that first hour, and, you know, they always worry because there's so many episodes after it. They don't want you directing that first one because, you know, and their

thought was, well, it's the first hour of the second season, which is not what it is at all. It's the beginning of a whole new movie. But, you know, that director and I, and he, you know, he had directed for us before. And, you know, he just got a on set that first day and the camera starts moving in ways that are not, you know, it's floating around. It's not a Cohen Brothers thing. There's just a sensibility issue where I just kept saying to him, like, what are you, what are you doing? That's not the show. And he kept saying, you're going to love it. And I kept saying, I'm pretty sure I'm not loving it right now. And ultimately, you know, maybe he had a version of the show that was great for him. But for me, you know, I mean, I walked into that diner set at the

Waffle Hut. And, you know, I had these very specific things that were going to happen. They were, she, she was going to spray him with bug spray. He was going to pull the gun and shoot her. The short, the short order cook was going to run out of the back. The waitress was going to, you know, all that stuff. And I'm walking around as a filmmaker. And I see there's a swinging door, right, between the kitchen and the restaurant.

And I pushed it. And it swung, you know, back and forth, slower and slower until it closed. And I thought, wasn't that interesting? that probably all the violence is done before the story even stops swinging, right? And I said to the director, I was like, I'd love to get that piece. That wasn't his vision. He didn't shoot that. Ultimately, I went back and shot it.

So, you know, it becomes our job, especially since television has become a visual medium, not just, you know, talking heads, not just L.A. law. If we really want to tell the story with the camera, then we're filmmakers. And yet you, it's one thing, I feel like it's one thing to say it, but it's another thing to be able to do it. And I was always curious about that, whether it was filmmaking was something that you felt drawn to regardless, you know, even though you were a novelist and then you were writing for television, or was it really that experience that you're describing, which, you know, as a creator I can only imagine would be frustrating of, I wrote the script, I understand what this thing, this piece is, and now I'm being denied the chance to, you know, to fully enact it. Well, no, I wasn't the guy who was like, what I really wanted to do is direct. But, you know, even beginning with the Unusuals, it was a show with a very distinct tone of voice. And certainly with my generation, which was we made eight of them for ABC, and it was a fake documentary in the style of the Seven Up series that Michael Apted did, which was a fake documentary, which meant, all right, as filmmakers, I mean, if I,

In order to write it, I had to go, well, you know, if you really look at the documentary as a format, it's really fascinating because, you know, usually the camera's not there. You know, it's not reality TV, right? It's like sometimes you've got archival footage. Sometimes you've got audio recordings. Sometimes you have still photographs like Ken Burns. And, you know, and you have interviews. And so that becomes a great challenge as a writer. It's like, all right, how do I come?

How do I put a story together with the conceit that I don't, I can't tell the story. by just showing it happening. That's really interesting. And then from a filmmaking standpoint, well, you know, when they make a documentary, they don't know what's going to happen next. So the camera guy's there, and he's like watching what's happening,

but if two characters have a fight and one of them storms off, now we're chasing the action. So whereas what you would normally do is, you know, the characters would have a fight and she would go to her car, will there be a camera set up there for when she lands

and you'd get the scene, In this case, what we get is what we get, right? So imperfect becomes perfect because you know when something feels real and not real. So, you know, I've had to just because of the shows that I have created to think about the filmmaking of them for a long time. And then obviously when you make a show called Fargo, you know, in the vein of two of the greatest filmmakers of all time, you know, those guys write a lot of scripts that they don't direct and those movies never turn out to be Cohn Brothers movies, right? So it's not just the script. There's something in the filmmaking of that script that makes a Coen Brothers movie. And you literally can't ask them, how do you make a Coen Brothers movie?

Because they don't want to talk about it, right? And I didn't ask them. But because I knew better, because, you know, I respect their sort of reluctance to, I mean, they don't do a lot of interviews and they never really want to, you know, the work stands for itself. But it became incumbent on me to go, all right, well, this. the camera, these are the rules of the camera and these are, but you know, the Anton Schigur example is still the best example, which is, you know, they gave him that haircut and they laughed at his face for like 30 minutes, but there's nothing funny about it in the movie. It's just this really

unsettling specific detail. And, you know, you could write Killer with a Prince Valiant haircut and hand it to another director and you might end up with comedy. You know, you, so If you want to do something specific, you have to do it yourself. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. One of the pleasures and then I think also challenges of working in a writer's room is that, you know, you follow your muse when it comes to the writing. And, you know, I remember ideas would just emerge, you know, that we hadn't been working on on Tuesday. And then you would deliver them on a Wednesday.

And then now that's our direction because that's the authorial vision. that's the way ideas come to you. I was curious how that works. So I got to see up close and personal how that works with the script, or at least in the generation, the generating of the ideas for the scripts. I'm curious about how that works with the visuals

because I do know there are certain things. And I'm thinking of David and Sid with a pillow between them. That was right there from the beginning and then there it was on the screen. The Devil with the Yellow Eyes was a character was written, it was up on the board, we talked about it.

But I didn't know what that character looked like until I think there was some test footage or something. Well, that character came out of our production designer, Michael Wiley, who said he was obsessed with the show My 600-pound Life. Okay. Which is a reality show for people who don't know it. And he said it's so like you can't look away and it's so horrifying these people. And, you know, with the technical term, grossly obese, you know.

And yet there's something like behind their eyes that just feels trapped. and trapped in their own body. Yeah, but again, the uncanny, right? It's like humans weren't designed to be that big. So part of our reaction to people of that size is it just doesn't seem natural to us because that's not our experience of how human beings are meant to be designed, you know what I mean? So, but, you know, I want to say something about writers' rooms

because on Legion specifically, it's very difficult show to try to make in a writer's room because by definition, in my mind, a writer's room is an outline generating device. You get a bunch of people with their own worldviews in a room to kind of negotiate, and the common currency is plot, right?

What you end up with is this happens and then this happens and then this happens. and then this happens, right? Which works great for some stories that are plot-driven, but Legion is not a plot-driven show. It's sort of an experience and psychology-driven show. And so the problem when I would come in and would be pitched a whole story

is that it had been very methodically thought out and added up and everything sort of was set up and paid off the way that, you know, all the stories are sort of meant to be. but it didn't have that dream logic. It didn't have that, you know. And so the room itself became, I won't, it wasn't an obstacle to making the show, but it was challenging to try to work with the writer's room,

especially because I wasn't there a lot of the time because, you know, I'm off doing the other things. And so you guys would be sitting, you know, a room working very diligently and very hard to create something that I would walk in and go, oh yeah, that doesn't feel right to me. Or, you know, it becomes very difficult, especially to the degree that, you know, I'm like the guy in, in Williamsburg making artisanal beer in my bathtub, right? Like, it's, you know, these are sort of handmade things.

And, you know, in the sense of, as you said, like the love story, like, it's, it's hard to know what that means, but there's a sense to me of how important the idea of romance is, both in the physical, literal romance of these two people, but also the romance of this world and the wonder of what's going to happen next. And my hope that every week there would be at least one thing, a set piece or a concept or a visual that blows somebody's mind a little bit. you know what I mean, and that that was more important on some level than like, well, what happens next? It's like, well, you know, we know sort of like, I always knew in a basic sense of like,

he meets Sid and they leave this place and they go to this other place and then they begin to look into his memories and his mind and they discover something there. And then, you know, that becomes the story of the season. and it mattered less to me like the nuts and bolts of how those things all added up logistically but it's very, you know,

I mean, you could have a writer's room where one person would just go orange and another one where they went like Puma and you know, that would be more I think helpful. Well, absolutely, especially with a show like this though because it has to have an internal logic to make one person, it has to be a singular dream logic

in order for it to work. And what was interesting about being in the room, room is, you know, Nathaniel could say something that was deeply disturbing to Nathaniel. And we'd be like, well, that's incredible. That's really interesting. And then Jen would say something or Brian would say something. Peter would say something. All of those things were distinct, idiosyncratic point of view unique to them when you

try to stitch them together and then try to then daisy chain them to your unique point of view. That's when it starts to crumble. And that's the challenge. Yeah, and it's what, you know, the best directors really realize, like Tim Milance, I mean, one of the most important ideas. in that fifth episode that was critical for their relationship, David and Sid, is he finds a way for them to touch each other, you know what I mean? Which is in her, in their minds, basically. But she is never since she was a girl been able to have physical contact with anyone, let alone sex and what and what that does, which is like, you know, the first time you do heroin, I hear.

And so the idea of how immediately all addictive that becomes, so the fact that she changes in that hour, in that first half of that episode, to be someone who just wants to go back there. And he becomes almost her cult leader because he's obviously different than the David we remember from the episode before. And he's like very seductive and charming. and she's completely addicted to him.

And then he leaves her and goes off. And then she gets in a car with her friends and goes to this place where all these people have been massacred. And, you know, you see it on her face. She's like coming out of the addiction. She's like, what happened? What did he do? Who is that?

Who is that person that I allowed myself to be? Yeah. And, you know, that's a critical. step for her and and I think a very important goal in the story like this is it as all the other elements aside like it's got to be a visceral human experience one thing that I've had to learn a little bit about since I moved here is how buildings get protected against earthquakes and one of the things that I've learned through through not at all neurotic research is the way there's like basically they build in wiggle room basically right they can move yeah so they're not

rigid against. Yeah, not a brick building. Right. Yeah. I was thinking about that in terms of how you create these shows, and specifically because you said it before, Jermaine Clement in an ice cube, maybe my favorite thing so far, specific just thing in the season, that was not part of the show when I was part of the show. That was potentially a season two thing that then suddenly became an episode four thing.

Yeah, I sat down to write episode four with knowing a little bit about what, I mean, knowing enough of like, well, David's mind is off somewhere and Sid's going to go off and try to figure out what was real. And I just found myself writing this guy in an ice cube. You know what I mean? Doing this speech to camera, basically. And I was like, oh, I guess we introduced Oliver. Yeah, which we knew Oliver. We talked about Oliver, but he was season two. You know, I do have a character problem because I like characters and I like a lot of characters. And, you know, I like the idea of multiple points of view. And, and, you know, certainly when we were gearing up to make the pilot, you know, we've got David and Sid, and, you know, we see

potonomy and we see, you know, Amber, the female, uh, Kerry. And then at the end, we see Melanie a little bit. But I was already looking past that and going, well, they have to go to a place and that place has to have characters. And so, you know, I'm pushing FX to hire Bill Irwin. There's no character on paper for him, you know what I mean? But, But, you know, and then Hamish, who plays the interrogator, you know, I was like, I love that guy. I love that character. And so now Oliver comes in and it's like, well, I mean, if I could have anyone I wanted, it would be Jermain.

And then I get Jermaine. And it's like, well, now I got a right for Jermaine, you know. But I think, I mean, you know, it's what he says in that scene. You know, you have these two. I mean, a story is inherently. an empathy creation mechanism, right? It's why we tell our kids' stories so that they can go, well, you know,

I'm not this bunny, but I can empathize with what this bunny's going through, you know what I mean? And the more points of view you have, the more people you're forced to empathize with, the more invested you become in the show, because, you know, in Fargo, this works very specifically

that if you really like Mike Milligan and you really like Ed, Peggy and you really like Patrick Wilson's character and you know and and they're all in a collision course who are you rooting for like it makes the violence of it really hard to to to just sort of stand up and cheer for because you know I mean you're rooting for Jesse Plemens and Kirsten and you think I don't care what Gerhard they send I am rooting for Jesse Clemens in that fight and then I send the kid with cerebral palsy in who I've spent the hour like he's got the meet cute with the with the with the front office girl you know

about about rocky um and now you're like oh shit don't hurt that kid like you know it becomes less clear like well maybe jess maybe i'd be okay if jesse died here you know and then you find yourself negotiating to try to find the optimal yeah so i think that makes anything that we can do as storytellers to create an active engagement with the story um where it's not just I'm sitting there watching this, but I'm invested and I'm engaged. And my imagination is engaged, which, you know, is a really important thing in Legion, where, you know, you see something and it makes your brain go, oh, but what if, you know, all these things, like suddenly, and it's an experience we have all the time as readers because, you know, the writer of a book does half the job,

and you have to do the other half, which is, it becomes a story in your head with visuals and, you know, but film is a more passive medium, and you know, you can just sort of watch it, but the best stories are the ones where you're telling it along with the movie, you know. But that's also become something, I think, is a trademark in a good way. The audience doesn't know what's happening to them,

but they like what's happening. They're along for the ride. Yeah, that's what matters, is the impact of it, and that's the storytelling in three dimensions, you know. And we, you know, we're talking about Legion. We have there two more weeks left, two more episodes to go. You're already well into the work on many other things.

You've got movies coming up. You've got Fargo Season 3 coming much sooner than I even thought it was coming, because you're still making it. I think we premiere April 19th. April 19th, and what episode are you filming right now? Well, we block shoots. We're shooting five and six right now. So you're, how's that going? I mean, this is the speed round where I just have to ask, because I'm curious.

It's going great. I've seen three of the four hours so far. shot the first one, and I think we just locked it. You know, I mean, it's thrilling to me. You know, this Fargo story, this, I don't even know how to describe it. It's a type of storytelling that I have never found any place else to do it. There's something both very grounded and real about a crime story, and there's something much more abstract and thematic and about it, that because it's such a simple story,

you can do a lot of very deep and interesting things with it, at least to me, and hopefully no one will notice on some level, right? If you just want to watch it as, you know, it's funny sometimes and I can't believe that happened, it works on that level. And if, you know, if you want to think about season two as as a story about the death of the family business and the rise of corporate America, you can also think about it that way, or in the myth of of Sisyphus and the meaning of life and, you know, little things like that. Because hopefully it doesn't take itself too seriously. But it really feels special this third year to me.

And the actors are incredible. And yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I'm deep in that process of, you know, working with directors and trying to make 10 hours that were directed by six people. feel like 10 hours were directed by one person and, and, you know, I'm not there on set a lot. I was there a lot more of the first year. And, you know, so it becomes, there is a process of you spend a lot of time talking to directors and being involved in the prep and then, you know, they shoot the show and you get in the

editing room and go, why did they? But, you know, there's also a lot of times in the editing room where you go, oh, that's so much better. I know you don't, this is the part that you don't love, but to be, to be glib or Comic-Khani, but if you did want to tease the last two weeks of legions or something, is there a word or a feeling, or maybe it's Puma that you want to live people. You know, what's, this show is never a mystery box show to me. It was never about, I want you to be off balance.

I want you to be confused. it was always, I want you to feel what David is feeling. And in the beginning, David had a lot of images and not a lot of information. And I think what you've seen now in the first five hours is that each episode you're getting a little more clarity, right? And so now we know it's a parasite, you know, after episode five. And so, you know, where we're going to end up with is we're going to end up knowing things. And we're going to end up with some decisive action that's going to happen. and, you know, step one, identify the problem, step two, solve the problem.

But, you know, solving problems often creates other problems. And, you know, I mean, I think what's really fun about the last two hours is, as should happen in a story, the pace picks up, the energy level picks up, the stakes get higher, and the life or deathness of it becomes very real. and there's risk to characters that hopefully people really care about at this point. And then there's some stuff in there where we hopefully blow your mind two more times. Well, I want to thank you for letting me be a part of it, even in a small way. And the only question remaining, of course, is do you want wax on the car? Yeah. I'm not a big wax or starch enthusiast on my shes.

shirts either, which are on the hangar. I noticed that. I was going to show a little initiative and get those done, too. No, no. I'm glad that you came to help us out. It was fun. And thanks for helping me out with this interview. Great to talk to you. Awesome. Thanks again to Delta Studio for sponsoring today's episode of The Watch. Delta Studio offers you over 1,000 hours of every type of entertainment for every passenger 100% for free. You can choose from up to 300 movies. You can watch HBO. You can watch Showtime.

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