Before Noah Hawley created his renowned television adaptation of the 1996 Coen brothers’ classic film Fargo, he spent most of his time writing novels. His first, A Conspiracy of Tall Men (1998), is about a professor of conspiracy theories who becomes embroiled in a mystery of his own when his wife dies in a plane bombing. As he plummets down one of the rabbit holes he has made a career of circling, the professor finally has good reason to be paranoid—only now he can’t get his usual enjoyment from it. This predicament is typical of Hawley’s work: respectable American life becomes a comic nightmare, and sanctioned pleasures turn perverse. But for Hawley, darkness need not mean doom. His magisterial command of plot—and of what makes it compulsive—is coupled with a remarkable gift for finding humor and goodness in stories of inexhaustible violence.

Born in New York City in 1967 to a family of writers, Hawley studied political science at Sarah Lawrence College and shortly thereafter began writing fiction while working as a paralegal, first in New York and later in San Francisco, where he also joined the Bay Area collective the Writers Grotto. On the heels of the publication of his debut novel, Hawley wrote and then sold his first screenplay, which would become the film Lies and Alibis. This occurred during an auspicious six-month period when he also had his novel optioned by Paramount, and successfully pitched an idea for another movie. In the decades since, Hawley has written five novels; cowritten and directed the feature film Lucy in the Sky (2019), which stars Natalie Portman as an astronaut suffering from PTSD in the aftermath of a space mission; and created numerous TV series, including five seasons of Fargo (2014–24), the Marvel Comics–inspired show Legion (2017–19), and, most recently, Alien: Earth (2025), a prequel to the 1979 Ridley Scott film. When interviewers emphasize the sheer breadth of his output, Hawley responds by sharing his professional motto: “What else can I get away with?” It’s exactly this boldness and sharp attunement to the world around him that have come to define Hawley’s high-wire acts.

For this issue, Hawley was interviewed by actor and musician Jason Schwartzman, who plays the impudent son of a powerful crime boss in Fargo’s fourth season. Schwartzman’s storied film and television career began when he landed his first role, at the age of seventeen, in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998), beginning a long-standing collaboration between the two. With the release of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, 2024 was an especially triumphant year for Schwartzman, who had roles in both, as well as the lead in Nathan Silver’s critically acclaimed film Between the Temples, in which Schwartzman plays a doubt-ridden cantor heartened by his friendship with his former elementary school music teacher. Contributing to his status as a veritable indie darling, Schwartzman once played drums and wrote songs in the successful alternative-rock band Phantom Planet, and later made music for his solo project, Coconut Records. Recently, in New York magazine, Schwartzman described some of his favorite things. The list includes magnets, laminators, fabric markers for covering up coffee stains, his wife’s candles, and Boggle, about which he writes, “How did they create this game? How did they know what letters to put on what square? How did they do that? It is amazing. It’s probably one of the most important things in my life.”

—The Editors

I. “IT’S WATER, WATER, WATER, SMALL TALK, SMALL TALK, AND THEN—CHARM THEM”

JASON SCHWARTZMAN: Let’s just talk. So, you’re here in LA for how long?

NOAH HAWLEY: Just until Friday. Although there’s a screening of [Robert Eggers’s] Nosferatu on Friday night. And I’m like, Do I stay? It’s the kind of thing that’s hard with the kids—to say, I’m gonna stay another night to see a movie that I could see later, but Eggers is gonna be there. I could do it, but when you’re in our business, you’re gone from home so much that it feels like it’s gotta be really worth it to ask that of them.

JS: I know, I totally agree. There’s a band called Fontaines D.C., a really great band from Ireland. I’ve been literally following them. I seem to always be missing them on tour wherever they’re going. And so when I was in Manchester recently for work, it turned out they were going to be playing in this area not far away called Wolverhampton. I thought, OK, I have to do it. Even though I’ll be wrapped, I’ve got to stay this one extra day. And then I just couldn’t. I was like, What am I gonna do, go to this concert and not be with my kids?

NH: This business, in this town especially, will always ask things of you, and you’ve got to learn where your boundaries are. I’ve just learned to be like, No, I’m good. If it can be convenient for me, we’ll do it. If not, it’s fine. I don’t need it.

JS: When you talk about not doing something and having your boundaries, I wonder if there are any types of things you wouldn’t do, more out of nervousness or fear. Like, you’ve gotten numerous awards, and you’ve had to go into these rooms that are full of all these people. I’m so fearful in those kinds of public situations, or I used to be, at least. Are your boundaries only family and time? Or are there things that hold you back from things you’re afraid of?

NH: No.

JS: Really?

NH: Long question, short answer.

JS: Exactly, yeah.

NH: Yeah, pretty much. We grow up as nervous young men with social anxieties, but I had a moment early in my career when I realized there’s a performance aspect to the job. I remember clearly one day thinking, Just go in and put yourself out there, even if you don’t feel it. And it’s easier the more I do it. A big part of this business is sales, right? A pitch is a very artificial thing. You walk into a room, make small talk, segue into the pitch. You do your pitch, and then maybe there will be a conversation about the pitch, and then you leave. It’s water, water, water, small talk, small talk, and then—charm them. It’s such a skill to be good at that, and you don’t want to deprive yourself of it. I always say you’ve got to be good enough to get into the room, you’ve got to be good in the room, and you’ve got to deliver when you leave the room. If you can do those three things right, you’ve got a career.

I remember we were in Chicago doing Fargo, season four. We had dinner: you, me, and [my wife], Kyle. You asked, “How do you do all the things you do?” And Kyle said, “He has no creative doubt.” I hadn’t thought about it that way, but it’s true. When I do something and I like it, I don’t have any doubt about it.

I will say what I’ve taken to doing when I go to these awards events: I have an agenda. I think, OK, here are the three people I want to talk to at this thing. Then, once I’ve talked to them, I can leave. So it’s not just some amorphous thing you’re going to. It’s like, I want to talk to this person, I want to talk to their boss and maybe schmooze with someone else, and then let’s just get out of there. Because a lot of those things, you’re like, I’m going, but what’s the point? Why am I doing it?

JS: When you’re talking about your agenda, are those people you want to talk to?

NH: Yes, those are people I want to talk to. It’s such a funny business. There are some parties that you go to just to be seen in the same room as certain people. So they go, Oh, right, you earned your way into this room. The goal is always, as an entrepreneur—which is what I am—to be able to do what I’m doing more: I want to make more TV, write another book. You’ve got to be a good businessperson. I’m not romantic about Hollywood; it’s all just people. I’ve never been invited to the White House, but I imagine that would be something I’d have a few nerves about.

II. THE LOGIC POLICE

JS: I will say, as someone who was in your hands [with Fargo], it’s so nice to have a director without creative doubts, because someone’s gotta be that way. You need someone that has a mission and has a way to do it. That was the greatest thing for me about that whole experience—the inspiration I took from you. How do you have such clarity about this? It’s beautiful. It’s so clean.

NH: Yeah, and at the same time, because I’m very comfortable—I know what the story is and what the scene is—I’m open. We’re doing this together, and I want to know: What are your instincts? What do you think you should be in this room? Because being open to the process is important, not feeling threatened by other people’s ideas.

At the same time, I said to FX in the first year of Fargo, “You can’t make a Coen brothers movie by committee.” Ultimately, someone’s gotta be the Coen brothers, and in that case, it was me—especially if you’re trying to do something a little weird or specific.

JS: And that has not been done before.

NH: Yeah. There’s really only one note you ever get [from the network], and that’s clarity. They’ll sacrifice everything for it—the joke, the emotion, the moment. You have to fight that clarity note.

JS: Because you feel like sometimes you’re losing too much.

NH: It’s so reductive. And it’s not how people watch things. You get this logic-police thing: What’s the backstory? Where does he stand on whatever issue? But then it’s a terrible story. As long as people are not actively confused, if they feel like they’re in good hands, they’ll go, I don’t get it yet, but I’m sure I will when it’s time.

JS: That makes it fun, because it feels like you’re watching something grow as opposed to just being told something.

NH: My favorite moment in production is walking on set for the first time and thinking, This could go horribly. Because then you’re really risking something. It’s not just, Yeah, it’ll be mediocre. It’s like, No, this could be an epic fail.

JS: I love that thinking too. I feel like it makes you accountable, because we’re all necessary on that set. Everyone’s important and has a skill. It makes you afraid of wasting people’s time.

NH: You know the first time you’re directing and you’re standing on a set and two hundred people are staring at you like, What’s next, boss? Where’s the camera going? What are we doing? Your mind goes blank in that moment. Over time, you learn to be OK with that moment, and go, “Well, what should we do next?” Then if it’s silent long enough, people start offering you stuff, and you’re like, “No, no, no.”

You remember Mitch [Dubin], the camera operator? He’s shot every Spielberg movie since The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and that’s how Spielberg works. He needs the fear. He needs to show up going, I don’t know how I’m gonna shoot the scene, and then walk the set, and then be inspired. That’s the line I try to walk: between having a plan and being inspired.

JS: When you were talking about not having any creative doubt, I was wondering about your books. How long does it take for you to know whether or not a book is something at all? How long do you work on it before you go, Maybe this isn’t where I want to go?

NH: All creativity is an act of play. So my approach to writing is “Yes, and.” It’s like improv. When an idea hits me, I’m like, Oh, I like that, and then what? There are a lot of people who go, Well, that’s good, but could I do better? I figure if the idea could be better, then along the way I’ll go, Oh, you know what would be better… I don’t linger. I just go.

It’s the same thing on set: Here we are and we’ve got the script and the actors and the lights and the cameras, but I need to be open to what is in this moment so I can play with the material. That doesn’t mean the material itself is playful or comedic or whatever. Sometimes it’s a super dramatic scene. Writing screenplays, you’re telling the story with the camera, and what the camera is doing needs to be in the script. If it’s like, You walk into the room. There’s a gun on the table, I know that, editorially, I’ve got to see the gun. I’ve got to see you seeing the gun. So why not write it in? “Coming into the room, lost in thought; angle on the table; there’s a gun; close-up on Jason; he sees the gun; these are the thoughts that go through his head.” Sometimes it gets really specific. But that way, when people read the script, they see the movie.

JS: I remember that, as I read your scripts, it was like watching a show, but on paper. It was so evocative.

NH: Whenever you’re asking someone to interact with your story, it should feel like your story. It’s why I do the hair-and-makeup tests I do. I don’t know how anybody else does things, but at a certain point early on, I thought, We have to show the studio or the network what these people look like in clothes and makeup. But instead of just having them turn to the right and move on, I was like, Well, we’ve got sets we’ve built, we have all the actors, here’s an opportunity to put them in spaces together. To go, This is a protagonist and an antagonist: What’s that vibe?

JS: It’s so rare to have that, by the way. It’s the coolest thing in the world.

NH: And then the actors get an opportunity to wear the skin of the characters without any pressure; there’s no lines. I just come up with these little vignettes. Now it’s kind of a joke because I’ll bring in a techno dolly and cranes to my hair-and-makeup test. But then I cut this thing together to music, and I show it to the corporation, and they go, I see what this is gonna be. I see what the tone of voice is. You could watch the hair-and-makeup test of season two of Fargo, or season one of Legion. These things are all out there. We did this one for Alien: Earth and it was super cool to feel like in two days you’d made a mini movie.

JS: For Alien: Earth, were there any pretests that you shot before that? Or is that also the first time you’re doing it?

NH: It’s the first thing. It wakes the crew up. It gets them behind the wheel of the car they have to drive. Because a lot of times you’re like, This operator’s never worked with this focus puller. You get that opportunity to start to share a common language.

I did this pitch once: I drove over, we had the small talk, and then it was time. And I said, “I was thinking on the way over here about what the segue should be from small talk to the pitch. And I was thinking that maybe I should talk about how my house was broken into recently and they stole my guitars. And then I thought, No, no, no, maybe I should talk about how I was watching TV the other night, and Stripes came on. I thought, Oh, we need that. We don’t have that Bill Murray antihero anymore.” And I went through a couple of things of, like, what the segue should be. And then at a certain point, it became clear that this was the pitch. It was a crime story about a Bill Murray antihero. You know what I mean? But everyone in the room was like, What’s happening right now? We’re not used to this meta thing. So the tone of that was also the tone of the show. It’s a playful and inventive show.

JS: So smart.

NH: I just get excited about all the creative problem-solving. I have to imagine that Wes [Anderson] is similar. I know he’s got things sort of planned out, but it’s all playful.

III. SECRET WEAPON

JS: One thing I really love about you is—this will sound so cheesy, but I could ask you, Can you describe hot water to me? And someone could explain it, but I feel like you would say, Give me your hand. And you’d just put it under hot water and say, That’s hot water.

NH: Thank you.

JS: It’s so precise. As we said earlier: long question, short answer; it’s like that. It’s nice for actors who sometimes don’t know what they’re talking about. You have this ability to speak their language. It’s a weird language, and you do it very well.

NH: The script is the best worst blueprint. No matter how good the experience of reading the script is, it’s not the experience of watching. It’s like the script for The Shining. Quality script. Watching The Shining: nothing like reading the script. The music, you know, the omniscient camerawork… My secret weapon is that I know what it’s going to sound like.

JS: I want to talk about that.

NH: I have a score for a show recorded before we film. I talked with [composer] Jeff Russo in advance, and when I was location-scouting for season one of Fargo, I had, like, ten pieces of music, including the main theme that he had written. So I was able to sit on that bus going through that landscape listening to that piece of music and going, I know what the show is.

JS: How do you even explain to him what you’re trying to make, based on the script?

NH: We talked about it at the outline stage, very early. I said that the score for Legion should sound like [The] Dark Side of the Moon, which is about as close to the experience of mental illness, sonically, as you can get.

JS: You’re so detailed. Do you get hung up on things? I would be like, OK, electronic music. And then I would need three weeks to research, and I wouldn’t end up doing it, because I would be researching.

NH: To bring up The Shining again, on season five of Fargo, I just wanted that Moog sound, the mood of it. You can only play one note at a time. That’s how that old synth works. There was something about that. And that’s the opening music.

JS: Did you use a real old Moog?

NH: Oh yeah, Jeff always has instruments made. He has this crazy thing for Alien: Earth, this giant steel triangle with strings on it and you can bow it and hit it with a mallet. He found a guy in Germany to make it. When I said [The] Dark Side of the Moon to him, he went out and he found the actual patch cord synth, the same model they used on the album.

JS: The Synthi. That’s so cool. I see him because our kids go to the same school. It’s fun to be able to know that someone is a musician from a distance, because I’m just thinking, He’s dropping his kids off, but he’s listening to something right now in his head. He’s working on something.

I loved, by the way, that score. It was so beautiful. Because also it was really jarring. There were frequencies and tones that you really can get only with those instruments, that you can feel on a fucked-up, deep level, that are unsettling. Truly low.

NH: It gets in your bones. I had it in my head early on that for season five of Fargo I wanted a version of “Toxic,” the Britney song. I had this Irish singer Lisa Hannigan do this version of it. I didn’t know where I wanted to use it, but when I got to the moment of Jon Hamm walking, this long walk—that was in the script when I wrote it. I wanted the camera to be on him from the moment he leaves the car all the way till he reaches that building. The network kept saying, “It’s really long,” and I was like, “I know, but look what’s happening on his face: the transformation, this humiliation, becoming the man who’s gonna be violent and vengeful in that moment.”

I worked on the music with Jeff and I would go, “It drops into a rhythm here: I don’t want that. I want it to be more bare, more haunting and atmospheric.”

JS: You’re musicians.

NH: Jeff and I can have very specific conversations. It’s helpful. And we also talk about where not to use music, which is often the most important thing.

IV. EMPHASIZING THE RIGHT SYLLABLE

JS: If all directors could talk about music like this, it’d be great.

NH: One of my biggest regrets is—this will kill you the way it killed me—we recorded the score for Alien: Earth at Abbey Road Studios in Studio One, and I was gonna go, and then I couldn’t get away. It was the last three days before they did a remodel, so it was probably the last time that room was gonna sound exactly like it did when the Beatles recorded in there. So I got the chance to sing at Abbey Road, but I just wasn’t there to do it.

JS: It would kill me. But I would accept it. You can’t do anything about that.

NH: I have a lot of conversations with Kyle where she says, “Should I have done this?” And I just don’t do that. What’s the point? We did it that way, I’m happy with my life. There’s rarely a thing where I go, Oh, I should have made a different choice. I have a pretty low resting heart rate.

JS: You do, I know.

NH: I have this line that I use when I’m hiring people: never hire anyone who climbs four flights of stairs to get to the second floor. Some people just work too hard. You’re putting the emph-a-sis on the wrong syl-la-ble. The day is long, there’s a lot to do. We know it’s impossible, what we have to do every day, and somehow we manage to get it done most of the time.

We had this conversation. I don’t know if you remember, because you were really nervous about a big scene. I said, “Well, picture your favorite scene in your favorite movie.” You said the “I could have been a contender” scene. And I was like, “They filmed that on a Tuesday between four and eight o’clock, and I guarantee you, if they didn’t get it right, they came back the next day.” You’ve just got to show up and be in the moment. That’s the job. What’s crazy is there’s so much money at stake. And the time constraints are ridiculous. But my job is to make it so that you have no idea. If we need to take more time, we’ll take more time. But I’m also able to make choices on the go and economize. I’m a pragmatist on some level.

JS: How hard is it for you to do a show where you can’t direct every episode? When you’re getting footage back and you’re watching it, is that a weird feeling?

NH: It’s tough. I don’t like watching other people’s dailies, because when I see the director’s cut, I don’t want to know what they shot. I want to experience it in the story. I want to watch it like a viewer. Sometimes someone will call me and say, “I think you should see what they did yesterday,” and I will take a look. But my career is full of moments of me in the editing room going, “Why did you do it like that?”

JS: But you figure it out.

NH: I called you in season five, and I was like, “I’m gonna send you some lines and I need you to record them into your phone.” And you must have been like, What is this? It was a tiger documentary.

JS: I loved it, though.

NH: That was because the scene didn’t have that Coen brothers tone. Some of it was definitely my fault. The mother-in-law of Juno Temple’s character has her committed to a mental hospital, and the guys show up to take her, and Juno was playing it real: anguished, desperate, trying to escape. And I was like, Oh no. If we do the real tone in this moment, we cannot be funny again in the whole episode. But budget-wise we were up against it. I couldn’t afford to reshoot. They had shot this whole thing, and she’s in the mental hospital and she’s tied up. So I was sitting there and I just thought, We’ve referred to her as a “tiger” several times. What if we call the episode “The Tiger” and do this David Attenborough voice-over about the tiger? You know, It may look like the tiger is giving up, but look closely. Even now, she plans her escape. In that way, we salvaged the tone. But that wasn’t in the script; that was me in the editing room going, Oh no, what am I gonna do?

V. “I DON’T LIKE AUDITIONING ACTORS. I WOULD RATHER GO, LET’S CALL JASON”

JS: Tell me about the new Alien. How do you even begin to switch into that kind of thing? I don’t know anything about it, but the idea of you and that together is what’s so exciting to me, your visual language and your language-language combined with this other kind of terror and presence.

NH: It’s not a career I ever thought I would have, reinventing classic movies—but if I have a secret to it, it’s that I really just try to figure out what the original made me feel and why, and then re-create those feelings by telling a different story. It started with Fargo. What’s interesting is that in the first season of Fargo, my sole focus was on making a Coen brothers thing. With Alien: Earth, my sole focus is not on making something that feels like a Ridley Scott or a James Cameron movie. The original Alien is a class story on some level. It’s blue-collar. It’s almost like Waiting for Godot in space. It’s all about not getting paid.

The thing that makes it interesting to me is the reveal that Ian Holm is a synthetic being. You thought this was a monster movie; now it’s a whole other thing. You have the parasitic monsters of our animal past, and then this AI future, and they’re both trying to kill humanity. I was like, Well, that’s an interesting space to tell a story. That certainly feels relevant to our moment, sandwiched between bird flu and OpenAI.

JS: Is it hard to explain a vision to actors? One of your greatest skills as a leader is getting everyone to believe in the same thing, which is basically impossible to do. You’re so good at it. You have everybody fighting for the same thing. How do you get people to fight for something they haven’t even seen yet?

NH: I always love the moment, especially in Fargo, of showing the first hour to the actors for the first time. That show is a lot of moving pieces on a collision course, and it often starts off feeling like five different movies, and then by the middle they’re all converging into one.

I rewatched the first couple of hours of our season recently. That whole opening twenty minutes, which is the history of true crime in Kansas City, with the different film stocks and the mug shots that we did, and those Blue Note album cover transitions. I went in with a lot of stylistic ideas that I think came together in a really interesting way. But how can you know until you see it? You’re like, Oh, that’s what we’re making.

JS: I don’t really take pleasure in watching anything I’ve done, but that was the most fun. To work with someone you like is sort of the equivalent of a band you like asking you to go on tour with them. You don’t usually get to join the band. Unless you’re like Johnny Marr, who joined every band, in a great way. But it’s such a joy to love something and then to be part of it.

NH: I remember when we met, we had that lunch off the Paramount lot, and I was pitching you this season, and then halfway through the meal I realized you were pitching why you should be in it. I was like, I’m trying to get him to do it; he’s trying to get me to hire him. So clearly we both want to do it.

JS: Oh my god. For me, that was the only time in my life when a dream really did come true. If you could have asked me, What was one thing you would want…

NH: Hearing that is meaningful too. Jennifer Jason Leigh wrote me a letter about Fargo.

JS: She’s so incredible in that.

NH: That role calls for a certain withering disdain. I had been thinking a lot about the Brits, because those Maggie Smith types, they can do withering disdain like nobody’s business. But I got that letter from Jennifer and I was like, Well, of course, Jennifer. There’s something about the Americanness of it, too, that is a very different brand of disappointed mother.

Sydney Chandler, who is the lead in Alien: Earth—she flew up to Calgary while I was shooting season five, because she wanted the job. There were other actors who I Zoomed with and she was like, No, I’m getting on a plane. I’m coming up there to get the job, to have dinner and talk. That’s meaningful to me. I try to tell my kids, “Make the effort, you know, show them that you want it.” You’ve got to chase the thing you love. Because everyone’s coming at you when you’re casting things, and everyone’s got ideas. I have my own ideas. I think, What about Andrew Bird as an undertaker? The network’s like, “Well, is he gonna audition?” I’m like, “Oh god no, he would be terrible, that would be the worst audition you ever saw. But I think I can get the performance out of him.” I don’t like auditioning actors. I would rather go, Let’s call Jason.

JS: You’ve probably been asked this a million times, but I don’t know the answer. When is something for a book, and when is something for a movie, or are you only doing one? Is it very clear to you what something is?

NH: There’s one idea I have that keeps shifting between mediums. But usually there’s a couple of rules, if you think about how media exists in time. In television, we’re basically interacting with the culture in real time. You’re like ten to twelve months off. A film takes five to seven years to get into production. A book can take three to seven years to get into the world. So on some level, if you want to deal with a cultural moment that’s of this moment, you want to do it in television. With a film, you don’t know in five years what we’re all going to be doing. Hopefully this film is gonna hit, and things do, but you had no idea when you started the process that it was gonna be a movie of the moment. A book is a similar thing.

JS: My last question is: If you write a book, obviously you’re picturing something. If you’re writing a script, you’re picturing something.

NH: Yeah.

JS: But is it the same kind of picturing?

NH: No, it’s different. It’s still visual, but it’s different. The amazing thing about fiction is that you can jump a hundred years in a sentence, and the audience, the readers, will stay with you. A book is so much more expansive than a script. A script is this finite, specific thing, because if I don’t make it specific enough, you don’t get it. I started as a fiction writer, but I think I’m a very visual fiction writer. I didn’t read a lot of scripts before I started writing them. Nobody ever taught me how to do any of this. I was just like, Well, this seems like how you would do it. You would say what they see and then have the seeing be filmmaking. Otherwise, it feels esoteric.

JS: A director once told me that being a director is kind of like having sex. You don’t know exactly how other people do it. You have your way of doing it, you think it’s pretty good, but you’re maybe kind of jealous. You don’t really want to go visit someone else’s set, unless you’re into that.

NH: I rarely go to other people’s sets, but I did go, when I was in New York, to [Jason] Bateman’s set for his new show. I think Laura Linney was directing. I was there for an hour or so, and I was like, Yeah, this is obviously the filmmaking process. I see it. But it’s not my film. But I think that’s interesting.

JS: I think so too.