Noah Hawley

Otherwise, I was going to...

fail on my face, you know?

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.

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 in...

you know, like Anton Sugar'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, right.

Yeah.

Well, one of the first things I did was I took like half the edits out of the episode, you know, because...

Nothing makes something feel like television more than... Cutting to dialogue.

You're cutting every time someone talks, right?

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.