Noah Hawley on the Visual Language That Sets ‘Fargo’ Apart from Most TV

In an age when a great deal of television is shot the same way regardless of the genre, with the same straightforward coverage that’s been standard industry practice for decades, FX’s “ Fargo ” stands apart. It’s a show with a genuine visual philosophy that evolves from season to season, with camera movement, framing, and lens selection that’s creatively motivated and not simply dictated by the need for a crew to make its days. For series creator and showrunner Noah Hawley , the visual approach began with the filmmakers whose movie provided him with his source material.

'Slow Horses' Season 4 Trailer: Gary Oldman Leads His Gang of Misfit Spies Into Crossfire

“The Coen brothers are not just great screenwriters,” Hawley told IndieWire’s “Filmmaker Toolkit” podcast. “They’re the great directing team of our generation. They write or rewrite a lot of scripts [that they don’t direct], but those movies never turn out to be Coen brothers movies. So there’s got to be something in the translation from the page to the screen that makes it a Coen brothers movie, and my job wasn’t just to write like them, I had to figure out, what’s that sensibility?”

In the first season of “Fargo,” Hawley put what he learned about the Coen brothers’ cinematic language into practice. “They don’t like unmotivated camera movement. They want to work in a straight line: The camera moves in, it moves out, it moves up, it moves down, it moves left, it moves right. They like to shoot on wider lenses for the comedic aspect of it. There were a lot of technical rules in the first year that I tried to understand and engage in.”

As “Fargo” has progressed, its visual style has become increasingly varied and sophisticated, with Hawley bringing his own preferences into the show and integrating them with the Coens’ motifs. The camera moves have become more dramatic and tied to the internal tensions of the characters, with the result being that Season 5 is not only the most relatable — because the camera so effectively immerses us in multiple perspectives — but the funniest, scariest, most tragic, and ultimately most gently uplifting season to date. The Emmy-nominated season concluded in January 2024.

While Hawley hasn’t left behind any of his signature philosophical dialogue or memorable badinage, Season 5 is also the most reliant on the camera to make its points. “I like writing dialogue as much as anyway, but if I can go two or three pages where it’s behavior and action and the camera is doing the work of telling the story, then you start to justify this idea of cinema on TV,” Hawley said, adding that “nothing makes something feel like television more than too many cuts.”

To that end, Hawley does everything he can to tell the story in the fewest number of shots, and the clarity and concision this provides is one of the things that gives “Fargo” the breadth and density of a great epic novel. “The first thing I do when I get a director’s cut is often to strip out a lot of the coverage,” Hawley said. “And I’ll say to directors, ‘Look, if I don’t use an angle by halfway through the scene, I’m not going to add it.’ It’s always disconcerting to me to suddenly be on another side.”

The series’ visual economy is evident right from the first few minutes of the Season 5 premiere, which Hawley directed and which beautifully lays out the key ideas of the season, set in 2019 and exploring the divisions in America and what they say about where we’re going and where we’ve been. Hawley opens the season with a title card defining the term “Minnesota nice” before presenting a town meeting that turns into a violent brawl, immediately establishing the tension between a certain kind of Midwestern politeness and the seething rage bubbling underneath the surface.

Kathryn Hahn Thought of Herself as a 'Marvel Visitor' -- Until Kevin Feige Told Her Otherwise

“It’s all about elegant solutions and economy and, ‘How can I show you without having to tell you,’ right?” Hawley said. “This idea of ‘Minnesota nice,’ which as far as I know came from the movie ‘Fargo,’ is like ‘Smile, smile, smile, smile, gun .’ You know what I mean? People put on a good face, this Lutheran kind of niceness, even as underneath the rage builds.”

In the last several years Hawley saw a change that he wanted to explore in the series. “You have these city council meetings and school board meetings and no one’s being nice. No one’s pretending — all the rage is on the outside now.”

Hawley set the show in 2019 because it was as late as he could go without getting into the pandemic, which he felt was superfluous to the story he was telling. That story was designed to raise the question: What happens to ‘Minnesota nice’ in a world where passive-aggressiveness has all just become aggression?

“Being nice is an agreement that we all make to be in a society together,” Hawley said. “And I’m not going to say ‘me, me, me’ while you yell ‘me, me, me,’ right? We’re going to have to figure out a way.”

For Hawley, asking how to return to some kind of civilized society gave him the central idea that drove all of the complicated ideas weaving in and out of Season 5. “We have to agree on some shared values, and we’re going to have to figure out a way to live together, and I see that happening less and less,” he said. “The whole season was about addressing that for Dot and her family, who still wanna live in a world where the social contract matters. You know, how do we get that back?”