From showrunnerNoah Hawley, the third installment of the FX seriesFargois set in 2010 and follows the rivalry between Emmit Stussy (Ewan McGregor), a self-made real estate mogul, and his slightly younger brother Ray (also played by McGregor), a balding and overweight parole officer who blames his older brother for the hand that he’s been dealt. At the same time, V.M. Varga (David Thewlis) provides Emmit with an unwelcome business proposal that will upend the perfect life that he’s built. The third season also starsCarrie Coon,Mary Elizabeth Winstead,Michael Stuhlbarg,Shea WhinghamandOlivia Sandoval.
To promote the new season, Collider participated in two different conference calls with executive producer/writer/director Noah Hawley, and we’ve combined what he had to say to shed insight on where things are headed. During the interviews, he talked about the connections between the seasons, deciding to set this in 2010, the reason for the dual locations, wanting the same actor to play both Emmit and Ray, and the challenges that come with that, creating the looks for each brother, the importance of the show’s female identity, naming characters, the process for creating a visual style for each season, and putting together the music.
Question: The first season was connected to the movie, and the second season was connected to the first. What kinds of connection can we expect from Season 3, and how do you decide what connections you’ll use?
NOAH HAWLEY: I think the seasons always need to stand on their own two feet. The first season is a good example because the first three hours of the show were completely unconnected to the movie, and that allowed the audience to settle in and say, “Oh, okay, I thought there would be connections, but there aren’t, and that’s fine because this is working on its own.” And then, in that fourth hour, we found the money from the movie and, suddenly, we gave people what they wanted. They were happy to watch it without a connection, but they were thrilled to have a connection. Obviously, our second season was a literal prequel, so the connections were obvious. This season, I wanted it to stand more on its own two feet. If the first two seasons are two chapters of a story, on some level, then this is a new book. But that said, I think it is rewarding for people to find something along the way, either that other people don’t notice or that is obvious to everyone. And I don’t know that I want to tease it. I think there’s something rewarding about waiting for it and being happily surprised. It won’t be early, but it will come.
Why did you decide to set this in 2010?
HAWLEY: I thought after 1979, it was important to tell a story that felt more modern. Obviously, our first year was set in 2006, before the big global event of our time, which was the financial crash in 2008. And then, 2010 was the aftermath and the struggle of everyone to get back to prosperity. And I thought it would be interesting if one of our characters was a real estate magnate. What were those last two year like for him, and what did he have to do to survive this financial collapse? It also allowed me to play with other elements of the modern world that have occurred since 2006, like the rise of social media and what it does to a place where community is based so much in tangible human interactions, in a very wintery, isolated region. What does it do when, suddenly, you have access, all the time, to a virtual community? What does that do to your real-life relationships? I wanted to explore all those things, as a color of this crime story, but certainly not in any lecture-y way.
What was it about St. Cloud and Eden Valley that made you want to use that as the location?
HAWLEY: With Eden Valley, I had a very tangible need for a town that had a very similar name to another town because there’s a mix-up that occurs, and they needed to be close enough together that you could see driving to the wrong one by accident. If you just look at the map and see Eden Prairie and Eden Valley, with 30 or 40 minutes between them, you’re able to see how a guy that’s not in his right mind and who lost a piece of paper might drive to one and not the other. And then, with St. Cloud, I needed a city setting that was close enough in proximity that you could see Gloria driving up to check in, and it all feels local enough. This season, we are more stuck in a triangle of close proximity, and that intimacy is nice for the story.
Each season contains elements that are left of center and beyond the reality of our world. Should we expect anything like that, in this new season?
HAWLEY: One of the things I love about Joel and Ethan Coen’s movies is that there is this element of the ethereal and the mythic that they play with. They take a very grounded story and they add an element in that shows that these stories are being played out, both on a realistic, grounded level and also in a mythological way. So, I definitely feel like that’s part of the identity of the show. The question is not, can we top a UFO? The question is, what are the organic, ethereal elements that are at play here, and how do we write to those, instead of thinking about it in terms of scale?
Your work has such specificity to it. How has your process evolved, over the years? Do you feel any pressure to go bigger, with each season?
HAWLEY: I don’t think it’s bigger. The great thing about an anthology is that each year is its own 10-hour movie, and the only requirement is that it’s the best 10-hour movie that I can make out of the story. I don’t compare the years or stories, or anything like that. It’s more just that writing is writing, and filmmaking is three-dimensional writing. Specificity is the fun of it. It’s the play of the creative process. Just taking nothing for granted, and you’ll make something more interesting.
Did you know, from the start of working on this season and creating these characters, that you wanted the same actor to play Emmit and Ray? And because you have the same actor playing both of those characters, sometimes in the same day, what have been the biggest and most difficult production challenges?
HAWLEY: From the very beginning of the idea, there were two brothers and, when they were teenagers, their dad died, and he left one of them a stamp collection and the other one a Corvette. They traded, and the trading was somebody’s idea, and ever since, there’s been a grievance between them. From the very first moment, there were two brothers and they were played by the same actor. I couldn’t tell you why. That’s just what the idea was, so I didn’t question it. And when I told the network, I think they were very happy because obviously it becomes an attractive job for an actor to get to play two roles. When you’re trying to recruit actors of a certain caliber, you want to be able to offer them something they can’t get anywhere else. I think everyone was thrilled about that. And practically, it’s not that complicated, mostly because we’re not doing a lot of crazy stunts and things that would require a lot of time, in terms of the filmmaking. It takes about 90 minutes to change Ewan from one role to the other, and because we’re a lean cable show, we have to always figure out what we’re shooting during those 90 minutes. There’s usually a techno-crane shot that marries the two actors into one scene, but then it’s just coverage like any other scene. We don’t want to draw a lot of attention to it. We just want to shoot it like we would anything on this show. And they’re not in every scene together. There are some episodes where they’re not in a scene together, at all. It hasn’t really been that challenging. I think the challenge is more for Ewan, who will have to play one side of the scene in the morning, and then change over and play the other side of the scene. It becomes about really needing a double that he can actually act against. Part of the challenge is finding someone who looks enough like him that they can be a stand-in, but also can act.
Why was Ewan McGregor the right pick to play Emmit and Ray, and why was that the right focal point for this season?
HAWLEY: Knowing that one brother, Ray, is the underdog, and the other brother, Emmit, is the winner, the salesman and the rich guy, there’s the sense that you’re looking for empathy for both characters. If I’ve done my job right, then you really empathize with Ray because he’s the underdog, and we always root for the underdog. And then, we look at Emmit and we see his brother in him, and that helps us to empathize with Emmit, who’s not a villain. I’m not trying to say that one brother is good and the other brother is bad. I’m trying to say that it’s complicated and that there are grievances within families. No one is 100% right, and no one is 100% wrong. It helps, over time, to really humanize the successful brother. And Ewan is really the perfect guy for that because he has this inherent charm and a sparkle in his eye. He has a natural quality of someone who doesn’t give up, and that’s important, both to help you see how the winning brother became the winner, and also why you’re still rooting for the underdog brother. He’s going to get back on top. He hasn’t surrendered to the negativity. That was a real victory, in getting Ewan to do these roles.
How did you establish the separate looks for Emmit and Ray?
HAWLEY: Ray, the younger brother, was always scripted as being balding and heavy-set. That was going to be the biggest transformation for Ewan, who is a notorious athlete with a full head of hair. So, I had a dinner with him, maybe three months before production, and I told him to stop working out and start eating ice cream with every meal. He said he’d been waiting 20 years for a director to tell him that. He went to work beefing up, and in the meantime, we were designing the look for him with (make-up designer) Gail [Kennedy]. She did some mock-ups and we zeroed in on the look with ways to make his face look a little bit fatter and a little bit different from his older brother. And then, we decided that he should shave his head. It’s a much better way to look bald than to have a bald cap on over your hair. He was happy to do that, but at that point, it presented us with an opportunity because he would need to wear a wig to play Emmit. So, I thought that maybe neither of these brothers would look exactly like Ewan. There is something helpful, if you’re having one actor play two roles, that neither of them be his natural look, so we designed more of a curly-haired look for Emmit. Originally, Ewan was supposed to wear brown contact lenses to play Ray, but he tried them on for Emmit and we all really liked the fact that the look that was closest to his, his eyes were different, and the look that was furthest from his normal one, he had his own eyes. Ultimately, that really made all the difference.
What differences did you want to highlight in the brothers, beyond just their appearance?
HAWLEY: It’s interesting to look at the confidence levels that they have. Emmit, the older brother, has never lost at anything in life. He is a winner, and therefore, he approaches the world with the expectation that he’s going to win. Ray, on the other hand, is the younger, fatter on who lives in his brother’s shadow, and he was tricked, early on, to give up his birthright, which is the stamp collection, for a flashy car, and he realized, not too long afterward, that it was a bad trade. He never got the career he wanted. He settled in as a parole officer. He’s someone who has a lot of power over very powerless people, but isn’t very respected by the world. He’s nervous around his brother, and the power dynamic clearly favors Emmit, but he’s not a pushover when it comes to dealing with people of real authority.
Why did you decide to make competitive bridge a part of Ray and Nikki’s relationship?
HAWLEY: I really wanted them to have something positive and aspirational in front of them. Ray has a checkered past and he was in a dead-end job, and he met this woman who’s very pretty, but she also is the only person he’s ever met that thinks he’s better than his brother. It’s so clear that she loves him. What I liked about it is that bridge is not poker. It’s a retro game, much in the way that bowling is a very retro and dated game. The more I read about it and looked at it, the more I realized that it’s a really complex game that has a lot of great language around it. It felt like a fully realized subculture that I could put them in. The most important part was that I could show that Nikki was not only the brains of that operation, but also overall. We have this dynamic, with the two brothers, where if it were left up to them, they might work through this, but they each have a consigliere with them. Emmit, the older brother, has Sy, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, who’s always at his right shoulder, advising him and keeping him from burying the hatchet, on some level, and Ray has Nikki, who’s always standing up for him. So, those characters are on a collision course.
Ewan McGregor has said that he was channeling Donald Trump while he was playing Emmit, and that some of the themes about truth are resonating with the state of the country right now. What can you say about those themes?
HAWLEY: It was always my plan, this year, to deconstruct the sentence, “This is a true story,” which is the first thing you see in the movie and the first thing you see with every episode of the show. That’s a lie, of course, because it’s not a true story, and the movie wasn’t a true story. It’s all made up. And then, just that phrase “true story” is really interesting to me. Obviously, a story is a story, and the truth is the truth, or at least it used to be. So, I started writing to that end without really knowing that it was going to end up being such a zeitgeist topic. Once I realized that, there was nothing I could do but continue to explore it, both in the events that happen in the show and in the way that people talk about them. Obviously, it’s a timely conversation to have. My goal wasn’t to lecture or to voice a political opinion. It was simply to say, “Well, it’s really interesting, this idea that I’m making a true story that isn’t true. What makes a story feel true?” That’s a big part of my process, every year, in writing this. I go, “All right, we’re putting all of these characters on a collision course and we all really want the black hat vs. white hat showdown at the end of it, but that’s not how real life works, so we have to have something different. There’s a little more randomness or coincidence.” So, to make something feel more true, you end up making something that feels less like a movie and more like real life, even though it’s not real. It’s an interesting exercise in paradox, on some level. It just happens to be very topical.
Carrie Coon and Mary Elizabeth Winstead have both talked about the strengths of their characters. Why is it important to you to create such strong female characters on this show?
HAWLEY: Because of the film,Fargo, as it exists, has a very strong female identity. You can’t look at the movie without thinking about Marge and the fact that she was seven months pregnant, as a character in that story, and what being an expectant mother did to the danger level and to the way that she approached this case and these people. It was very different than how a man would have approached it. So, the female identity of the show was always important to me. In the first season, we had a one to one parallel with Alison Tolman’s character. But then, in our second season, we decided that our law enforcement officers weren’t going to be women, which really freed me up to say that the strong female identity was really important to the show, and we could expand that and look at Kirsten Dunst’s character, Jean Smart’s character and Rachel Keller’s character. And the time period really lent itself to the exploration of women’s roles in society in the ‘70s. I was really excited about that. And then, in this third season, the decision to go back to a very strong female lead, both in Gloria, as the more traditional Marge surrogate, and in Nikki, as the very unpredictable strategist. Nikki is a women who knows that her looks are definitely a tool in her arsenal, in terms of how to get what she wants from the world, but you’ll realize, by the end of the season, that it’s hardly her strongest tool.
How did you develop and design the trailer that V.M. Varga lives in?
HAWLEY: It’s a portable space. It’s a very spartan life that he lives. He’s obviously got quite a bit of money, but you’ll never see him in a hotel or a towncar. We’re mixing the fun of the criminal syndicate with more white collar crime. When it came time to say, they’re driving this big rig truck and it’s their headquarters, it’s very portable. There’s a bunk bed in there, some monitoring equipment and some interesting artwork. This is where they do their intelligence gathering, and it’s where the secrets are kept. You would never accuse these guys of flashing a lot of money around, so I didn’t want the inside of the truck to be luxurious. It’s bare bones. Very little thought has been given to the comfort of this space that they inhabit.
Since you have some pretty great ones, how do you come up with character names?
HAWLEY: There’s no alchemy to it. Sometimes the name comes quickly, sometimes it takes a little longer, and sometimes one of the other writers will come up with a name. Ultimately, I usually end up changing them, just because it doesn’t sound right to me, but there are plenty of names that they’ve come up with that I’ve kept. There’s a certain heightened quality, I would imagine. You don’t meet a lot of Gloria Burgles. There’s something dated sounding about the name. Gloria is not a name that’s much in vogue these days. Maybe I’ll bring it back. And Burgle has a slight law enforcement connotation, but is a verb that’s being used incorrectly. Nikki Swango feels very specific. My hope is that it’s not so heightened that these people aren’t real people. I’m always looking for something that feels of a different time and that’s maybe a little rural and distinctive.
While it feels like it’s of a piece with previous installments, this third season has its own distinct visual style and color palette. What is your process for creating a visual style for a story and the decision-making process for applying a distinct look to a season of television?
HAWLEY: It was a happy accident, on one level, the fact that we didn’t have much snow, in our second season. You would never confuse our first season and second season because they just look like different movies, and because Joel and Ethan never make the same movie twice, I was really excited by that idea, going into this third season. So, I started talking with the D.P., Dana Gonzales, about what that look might be, and we both looked atInside Llewyn Davis, which was a winter film. It had a very distinctive look. It wasn’t a Roger Deakins film. It was one of the rare ones that they did with another D.P. And we settled on this idea that we would pull the blues out of the image. If you take the blue channel on the digital images and just dial it out, what you end up with is a very distinctive look, in which colors like red, orange and yellow really pop in a different way. Usually, in cold weather films you add blue because blue denotes cold, so it was interesting to take the blue out and see what it did to the image. Once we did that, it became clear that it doesn’t look, at all, like any of the other seasons, which I really liked. And then, you start to design to that ‘cause you think, if those colors pop, then if you don’t have any of those colors, it begins to look monochromatic and you don’t want that because it’s not a black and white movie. So, you start to design every space to have some of those colors in it to create a real palette.
What was your guiding principle in putting together the music for this season?
HAWLEY: It’s always a little bit eclectic. Usually, I’m looking thematically, on some level. It’s always multiple time periods. Even though it’s 2010 in small-town Minnesota, it’s also still 1975 and it’s also still 1941. There is that sense of history, and that sense of progress in some places and real nostalgia in other places. I just start pulling material that feels right to me, mixing all genres. It’s never meant to be gimmicky. I’m just always looking for the natural sound of the feeling that I’m trying to convey.
