- [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by: Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, bp America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's HealthCare, and by: And also by: A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

- In our mythology, in our narrative, is this idea that we're iconoclasts, we're rule-breakers we're individualists, right?

And if you have the rule of law versus the individual, right, we're gonna root for the individual almost instinctually.

And the danger of that, obviously, is that what you're really rooting for is the villain- - Right.

(laughing) - In a classic story, right?

(expansive classical music) (expansive classical music fades out) (mysterious music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

Since the Library was dedicated by our 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, over a half a century ago, it has hosted some of the biggest names and best minds of our day to discuss our nation's rich history and the issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

Noah Hawley is one of the country's premier filmmakers.

He's also one of our foremost thought leaders.

The showrunner for the highly popular series "Fargo" and "Alien: Earth," he's a contributing editor to The Atlantic, and a novelist.

I talked to him about his unusual career path, how American culture is reflected in his work, and why, even against our better judgment, we often root for the antihero.

Noah Hawley, welcome, and as we do this conversation, "Alien: Earth" is the number one show in the world.

So congratulations.

- Thank you.

Now you just have to say that in every language (Mark laughing) on Earth.

- It might take a while.

Well, let me start about how you got into this racket.

You did not start off as a filmmaker.

You started off as a paralegal.

You became a novelist, and eventually, you got into filmmaking.

How did that come about?

- Yeah, I came in through the side door really.

You know, there's an interesting sort of two-tier system in Hollywood, right?

There's an organic ladder that people climb, and then there's people who come in from the side.

I came in as a published novelist.

And the moment that you are creating original ideas, then Hollywood looks at you differently than people who are coming in, say, as a TV staff writer, et cetera.

And so, you know, I had written a book called "A Conspiracy of Tall Men."

It had been optioned by Paramount.

I wrote an original, what they call a spec screenplay, just an idea that I had.

Because I was represented at ICM, which is an agency, for my books, they also have a Hollywood agency, so I ended up with a film agent.

And then, within six months, I sold an original idea, I sold that spec script, and Paramount hired me to adapt my book.

So suddenly, I had this other career, much more lucrative than novelist.

And then, you know, then the question was: Well, what about television?

And so I just went out and started to take some meetings and here we are.

- You've established this neat trick in your career of taking iconic films and adapting them to the small screen, essentially maintaining the essence of that film, but making it distinctly your own.

How do you do that?

(Noah laughing) - You know, it's an interesting process, because it's nothing that I've been taught, right?

It's an instinct that I had in it.

And it starts counterintuitively with not rewatching the movie, right?

You don't go back and rewatch the movie, because then the exercise becomes literal, right?

How to translate the literal movie.

Instead, what I do is I think about the first time I saw "Fargo," what were the feelings that I had?

What does that movie, what lingers in my mind about that movie, right?

It's the, you know, there's certainly the black comedy of it, but there's also her inherent dignity and sorta decency versus evil and all those elements.

"Aliens," similarly, you know, what is it about that movie that really stays with me?

And then, you begin this kind of, not literal, but metaphorical translation of, you know, well, what is the monster and what does it represent?

And you know, if an "Alien" movie is a two-hour survival story, well, that's not television, right?

Television is 10 or 30 or 50 hours of following characters who don't die.

So if you can't kill everybody, what is it gonna be?

But it still has to be "Alien," if that makes sense.

So you know, it's a free association.

You have to be open to these ideas, and you know, it's a longer conversation, but the reality is, it's, you know, it's more about capturing a mood and a state of mind.

- So you're about to go into season six of "Fargo" and season two of "Alien: Earth."

- Yeah.

- Does the process become iterative?

Do you go back to the original or do you base the new season on the last season?

How's that work?

- Well, it's interesting, 'cause most of my career, I've done these standalone stories.

I mean, we've done five seasons of "Fargo."

Each has a beginning, middle, and end.

It exists as a finite story, right?

I've done a show called "Legion," which we did three seasons of.

And if you look at each season of that show, it's almost a completely different show each time around.

And some of that is because, you know, in order to tell a story, I have to know how it ends.

Because otherwise, I don't know what it means, right?

And so television is this interesting thing, because you, each series has a beginning, middle, and end.

Each season has a beginning, middle, and end.

And each episode has a beginning middle, and end, right?

There's a lotta beginnings and middles and endings.

And you know, it's interesting now in thinking about season two of "Alien" because, you know, for the first season, it was such a, you know, such a complete thought.

You know, how do you continue a story for what you hope is the middle, right?

This is not the end either, right?

And you know, it's an interesting dynamic, because what I find I do is, I figure out what story I wanna tell, I figure out the characters that I need to tell it, and then I tell that story.

Well, now in a season two, I have all these characters.

I need a new story.

All those characters might not fit exactly, right?

You have to figure out what that story is and then go, "Okay, well, here are the characters I have.

Who fits where?"

Television tends to be, you know, we have all these characters, now we need to make up stories for all of these characters.

And that's why sometimes, when you get deep into a series of television, you think, "Why is this story in here?

It's not that interesting.

It's not moving anything forward."

It's 'cause they're writing for the actors at that point.

- "Rolling Stone" wrote a profile on you titled "Inside the Mad Genius Mind of Noah Hawley."

And you said in that interview that your filmmaking is artisanal on some level.

How so?

- Well, it's, you know, I mean, "Alien" is the biggest show I've ever made by far, but I did it the same way I do everything else, which is by hand, you know, and with love and.

You know, there's something about the act of play, right?

Creativity is an act of play, and so at every stage of the process, you have to be playing with the material, right?

At the writing stage, it's imagination.

What could happen next, right?

And then you get the script, and then you have to prep the script, right?

What are the creative ways in which we could bring this to life?

And then even on the day when you're filming and you have the actors and you have the script, it still can't be now this box that you're in.

It still has to be, "All right, well, let's get it on its feet.

Let's see what it wants to be and then let's play with the material."

And that doesn't necessarily mean changing anything.

It just means you always have to be open and aware of possibility.

And so that makes the process really alive, you know, and fun, right?

You know, I'm a firm believer that if you get to do what you love for a living, you gotta love doing it, right?

Otherwise, you're just a jerk.

(Mark laughing) Right, like?

We all know those people who have it all and they still manage to be unhappy.

That's not my approach.

(Mark laughing) - That's not your bag.

You've called TV a more efficient way of making films.

How so?

- Well, there's a machine to it.

You have these seasons, and you need to be on the air within a certain amount of time.

Otherwise, you start to lose an audience.

The film business is a lot of, they don't have to make movies.

Do you know what I mean, like?

- Yeah.

- They go, "Well," there's a lot of dicking around.

There's a lot of, "I don't know.

The script is good.

Do we have the right actor?

Is it the right director?"

Years go by, right?

And what's nice about television is that you can interact with the culture mostly in real time, right?

From writing to air, for something that's not visual effects heavy, you know, you're talking about 18 months, right?

And that way, thematically, you can address, you know, season five of "Fargo," you know, Jon Hamm and the constitutional sheriff, and you know, addressing the sort of political climate of the world that we are living in today and it's still the world we're living in.

Versus a film where, you know, seven years ago, you had an idea and now you finally made it, and it doesn't feel relevant anymore.

- We used to talk about the big screen and the small screen at a time when we had big screens in theaters, as we still do.

But the screens that we looked at TV on were relatively small.

Now they're bigger.

- Yeah.

- So is there a difference in making movies for television versus the big screen in terms of how they're seen by your audience?

- There is, certainly, you know, but I look at it as the difference between telling the story with the camera and telling the story with words, right?

Television historically is a small number of characters wrestling with a problem mostly in close-up, right?

Television historically is 50% of the show is things happening and 50% is people talking about their feelings about what's about to happen, what just happened, et cetera.

Cinema is something different.

Cinema is suspense, right?

It's action, but it's allowing the audience to figure the story out, versus television historically, which is telling people what the story.

"Oh man, did you see what just happened?"

Explain, explain, explain, right?

So and I think it doesn't matter the size of the screen is what we've learned.

It's just the approach.

Are we telling a story with the camera or are we explaining it to people?

And there's two different approaches, right?

What I've heard from Netflix, for example, is that they've asked their writers to put more exposition into their shows because people are on their phones.

They're watching, but they're on their phones.

So they're not watching the camera tell the story.

But if you say it out loud, then they are following the story, right?

I'm not willing to sacrifice the eyeballs.

I think we can win that battle against the second device, right?

I think if you make something that's visually compelling, that's surprising, the audience is gonna put that second device down.

- Were you a film aficionado before you got into filmmaking, or is just filmmaking another way to tell a story?

- Yeah, it's another way to tell a story.

You know, each medium has its unique components, right?

I mean, in film, you have the ability really to deconstruct time, right?

You can slow, literally slow, create slow motion, right?

Or you can speed things up or editorially, you can either expand things or cut things down, right?

No matter how fast you're telling a story on the page, it takes the same amount of time to read it, right?

So there is something to that medium that is unique, and I find that interesting.

- I wanna quote you from an article you wrote in The Atlantic.

You write, "When I consider the author's role in our culture, I picture the following sequence: First comes news, then comes history, then comes fiction.

But over the past 10 years, I've noticed something at first puzzling, then alarming.

Fact and fiction are trading places in the sequence."

What do you mean by that?

- Well, I'll give you a couple of examples.

The first is, you know, one of my favorite novels of all-time is "Libra," which is Don DeLillo's novelization of the events leading up to the JFK assassination, right?

And this is a book that he wrote in the '80s, you know, 20 years after the assassination itself.

And it was as much about people's obsession with the conspiracy theories around JFK as it was about the events of that day.

So that's what I laid out.

That's fact and then history, news and then history and then fiction.

If you think about January 6th, right, we all were watching the events of January 6th on TV.

But depending on the network you were watching, you started to see in real time a second narrative emerging, right, which is, yes, it may look like these are a bunch of MAGA supporters who are storming the Capitol, but really, what if it's an FBI, you know, entrapment?

You know, what if these people are being lured into this?

And then, of course, it becomes, well, a day of love and they're just tourists and everything.

But unlike in the past, right, which and we can talk about the fiction of that news, right, but you know, unlike in the past where you watch it, everyone agrees on the fact of it because we're seeing it, and then later they start to spin it.

Now you start to see the fictionalization of reality happening in real time.

- So has that changed the way you tell stories as a filmmaker?

Have the changes you've seen in the last decade changed the way you approach storytelling?

- It has, I think.

I also think that there's a, you know, there's an exhaustion because of the volume, you know, from traditional media to social media to, you know, books and articles and everything that's coming out on these subjects.

We've become exhausted by the world (laughing) around us in a way that we didn't used to, right?

And so, you know, what I've found, interestingly, right, the first Trump administration was great for business, right?

So many books got sold.

How did this happen, right?

Who is the Trump voter, et cetera?

Magazines, New York Times, Washington Post, everyone had banner years, right?

Second Trump administration, no one wants to read about it.

Everyone's exhausted, right?

So it's a different approach.

What fiction allows you to do historically is to say, "Well, I gotta wait for 10 years to go by, for us to really sort of culturally take in what has occurred historically," right?

And only then, from that vantage point, can I interact with it.

Because only then will I really understand what it means, 'cause I'll have seen how it plays out over time.

- You've said in the past that America roots for the villain or the antihero.

Why is that?

- Yeah, I mean, this comes out of season four of "Fargo," where Jason Schwartzman's character says, "Do you know why Americans love a crime story?

Because America is a crime story."

(Mark laughing) - Right?

- Right.

- But who do we root for?

We don't root for the victims, right?

We root for the criminals.

And some of this is, you know, we're this can-do country, right?

We're this, literally we threw off the yoke of British rule-making to say, "We're gonna make our own rules," right?

So in our mythology, in our narrative, is this idea that we're iconoclasts, we're rule-breakers we're individualists, right?

And if you have the rule of law versus the individual, right, we're gonna root for the individual almost instinctually, and the danger of that, obviously, is that what you're really rooting for is the villain (laughing) in a classic story, right?

- (laughing) Right.

- In a classic story, it's like you're rooting for the cops.

But if you have this inherent thing, right, villains are, they're usually more fun, villains, in our stories.

And they make things happen, right, and they're not bound up in red tape and all of that.

And I do think that there's something that allows the audience to feel like, "Yeah, I wish I had less rules.

I wish that I could be that guy.

He doesn't seem to be bothered by," you know?

And so you end up with these, the Jack Bauers and the, you know, they work in the system, but they break the rules anyway.

- Right.

- You know?

- You also write in The Atlantic about the Old West and how that informs who we are.

And you wrote this after driving through the West with your wife and family.

What does the Old West say about who we are as a people?

- Well, the myth of America, right, the myth of what America is.

And we definitely went through a cultural upheaval in the last, you know, 20 years, where the country, you know, we're sitting in the LBJ Library right now.

LBJ is one of the great architects of equality in the history of America, right, passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and these things that made us a more equal country, right?

And then, you know, all the way to Obama as our president, you know, in a way that some people felt like, "We did it.

We achieved this post-racial equality."

Now equality is a bedrock, fundamental American identity.

And then, of course, you saw the backlash to that and you saw us get to this place in which, you know, everything, it's upside down day, right?

You're like, "The real civil rights violation is against the rights of white men," right?

"They are the ones who are being discriminated against," and you know, in an Orwellian kind of corruption of language, right?

The Soviets had this thing that they called free and fair elections, and they were: you show up, they hand you your ballot, it's already filled out, you put it in the box.

Right?

So what do you do then when you wanna create an actual free and fair election?

The language has been taken.

Right?

There's something to that, that as a storyteller and a fiction writer, you know?

So you look at these American myths, right?

You look at, you know, the "Yellowstones" and the, you know, the sort of Taylor Sheridan ethic of the working man, and you know, good stories, right, but they play very much into this idea that, you know, every man is a king and nobody's gonna tell me what's right and wrong, right?

Because I work for a living.

And I mean, it's a romanticized notion.

You know, it was very important to me in the Jon Hamm season of "Fargo" that the hero at the end of the day was the system of justice, right?

It was the state police working with the FBI, working with the local cop.

Because Jon Hamm was also a cop, right?

And he was a cop who was saying, "The law is too complicated.

I know what's right and wrong.

I get to decide," right?

And that's not how law works.

Law is executed in a pragmatic and long-term way in which, you know, agents and law enforcement puts in countless hours and DAs are there to prosecute.

And you know, it's a system of justice, and that's what makes it great, because it can't be corrupted by just one person.

- We're built on a system of laws and institutions.

- Yeah.

- Right?

Right.

- Yeah, and sometimes that slows us down, right?

That we've certainly found that, you know, the problem is that crime can move much faster than justice.

And so, you know, the criminals put the pedal to the metal.

Justice has a hard time catching up.

- Is the American dream still alive and well?

- I mean, the American dream is another myth, right?

You know, it's this idea that anyone can go from, you know, rags to riches and pull themselves up by their bootstrap.

And if you're an American and you make $1 million and then you lose it, you'll just make another $1 million.

And you know, that is true to some degree.

I do think that the deck is stacked a little more each day here by the volume of wealth, you know, that a few people have.

And you know, the technology that's coming up behind us that, you know, is gonna take a lotta that opportunity because those jobs, you know, are gonna be outsourced to machines at a certain point.

And but I still think, you know, it's interesting the election of Mamdani in New York, right, and you know, Trump himself in some way.

You know, we love a good story, right?

So, you know, my daughter's 18, and when she was applying to colleges, I said, "Look, I didn't go to an Ivy League school.

I didn't get a 1,600 on my SATs.

I was a straight B student.

But what I can do, I can tell you a story."

So if I'm going into a job interview, you know, if I have to sell myself or sell a product or sell an idea, I can do it.

That gives me an advantage.

That feels like a particularly American skill, right?

The perception of value, right?

I can create a perception of value for myself that creates opportunities for myself.

And I think, to some degree, that will always be true here.

It's just, how big is that available set of jobs that people can get?

- What's next for Noah Hawley?

- It feels like everything is next.

I've got, you know, a total of three shows to make in the next, you know, 18 months, something like that.

I've got a book deadline that I'm supposed to hit in the spring.

(laughing) It's a lot, you know, but I'm building something, I feel like, at this moment, you know?

I'm building out what I hope is a way of telling stories in the world, telling stories in my community here in Austin, you know, using those stories as a way to sort of take the values that are in those stories and apply them in a real-world setting, right?

To work with you here at the LBJ Foundation, to work with the Ransom Center at UT, Texas Book Festival, you know, the film festivals, all the stuff that we do here, and you know, really try to take the success that I've had and try to spread it if I can.

And I think, if we've learned anything from the sort of way that these devices make us feel both everywhere and nowhere at the same time, like it's really critical that we live in our communities and build up our communities.

- Noah, thank you for being with us.

- Thank you.

(expansive classical music) (expansive classical music continues) (expansive classical music fades out) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by: Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, bp America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's HealthCare, and by: And also by: A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(bright flute music) (upbeat music)