"Noah Hawley"

26:48It kind of depends on what phase I'm in, right? Right now, I can look at having technology have scripts due in a few months and production coming up. And, you know, I'm sort of in a phase right now, which is every day I'm like, where does my brain want to go? You know? And so, and some days that that's like, you know, I want to watch movies or I, you know, I want to read this book. And other days it's like, oh, I guess I'm going to think about, you know, alien earth today, or I'm going to think about Fargo today. And, and, you know, in that way, you know, when an idea is new, you don't want to look at it directly.

27:29You want to side-eye it. You're like, it's fragile. You're like, I don't know what this is yet and I don't want to scare it. And I don't want to tell anybody about it. And then after a few days or a couple of weeks, you sort of go, okay, now I see a little more clearly. I think I can start to make some hard choices here. It starts chasing you. Yeah, I like that idea. I like to keep things out in a kind of a soft focus, I always say. Just keep it out there in a soft focus for now. Let it kind of let it sort of marinate and come into focus on its own a little bit. You know, Jason was saying you've got all these different things that you're working on, and when they're in production, I imagine they're in production in lots of different locations as well, which must also be a big issue.

28:13Yeah, you know, we love Canada. We film a lot in Canada. But no, I mean, I shot Alien Earth in Bangkok. We were in Thailand for what was probably a total of a year. You know, I wasn't there the whole time. I'm there for a couple of months here, a couple of months there. But, yeah, it's hard. It's hard. And if I can time it to a kid's summer vacation, it's easier. And if not, we try to have a two-week rule. But can't come back from Thailand for a weekend, you know what I mean? I was just going to ask to mimic your son and say, look, there's a part in Alien Earth for me. I always say you can't come back from a weekend in Thailand, you know what I mean?

28:52Well, it's metaphorical and literal, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, Jason, anything? No. It is a coincidence? No. But incredible that you have adapted, as you said earlier, two iconic films in a television series. Is that a coincidence? Well, let's start with Fargo. How did you have the moxie to say, I want to approach the Coen brothers and talk to them about turning their iconic film into a television series. And then how did you do that again with Ridley Scott? Yeah, I mean, luckily these were both sort of incoming calls. I had written a couple of pilots for FX. I knew them. I was in talking to them about something else.

29:42They had optioned Fargo as a TV show. Joel and Ethan had signed on, and they'd said, if we like the script, you can put our name on it, and if not, you know where to send the check. And, you know, so the first process was to sell FX and to go through, you know, that process and write a script. And then we sent that first script to Joel and Ethan. And that was when I met them. But when, sorry, when FX optioned it, was it always going to be an anthology or was the original conceit to take the original characters and keep moving them? Yeah, they wanted to make a TV show out of it. But they also said, do you think we could do it without Marge?

30:19because how could you ever top Francis McDormand, right? And I said, well, first of all, everyone else is dead or in jail. So, all right, well, that's interesting. If you're adapting the movie without actually any of the characters in the movie, then what are you doing? And I said, look, it's not a TV show because the movie says it's a true story. And at the end of it, she's seen the craziest Coen Brothers case and tomorrow's a normal day and she's got two months left to have the baby and he got the three-cent stamp. And you know what I mean? It's a closed-ended thing. If she woke up tomorrow and it was another crazy Coen Brothers case, you couldn't say it's a true story.

30:57No one would believe it, right? I said, but you could. You know, why is the movie called Fargo? It's set in Minnesota. Except that Fargo, the word is evocative of a place, right? What Joel and Ethan call Siberia with family restaurants. And, you know, but it's also after that movie, it's kind of a state of mind. It's a type of story. And so I said, you know, so you could tell this story about Fargo and this is a Fargo story. Or, you know, as proved out, it could also be a 1979 crime epic about the death of the family business and the rise of corporate America. Or it could be a 1950 story about, you know, the sort of alternate economy and immigration and et cetera.

31:41So every time I just try to push that envelope of what is a Fargo story. But it would all need to take place in Fargo, though. No, it all needs to take place. I mean, not even really. Fargo, North Dakota. Yes? Well, but it needs to have some connection, you know, whether there's a character. I mean, the fourth season took place in Kansas City, but Jesse Buckley's character was from North Dakota, you know. Gotcha. And, you know, this last season with Jon Hamm, you know, he was in North Dakota. Oh, yeah. This fucking guy. I don't know how he gets fired. Honestly. Noah. Noah. Every fucking month, it's a new goddamn ham vehicle.

32:18You just put it out, man. Ham's fucking face everywhere. We'll cut all of that. All of that needs to be trimmed out, but I just needed to. Yeah, no, I'm glad you got that off your chest. So, sorry. Okay, so we're back. Yes. So, the fourth season was with the great Jon Hamm, right? Fifth season. Fourth season. Fifth season? Yeah. Yep. That's your back end. Fifth season was Chris Rock. And anyway, so yeah, so they came to me. But then, of course, I realized, look, you know, it's great. I wrote a script that the Coen brothers, you know, when I spoke to them finally, and they said it's, you know, we hate imitation.

32:59But it was eerie reading this because it felt like you were channeling us, right? That's a great thing to hear. That makes my millennia, right? Yeah. But then you got to film it. And we know that the Coens, they write or rewrite a lot of movies that they don't direct. And those movies never feel like Coen Brothers movies. So there's something in the cinema, right, that turns those words into that thing. And I had to figure out what that was. Otherwise, I was going to fail on my face. Did you end up directing the first episode? I didn't because I wasn't really directing then. And so, you know, I had a director.

33:38Yeah, who was it? Did somebody come in and say, yeah, here's the visual component that is the Coen brothers? Yeah, Adam Bernstein came in and he had shot a bunch of Breaking Bad and we had a good collaboration. But, you know, he gave me his director's cut and, you know, I recut it, you know. I recut it to find the tone of voice that to me felt like a Coen brothers movie. It's not as comedic as you think, right? And a lot of the comedy is deployed like Anton Chigurh's haircut. It's deployed in a way where you're like, well, it's not funny. It's just really specific and kind of unsettling. Right, right.

34:18But it ends up being funny. Yeah. Well, one of the first things I did was I took like half the edits out of the episode because nothing makes something feel like television more than you're cutting every time someone talks. Right, right, right. There's a scene in the emergency room where Martin Freeman meets Billy Bob for the first time and I'm in this master shot sort of slowly pushing in and, you know, Billy Bob gets up and moves over next to him and that's the first cut, you know, but that's a long time, right? But that's what a movie feels like. You trust the audience, so. Wait, so who, like, because you're right.

35:00I love Martin Freeman. Sorry, I just had to say that. Have you seen his show, by the way? No, have you seen his show, The Responder, that he did? No, I haven't. In the UK? Yeah. Oh, my God. He plays a cop in Liverpool. It's unbelievable. He's so good in that show. Please, I... I'll watch it. Yeah, watch it. It's so, so, so good. So the comedy that comes, like you were talking about, from the Coen Brothers, who was that for you growing up? Who was the show, the movie, the people, the comedians that you're like, you know what? I really like that kind of style. Well, I grew up, because my father had studied acting in the UK, he came back with a lot of Goon Show records, which was Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers and Harry Seacombe, this radio, half-hour radio show.

35:46It was that, it was Monty Python, it was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There was a lot of that British humor that really was seminal for me. And then, you know, because people ask me, when was the first time you saw Alien? And I say, well, I'll tell you the first time I didn't see it was a nine-year-old's birthday party where my parents were like, yeah, you're not going to that. And so we went to see The In-Laws instead, right, with Alan Arkin and Peter Fox. And I was like, I think that explains everything about me, right? Yeah, yeah, right, right. You know, so, you know, that's the sort of thing is the absurdism, but also, you know, the cinematic nature of it.

36:29Right. Yeah. Go ahead, Jason. Well, the first television writing gig came on Bones, yes? Yeah. Yeah. So you're a writer-producer on that. And then you start to create your own shows. So the Unusuals and My Generation were those two of the first? Both for ABC, yeah. And was it a difficult process to get the networks interested in your ideas? I mean, were they receptive right away based on your time there on Bones? Or was that kind of a tough transition into being a showrunner? I mean, I come from being a novelist, you know, to writing an original spec feature film that I ended up selling. And my first novel had been optioned.

37:14And they said, all right, well, now you're a screenwriter, so give it a shot. So I did some feature writing and then, you know, the TV agents at the agency were like, would you ever think about doing TV? So I went out and I took some meetings. I ended up selling a couple of TV pilots that I wrote and I thought, well, if any of these ever get produced, I should know how to make a show. And so whatever it was, 2004, I was in San Francisco. I came down to L.A. and I staffed on Bones. And I did it because Hart Hansen, who ran the show, said, well, you're going to learn how to make a show. There were other shows where they're like, you're going to be in the room the whole time.

37:50And I was like, well, I know how to write, but I need to know how to produce a thing. But then while I was on staff, I was still, I published another book. I sold a movie script each season. I didn't write a pilot the first year, but the second year I went into ABC and developed a show with them that they really liked, but they didn't make, right? Because it didn't really have a genre, right? That was the broadcast days where they're like, lawyer, Dr. Cop, right? And so the next year I thought - Do you think that show would have been made today? Sorry to interrupt. I think so, yeah. It was a sort of white trash dynasty about a guy who had a used car empire and he had four families and everybody worked for him.

38:30And, you know, it was a really fun sort of - I want to watch that show. I see you as the lead on that, Willie. Yeah, for sure. And they really liked it and the character work. And so then strategically I thought, okay, well, I'm going to go back in the next year. What can I sell them that they would actually make. And I thought, well, let's sell them a cop show, not a procedural, but like a Hill Street or, or a Barney Miller or something like that. And so that's the show I pitched them. And, and then, you know, we, we got it through the process with Jeremy Renner and, and, you know, Goldberg and Harold Perrineau and, and, you know, we did the eight hours and then they said, thank you.

39:05And, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. And then the next day, Jeremy Renner was nominated for an Oscar for Hurt Locker. He's like, you guys are real geniuses. Talk to us about how the directing thing started to come about and where did your confidence start to, when did your confidence start to grow for that, like asking for the wheel? Yeah, I mean, you know, what you realize, especially when there's comedy in the work, right, is that, you know, where you see the joke is different than where somebody else sees the joke, right? With a beat. And even the Unusual's pilot, right, is like Stephen Hopkins had directed it and he cut a much broader comedy than I saw, right?

39:54And so I would go in and, you know, so you start in the editing room to be a filmmaker. Right. You know, and where, you know, I'm not a big fan of melodrama. I like to keep the emotion sort of low until it's really earned. And then My Generation, it was a fake documentary about the high school class of 2000 and where they were 10 years later. And so I had to approach it like I was making a documentary film. So when you watch a documentary, you're like, well, the cameras weren't there. They've got an audio recording or they've got still photographs or they've got, you know, or if the cameras were there and the couple had a fight and she ran off and he ran after her, Well, the camera's not there waiting.

40:39The camera's chasing, right? So there was a cinematic mindset of making that. And then, of course, as I said with the Coen Brothers film, I started doing a lot of the second unit directing on the first season of Fargo, and then I just started doing the episodic world creation in season two. Did you find it... I think most people can read something or watch something and from the comfort of their couch, the safety of their couch, they can say, oh, I would do this differently or I would do that differently. And those are nine times out of 10, like really good ideas. They're good catches. They're good fixes.

41:17But if you give them a blank page or you give them a screen with no image on it or more pointedly on a set, standing in front of a bunch of actors and some cameras and a cameraman, knowing how to create from the ground up, you know, to put this thing into three dimensions. Like, did you find that change in the process from just from recutting stuff that's in front of you to actually creating it from the ground up on set? Was that a comfortable thing for you or did that, would that have some growing pains? You know, I'm sure you had that moment the first time you're on a set and they go, what's next, boss?

41:58And you don't know, right? It's so scary. And 200 people are staring at you. You know, I've gotten comfortable with that feeling, which is like, I just need a minute. I'm going to figure it out. Because then, of course, people start to offer suggestions, which isn't helpful, right, and everything. No, it was just about finding the, again, as I said, the feeling. And I don't have any training on this. And, you know, so a lot of it for me, you know, there's a moment on Alien Earth. I did that fifth hour, which was the trapped in the spaceship hour where you see what happened before the ship crashed.

42:41And you had this moment where Richard Morjani was running away from the xenomorph and she was hiding and she was pressed against a wall and we could see down the hallway and the xenomorph came out. And I thought, well, I want to do a push in here, but let's do a zoom. and what if we zoom on her and then we do it as a lock-off and then I do a longer zoom on the xenomorph and then I marry those two things. It's kind of an impossible shot. I don't know if it's going to work or not work, but I know it'll give you a feeling, right? Which is like something feels wrong here, right? Which you don't know is a cinematic thing.

43:19You just feel that feeling and that's sort of how I approach it. Super cool. and we will be right back

43:30and now back to the show did you find did you find that once you got kind of like JB was saying you could create from the ground up in real time as a director on set did you find that it took a step out of the process for you because as a writer as a producer as the showrunner all these things you're watching cuts or you're watching them shoot stuff and you're like yeah and you're trying to convey what it is that you want. And at a certain point, just being able to cut the middleman out, as it were, was that satisfying? Well, look, my wife, Kyle, who I love dearly, she said, you know, at one point to me, do you have to direct two, right?

44:10You know, and I said, but here's the thing. As opposed to just one? No, do you have to direct at all? Oh, two double up. Like you're writing, you're show running, you also have to be a director. And I said, well, here's the thing, I'd have to be there anyway. Right. The first episode of a new season, a new series, whatever. I got to be there anyway. It's actually, you're going to see me quicker if I do it myself. Way more efficient. Yeah, way more efficient. Yeah. So that's that. And for me, look, it's all an act of play, right? There's a, you know, as a writer, I'm a sort of yes and improv guy, you know, in the room.

44:46I'm like, okay, I like that. We're doing that. Now what, right? I mean, I've heard these stories about Vince Gilligan where he's like, that's good. Let's spend two weeks seeing if we can top it. That would make me crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For Tracy, he created Breaking Bad, yeah. Yeah, and so you get on set and, you know, I have a script I think is great. And I get on the set with the actors and I'm not saying we're going to change the words, but like let's figure out what it would really be like and what it wants to be. And, you know, you've got to be open to play in that moment. Yeah. What about, so you wrote and directed a film as well, Lucy in the Sky with Natalie Portman.

45:26Was the film experience anything different than basically just a double length episode for you? And I guess the question behind the question is, is there a desire to do film or do you see it as just simply arbitrarily a different medium that is every bit consistent with what you're doing on television anyway? and one could argue much more sort of creative control on television. Yeah, I mean, it's its own unique medium, right? And I did like the experience of it. You know, I mean, one of the things that, you know, I'm such a use every part of the animal television filmmaker that, you know, sometimes a scene doesn't fit and you're like, I'll use it in episode four, you know, or I'll repurpose this and then, but with the movie, you're like, there is no episode four.

46:15Or it's either in this movie or it doesn't exist, right? And, you know, whenever I come into a project, my first question is always, what am I taking for granted, right? As a storyteller or a filmmaker, whatever. And with Lucy, I was like, all right, well, this is a movie that's going to be shown in theaters. Well, maybe I'm taking the movie theater itself for granted, the fact that you've got a giant rectangle at the front and all these speakers on the side, and you're taking for granted that you want to use the whole rectangle and all the speakers, But what if this woman goes to space and it's this huge, you know, spiritual experience and the screen is full and the sound is full and then she comes back down to earth.

46:55We see her in the pickup line, you know, to pick up her kid. And now the image is small and the sound is in the front. Right. But but then, you know, she meets your friend, Jon Hamm. And you guys want to grumble about Jon some more? I mean, he's all right. He's OK. But she meets John and they have an affair and so the feelings get big and the screen opens up. So I'm always looking for those sorts of things. I think that the structure of a story should reflect the content of a story. What was it about that story that you thought lent itself better to feature as opposed to long form in television?

47:38And how do you treat any idea that comes into your head, decide whether to write another book based on that idea or actually this is something that could go into as a limited series or an ongoing or a feature? Some of it is how long you want to live with it. And the other, you know, TV, we're interacting with the culture mostly in real time. You know, you might be 18 months, a year away, like from writing to production, airing, whatever. A book, you know, you might live with for five years. A film you might live with for seven years before it hits the screen. And so it's sort of like, is this interesting enough?

48:14Is this going to hold my attention enough? Is there enough there for me to live with for that length of time? And do I have enough to say? Were there any sort of creative babies that you had to let go? That ideas that you loved for a long time? Anyone that sticks out that you're like, I loved this so passionately for a year. And then you read someone else's doing something similar. A year and a day later, you're like, or you just go, it doesn't really get me anymore. Will, I feel like you're looking for some free ideas here. I'm just saying, if you could DM me. All I'm saying is... What would it be and can I produce it?

48:53Yeah, I mean, there's always stuff, but again, I'm not dead yet. You don't have to say specifically the actual idea. Yeah, I think there are things, and there's scripts that I wrote that I love, and I wrote this novel before the fall and Sony owned it and I adapted it. I think it's great, but it's expensive, right? It's like a$70 million drama thriller and they don't make those right now. So I could beat my head against a wall for five years trying to get it made or I could go, I'm going to bide my time. Or turn it into a limited series. Yeah, or turn it into a limited series, yeah. What about other people's ideas?

49:31Let me shoot you my number real quick. Okay, great. Thanks. You're such an auteur. Do you even spend any time considering other people's work and adapting that? Yeah, it's interesting. You know, Lucy in the Sky, I did not originate that project. Fox Searchlight brought that to me. It was a script that Reese Witherspoon was producing. The first draft, you know, it's sort of like a dramatization of this true, you know, this tabloid story about this astronaut who has an affair and, you know, drives across the country allegedly in a diaper, you know, to kidnap the, you know, it's a very tabloidy story.

50:11And the first script was kind of a diaper joke script and I passed on it. And then, you know, and then they came back to me with a script that began through magic realism to explore her psychological state of how she went from being that one person to being that other person. And I thought that was really interesting. And so I signed on and I developed it with John Henry Butterworth. And then, you know, but in the end, I feel like if I had had the idea and written it from scratch, it probably would have been a different movie. You know, when you get a script, you kind of can't see past what the script was.

50:48So I don't know. It was a$35 million magic realism astronaut movie. And it turns out people don't want to see those. I'm not sure what they want to see nowadays. It's such a crap shoot. It's really, really interesting. What about stuff for the stage or theater? Oh, here he comes. Did you ever forget a line on stage? Anybody ever have a heart attack? I think about it. Like I said, I'm a New York City kid. My dad had been an actor. I grew up going to all the shows. And it's a different medium. It's an animal I haven't tried yet. Yeah, it's a good way to test the waters for bigger things. And so let's go back to music a little bit.

51:36Sean, will you be surprised to hear that he's a singer as well and has sung on some of his shows? Yes? I didn't know that. You do a little bit of singing. I think that's a big surprise. We like to know what the audience would be surprised about. Yeah, can you give us a little something? A little something-something? Just like happy birthday, you know? It's Sean's birthday today. Happy birthday.

52:02That's something you still do, yeah? It is, yeah. And, you know, like I said, I wanted to be a musician. It wasn't really in the cards for me professionally, but I found a workaround, right? That's what I try to do is what's the system and can I game it? And, you know, it started on season two of Fargo where I decided I wanted songs in the show that were covers of songs from Coen Brothers movies. So Jeff Tweedy did a cover of the Jose Feliciano song from the movie Fargo. Oh, wow. There were a lot of covers. And then I thought, well, why don't I do one? And so Jeff Russo, the composer, and I recorded the Go to Sleep, You Little Baby from Oh Brother.

52:48And then when I made Legion, which was a very surreal Marvel-inspired show, I wanted the songs to sound like score. I wanted it to go from score into songs without feeling like there was any difference. So he and I just started recording. Again, it's like I hear it in my head. I could try to explain it to somebody else or we could just do it. And so that's what we ended up doing. And now we do this. That's cool. Tell the audience a bit the torture, the horror, or the pleasure, you tell me, of pitching. What a writer has to do to get the people who write the checks to write the check. You've got to basically tell them what's coming, right?

53:36And you've got to trick them sometimes. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating that this visual medium is still rooted in the oral storytelling tradition, right? Which is, I walk into a room, I tell you a story. Right. and if I'm charismatic and I've got good timing you're going to go, oh my god, that's amazing I want to see that I did one pitch where I went in and I started to talk about the segue the segue of course is the segue from small talk to the pitch and we did the small talk and I was thinking on the way over here about the segue of how I was going to get into the pitch and I was thinking about how How are you?

54:16Yeah, I was thinking about how recently my house got broken into and they stole some guitars. And then I was thinking, no, maybe I'll talk about how I was watching TV last night and Stripes was on. And I thought, we don't have that kind of Bill Murray antihero anymore. And I went through a couple of other things. And then at a certain point, they realized, oh, the segue is the pitch, right? Because it is an antihero story about a crime, you know. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. My feeling is always when you're asking someone to interact with the show in any way, whether it's an outline or a pitch, it's got to feel like the show.

54:49And so I do these hair and makeup tests when we get on set where it's, you know, it's grown to this thing where I'll have like a, you know, a crane on my hair and makeup, you know, because I'll get the characters in. I'm like, let's not waste an opportunity just by looking at people in clothes, right? We have an opportunity to like, you know, let's get David Thoulis and Michael Stuhlbarg and Ewan McGregor in a room and feel like what that dynamic is between them. And so I end up cutting these things together with music. And when I show it to them, this is what the show's going to feel like, right?

55:25I love that. Yeah, because it's not, I mean, we're kind of past the point of talking, just going in a room and pitching and telling a story. You need shiny objects. You need to excite them. And you need to like, you know, sizzle reels or whatever. But it's great for the actors because they get to put the skin on without any pressure, right? for a day or two and then wakes the crew up, right? They're like, oh, we're pushing a dolly in the hair and makeup test. Like, I'm laying track and we're doing this for real. Yeah. Yeah. You know. We did that actually on our film last year on this movie that I did and we did all this camera testing here in the city outside, just me and Bradley and Maddie Libatique and guys and we went out and shot for a couple days during the day, at night.

56:07We went and shot all this stuff and Bradley ended up cutting it together and putting together this reel that he was showing the studio and cut it with music and with stuff that happened. And it was so, A, it was great for them, but B, really for us, it really started to, it taught us the language of the film before we started. Yeah, you get to feel it. Yeah, and it was really, really helpful. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it is, it is. I find it, you know, and it becomes a sales document for them internally of like, look what this guy's making for us, you know. We're making Alien Earth and you feel like you're watching, you know, an alien movie for four minutes or whatever it is.

56:45Yeah, it's cool. We would be criminal if we let you go without giving you an opportunity to discuss with Sean what, to the extent you're comfortable, we can cut it if you're not, what happened with Star Trek and will your participation with Star Trek be coming at any point? Yeah, because you're supposed to write and direct it, right? I did. I signed on. And, you know, after Lucy in the Sky, I thought, oh, I like this movie thing. I'd like to do another one. But I think maybe I'd like to try something a little bigger. And, you know, it's all franchises. And I thought, yeah, but everything's war, right?

57:22Star Wars is war and Marvel is war. But Star Trek isn't war. Star Trek is exploration, right? It's people solving problems by being smarter than the other guy. Like, the best movie from, the best moment from Star Trek is in Wrath of Khan where Shatner puts on his reading glasses and, like, lowers the shields on the other. It costs, like, 45 cents, right? But it's like, you see, oh, he's smarter than Khan. He's, you know. And so I went in. I talked to Paramount. I sold them this original idea. It wasn't Chris Pine. It wasn't anything. I wrote it. They said, we love it. Let's prep it. We were, you know, we were, I was going to move to Australia.

58:03We were booking stages, whatever. And then, you know, as happens in Hollywood, Jim Giannopoulos, who was running the studio at the time, he's like, I'm going to bring in somebody else under me and they're going to take over the film studio. And the first thing they did was kill the original Star Trek movie because they said, well, how do we know people are going to like it? You know, shouldn't we do a transition movie from Chris Pine, play it safe, you know, whatever. And so it kind of went away. But, you know, I do. I mean, I talked to David Ellison recently and I was like, you still haven't made a Star Trek movie.

58:40I'm just saying it's in there. I love it. Yeah, it's sort of like with all this new ownership and administration over there, I guess it's you can just pick up the phone and say, hey, guys want to dust this off? Right, right. You just wait five minutes in Hollywood for everybody to get a new job and then go pitch the same stuff again. Sean, what are you saying? Nothing. I don't know if you guys feel the same way, but to some degree you really have to declare, this is my next thing, this is all I want to do, all I want to think about, and then you can move the mountain. For me, I've got more Alien Earth I could make, more Fargo.

59:16It's more like, well, what I learned from Ridley Scott, who I got to know some, he'll develop three movies at the same time and he'll say to Sony, I'm going to make the Fox movie unless you guys... You know what I mean? So you kind of have to try to get them to play your game as opposed to play their game. Create a little leverage there. Right, right. Uh-huh. Well, you've certainly done your part with that. Keep it coming, please, Noah. It's an incredible body of work already. And are you even 40 yet? I mean, you know. I am. I'm older than 40. Well, you've got so much. It's just impressive. It's so broad and it's so diverse and everything about it is just really something.

1:00:01And the degree of difficulty is high on this stuff. And the fact that you write novels. I know. All these novels that these guys will never read. Yes. I am going to buy some of your books. Well, I appreciate that. Even if they're just on your shelf, it's meaningful to him. No, no, no. He reads these things. It's a very surprising element of Will Arnett. This guy knocks down books like Reese Witherspoon. Yeah. So I'm going to check out. Nice. All right, pal. Well, thank you for doing this very much. I'm glad we got this done. I'm glad you had time to squeeze this in in your busy, busy schedule.

1:00:35Thanks, guys. I really appreciate it. So nice to meet you. Yeah, nice to meet you, Noah. Thanks, man. Thanks, Noah. You too, guys. Talk soon, man. There goes Noah Hawley. I mean, I wish I was... He's something else, man. What an impressive guy. I like to think I work hard, you know? but I don't. What are you talking about? You're tired at two. Yeah. But I worked so hard until two. Yeah. I mean, like, I can't. You like to think that you work hard. And can I just say, and I want you to be honest, as honest as you can be. Okay, I'm ready. How many golf games do you have scheduled this week, including yesterday?

1:01:09I will be playing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Okay. But I work during the round, as you know. I'm returning emails and texts all the way through it. And I'm usually knocking down one of these goddamn things before I get out there. And then I make more phone calls when I get home. Sorry we're getting in the way of your golf. This fucking podcast, man. It's no good for my golf game. By the way, Sean, you know what my favorite thing about JB is sometimes we're playing golf and he won't pull out his phone, but you'll see him, all of a sudden he'll just wander off talking into his Apple, into his watch.

1:01:44My wrist. And he's talking to his wrist and he's like, yeah, well get them to send it, Tell them we'll look at the thing tomorrow. Period. New paragraph. Why don't we try to do an episode of SmartList while you're playing golf? You know, because I don't play that much. I work a lot. No, but while you're on the course, just bring your phone. Why don't we go out to Hawaii and play a round of golf? We've been invited. I know. We're actually, to be honest, we're all a little bit too busy to do that. I know. We're all doing a bunch of shit. Should we? I think and I know again we should talk about this privately but we might as well do it here we've talked about it we should go back and do some shows some live shows yeah why not get back out on the road yeah don't you think why wouldn't we yeah at the very at a minimum we should go and be on stage somewhere and doing it in front of a live audience why don't we do it like at the end of next year okay we could could we do the spring or no is the spring off limits for us I'm gonna be in New York check my book can you guys hold on one second second yeah no shawnee when are you done the play i'm doing the play uh january this in real time i know do the play january to april like the january third basically february i say we do like pre-summer so it's nice out that's what i'm saying is that we can get out to some nice places so it's not so cold sort of like september we were gonna go we were gonna you know i might have a little bit of work uh as well well i know you're not planning on doing any work will are you done i am i might i might you're gonna pack it in now you know what we can we can we can talk We can talk about it.

1:03:16We can keep talking about it. We don't have to decide now. We can make a decision. Bye, the end of the year. I know. God. No, Sean, what was yours going to be? Mine was, we can just talk about it. We don't have to decide now. We can go day by day. Or, you know what? Better still, we just play it by ear. That one, three by by. Triple by. Pass. Smart. Nice.

1:03:48Smart Less is 100 % organic and artisanally handcrafted by Bennett Barbaco, Michael Grant Terry, and Rob Armjarf. Smart Less.