Space Cowboy

Growing up in New York City, writer-director Noah Hawley says there were signs he would end up in Texas one day. His family lived in the West Village near the Hudson River and the Old Homestead Steakhouse, famous for its big plaster cow mascot. “My wife used to joke, ‘So you lived in a village near a river and a cow. It’s not much different from Texas,’” he says. “In many ways, I was preparing myself.”

Best known for adapting the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo into an award-winning television miniseries, Hawley once considered pursuing music. He played in a band called Bass Nation (like the musical instrument, not the fish, he clarifies) before attending Sarah Lawrence College. But writing was in his genes—his mother was feminist author and activist Louise Armstrong, and his maternal grandmother was a playwright—so after moving to San Francisco, he turned to literature and published his first novel at age 27.  

When his next novel didn’t pan out, he switched his focus to screenwriting—and Hollywood came knocking. His work on the first three seasons of Bones led to his own series, The Unusuals, which ran for one season on ABC. After garnering acclaim as the creator and showrunner of FX’s series Legion, the network selected him to adapt Fargo. That faith in Hawley paid off: The show won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries in 2014.

Today, Hawley has written six novels and directed the 2019 film Lucy in the Sky. His latest project, the FX series Alien: Earth, a prequel to the hit film franchise, premiered in August. Earlier this year, he was inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame in Austin, where he and his wife, Kyle, a seventh-generation Texan on both sides, have lived since 2009. 

Texas Highways: Did you want to be a writer growing up? 

Noah Hawley: I was always writing. In my teen years, I was a songwriter primarily, and a singer and a guitar player in a band. I thought that would be my life: writing songs and traveling the world. Then I went to college and graduated. I guess a nice way of saying it is that I realized I wanted to tell stories to an older audience, stories with more complexity than a song was affording me. And some of it was I got tired of living in a van with three other guys.

TH: Writing success came fairly quickly for you. But it sounds like you paid some dues being in a band.

NH: I think your whole life is paying dues. Part of what it taught me is perseverance. You’re putting in the miles, you’re putting in the hours. To get to a point of success, you’re playing a lot of empty clubs. There’s something grueling about it in a way that separates the people who really want it from the people who are like, “Yeah, this isn’t fun anymore.” It all helps to test your mettle before you get into the Hollywood game. 

TH: What’s the secret to writing for TV? 

NH: Some shows have a very distinct voice. Aaron Sorkin is a very distinct voice. Jesse Armstrong, who does Succession, is a very distinct voice. The job is to write in the voice of the show, which is usually the showrunner’s voice. I was good at being the third Coen brother because I understood how to write in that voice.  

TH: What’s the trick to adapting popular movies into TV shows?  

NH: The key is understanding that they’re different. One is long form, and one is short form. Alien is a perfect example. It’s a two-hour survival story, but for a television show, if it’s going to run for 20 or 40 or 50 hours, it can’t be a survival story. It has to be something else; it has to be character-driven, dynamic relationship-driven, plot-driven. It has to sustain itself over multiple hours, and within that, there’s life or death and threats and monsters.

TH: But the themes are the same?

NH: Yes, you have to extrapolate outward. If I have a skill at this, it’s an understanding of what the original movie made me feel and why, and then making the audience feel the same feelings but by telling a totally different story. I’ll understand that there are certain elements that you have, a feeling of catharsis let’s say, that took you from sadness to elation. Then all I have to do is create that feeling in you. I don’t have to do it the way they did it. It’s the feeling that matters. That’s the skill, to be able to understand what the movie Fargo makes me feel or how Alien makes me feel.

TH: One of your early forays in TV was the short-lived My Generation, which was shot in Austin. What do you remember about the 2010 show? 

NH: How small the city felt at that moment. We filmed at locations like the creek down the street from me and the original Bouldin Creek Café location. It was much more DIY back then. We ran around the city with great freedom. 

TH: Was that a fun time to be filming here?

NH: There was a lot of energy in the city. I was, in some ways, more devastated when My Generation didn’t get picked up than when The Unusuals was canceled because I had moved to Texas and managed to write a show that would shoot in my new hometown. To pull that off, I felt like a genius. 

TH: Have you shot anything in Austin since then? 

NH: No. I’ve got a movie that I got the incentive for that I’m hoping to shoot in the fall or the winter. I have great plans to film in Texas as much as I can in the near future, now that we got the film incentive. 

TH: Why are the film incentives so important? 

NH: We have a 30-plus-year history of film in Austin and in Texas, and it’s just keeping up a tradition. I did what I could to help. Obviously, it helped that Taylor Sheridan has his juggernaut machine up in Fort Worth, just making show after show and proving to the Texas Legislature that there is real money and real jobs that can be brought in. But we have to make use of it, otherwise they’re going to think we don’t need it. 

TH: That’s the goal, right? Work where you live?

NH: Having just filmed Alien: Earth in Bangkok for a year, that’s not the way to make television. As much as I liked Bangkok, I don’t want to go halfway around the earth to go to work.

TH: You’ve made Austin your home. Why is having some distance from Hollywood important to you? 

NH: Professionally, I think that Los Angeles has a recycling mindset. It may sound funny coming from someone who is reinventing classic movies as television shows, but it’s a fear-based business in Hollywood, and that fear is contagious. People play it safe. And it’s very competitive. Personally, LA is not where I wanted to raise my kids. Again, competitive, status-driven in a way that’s not particularly healthy. 

TH: As a musician, did you immediately embrace Austin’s live music scene?  

NH: Of course. Having come from a New York/LA mindset, where you don’t leave the house with your guitar unless you feel like it’s going to get you something, I loved that in Austin you’re going to see Warren Hood at Jo’s. You’re going to see great music at Whole Foods. People want to play music. It’s much more of a lifestyle than a cutthroat, competitive, what’s-in-it-for-me mindset.

TH: What do you like about living here? 

NH: The thing about Texas, in my mind, is it’s the Lyle Lovetts and Robert Rauschenbergs. The state is so large and the influences that come in are so diverse that you end up with artists who are really original: original thinkers, original with their forms and mediums. That’s what’s exciting about being here. 

TH: You’ve also opened a production office here in Austin. Why? 

NH: We’re working very hard to be a real part of the Texas and Austin community. I work with the TV festival, the two film festivals, the Texas Tribune Festival, I know Mark Updegrove at the LBJ Foundation. I’m trying to be a bridge in many ways between New York literary, political, journalistic, culture; LA Hollywood culture; and Austin. If all those people are going to come to town for all the festivals, then let’s turn that into a real cultural sharing. 

TH: You were inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame this year. How does it feel to be a member with Carol Burnett, Larry Hagman, and Rip Torn? 

NH: It’s great, obviously. There are so many luminaries. Texas is a giant state, but it’s also a giant in the cultural imagination of America. All any of us ever want is to be respected in our community, so that’s the real honor of it. 

TH: Do you consider yourself a New Yorker or a Texan now? 

NH: I don’t know. My kids are Texan, my wife is Texan. I’m committed to where I live. It’s funny, I had never been west of Pennsylvania until I was 23 years old. And when I actually drove out west, it’s a different world. There’s something about that landscape, those vistas, the energy—there’s a reason people went west to reinvent themselves. I think Texas was settled by choice. People built a new identity for themselves, and that’s a great place to be.