I think people used to read 'War and Peace,' and now they don't; now they sit around with their tablets and watch 'Downton Abbey' and 'Breaking Bad' or whatever, and they want the things that they watch to be better so that they can feel better about themselves for watching it.
I don't write these stories for the rewards that come back to me. I write them because I have to write them. It's a sickness on some level. It's a compulsion.
I think this idea of fighting the enemy within is sort of more interesting than fighting an external enemy.
When you're a writer on a show, your job is to write in the show runner's voice, really.
My feeling is there's a lot of straight drama on television. My goal in life is to try to create something unexpected, and genre is the tool in doing that.
Making a new season for 'Legion' is not something you just switch into. It's not something you do between dropping the kids off in the morning and having dinner at night. That's a retreat into the woods for six weeks with some mushrooms, and trying to come back with the answers.
I come from a family of writers. My mom had been a writer, nonfiction books, and her mother was a playwright in the 1930s and '40s. And my twin brother, Alexi, is a writer on 'The Following.'
I sat down to take a break from writing a book and wrote a spec feature that would end up being the movie 'Lies & Alibis' with Steve Coogan.
In a traditional TV show or movie, your hero is always where the action is. But in real life, at the end of the movie 'Fargo,' when Bill Macy is arrested, Marge is nowhere to be found because it's a different jurisdiction, and she wouldn't be there. I took that to heart.
I think for really good-hearted people, that idea of putting yourself in the shoes of a monster to figure out why they acted that way, that's a really frightening idea.
The first dumb idea was to do it at all - to take 'Fargo,' this beloved classic, and turn it into a television show. The second dumb idea, when you do it and it works, was to throw everything out and start again.
The great thing about making an ensemble show is it becomes modular. It might work on the page to cut from one scene to another, but on the screen, it's more powerful to take that second scene and move it first or move it later.
I'm not that guy who thinks I have all the answers. Writing is a means of communicating, and if enough people say, 'I don't get it,' it's worth looking at.
You need a good James Clavell novel, I think, to make a good miniseries.
I drove around New York when we did the upfronts and when we premiered 'Fargo,' and they crocheted a sweater for a double-decker bus and drove it around.
There is a difference between movie actors and TV acting, especially with movie stars, which is they know their face is 20 feet high on the screen. They know they don't have to do much.
Greatness and fiasco is the same. You're reaching for something just out of your grasp, and if you get it, it's great, and if you don't, it's a disaster.
There are things we can control and the things we can't control. I can't control how people react to the work I do.
Making 'Fargo' for FX has been the highlight of my career. A writer can search his or her whole career for a network partner who truly understands and encourages their vision. For me, the search is over.
There is the moral spectrum in 'Fargo,' and you see it in other Coen brothers movies, where you have a very good character on one end and a very bad character on the other.
