HOLLYWOOD – Noah Hawley is a talent. Whether you were wowed by any of the first three installments of FX’s “Fargo” or his often brilliant three season run of “Legion,” it’s easy to see how creative and daring a content creator he is. Hawley has now jumped to the big screen for his directorial feature debut, “Lucy in the Sky,” which was a late addition to the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival last month. It’s nowhere near as flawed as the initial reviews (TIFF giving it the Wednesday night death slot didn’t help), but you can tell Hawley might have pushed the medium a bit too much in context of the story he was trying to tell. And perhaps that was foremost on his mind when we sat down to chat last week before he headed into production on “Fargo” season four.
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For context, “Lucy” is very loosely inspired by the life events of Lisa Nowak, a NASA astronaut who had an extreme reaction to the love triangle she became a part of with two of her colleagues. The film, on the other hand, centers on Lucy (Natalie Portman), an astronaut who is desperate to return to space after having a life changing first mission on the International Space Station. She’s in a pressure cooker to be chosen for one of the upcoming mission teams and things only get more intense after she falls for its hunky mission commander, Mark (Jon Hamm). In an attempt to visually capture the walls of stress closing in on Lucy, Hawley changes the aspect ratio of the image at various moments in the film. It doesn’t always work, but it doesn’t hinder the fine performances from Portman, Hamm, “Atlanta’s” Zazie Beetz as a competiting astronaut and “Legion’s” Dan Stevens as Lucy’s too nice to believe husband.
To be frank, it’s rare for a filmmaker to be this candid about his work. In fact, Hawley seems to be a bit too hard on himself during the course of our long conversation. But as a Q&A it’s fascinating stuff.
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The Playlist: What made this story the subject you wanted to tackle in your first movie?
Noah Hawley: I mean there were a number of things, but I think one of the things primarily was that it was a very internal story that could be told in a very visual way. And one in which I could use the movie theater itself as a tool in creating the audience’s experience of what the film is. Because I knew that at least some people would watch it in a movie theater and the screen itself could be used to immerse you more in [Lucy’s] point of view. Because the more you’re seeing the story through her eyes, the less you can sit outside and judge her.
Was this something you’d been working on since you first heard about Lisa Nowak?
No, I got a script a couple of years ago that Brian [C. Brown] and Elliott [DiGuiseppi] had written was just really intrigued. It was already a very fictionalized version. I was aware of the underlying story that inspired it, but the script worked on its own, and those elements of magic realism and really exploring her psychology were there. I began to see visually that we could use the movie to really crack her psyche.
You’ve done some really interesting things with the visual medium, especially in “Legion,” and here you make some bold choices with perspective. Once you go down that road as a filmmaker, is it hard for you to not try to break the mold with everything you do?
No, I mean, I’m going back to “Fargo” now, and I’m very excited to go back into the constraints of filmmaking. You know what I mean? Because that’s the right filmmaking for that story.
Right.
It’s a much more structured, it’s a much more linear sense of the camera moving. The camera’s not going to do crazy things. You know, probably in the last couple of years of “Fargo” I have used the camera a little bit more aggressively or liberally than Joel and Ethan [Coen] might have done. But not egregiously so, I think. And again, just trying to enhance the emotional experience of those films. “Legion” was such a great expansion and experiment for me in filmmaking and was in many ways my school for what was possible. I don’t have formal training, I’m just making it up as I go along. And I’ve been in situations with, like, the visual effects supervisors, [and] I’ll propose an idea and they’ll say, “Well, that’s not how we do it.” And those people don’t tend to last for very long, because I don’t know how it’s meant to be done or not meant to be done. But I know what I’m trying to evoke in an audience.
Yeah.
So, in a scene in the pilot of “Legion” I began to use this “zolly” idea in which you both zoom in or out in the opposite direction of how you’re moving the dolly. But I didn’t do it in the classic Hitchcock sense. The camera was sort of moving on a diagonal in a scene where Dan Stevens is being confronted. And it creates an effect that you can’t really define, that you don’t know, when you’re watching it, what exactly is happening. But you know that something odd is happening. And I’m sure there’s no film school in the country that would teach me to do that. But in my head I thought, “Well, if I do this, then I think it’s going to create a feeling, so…”
I think it’s really interesting with what you’ve done here because there has been an increasing number of filmmakers playing with aspect ratio. It seems like there is something in the creative zeitgeist where directors are more willing to try out of the box stuff. Do you feel like there is more creative freedom than there was when you first got into business?
There certainly is. I mean, but for me it goes back to my coming of age as a novelist and the books that I read that really blew my mind and expanded what you could do as a writer. [Writers such as] Don DeLillo or Milan Kundera. I have a collection of books that sort of broke rules and, you know, “The Virgin Suicides,” who has ever thought to tell a story from a collective “we” as a narrator? I always think when I start a project, like, “What am I taking for granted here?” You know you’re in a movie theater and it’s giant rectangle and so you want to use as much of that rectangle as possible. Well, why? Why can’t the screen also be a tool? But to answer your question, I do think that we hit this moment where TV expanded so dramatically and so quickly and so many people got into the business that they realized, “How am I going to break through?” How is AMC, which is a network that you tune in to watch old movies, how are they going to break through? Or Hulu. What’s going to define them? And the only thing that really does it, are shows that are different and better. And I hear that and I go, “I can do different and better. ” You know what I mean?
Absolutely.
Then you do get attention. And you do have those shows that define a network and put it on the map. And so the next network goes, “I need my ‘Breaking Bad.’ I need my ‘Handmaid’s Tale.’ I need my ‘Russian Doll,‘” whatever those shows are where you’re like, “Oh, I never thought that you could do a show like that.” But the rules are kind of open now.
Do you want to make another film after the next season of “Fargo” or is another series in the works?
I don’t specifically know what the next thing is. I know I want to keep doing it all, but I also know that I did too much all at once. And so my hope is that, rather than multitask to the degree that I’ve been doing, I can make “Fargo” and then start on something else. Because the problem when you’re always starting the next thing before you’ve ended the last thing is it never ends. Not just in the terms of your own personal exhaustion, but there really needs to be a moment where you’ve finished a project where you can decompress. Where you can celebrate that you’ve done it. Just add it up. I went straight from “Legion” season one into “Fargo” season three into “Legion” season two into prepping this movie. The day I wrapped the movie, I was 12 weeks out on “Legion” season three. And then I had to make “Legion” while I was editing and finishing this movie. It’s not conducive both to my longterm health and, also. you have to make sure that everything that you make is of superior quality. And I never want to be in a position where someone goes, “Oh, you know, I think he’s just getting tired or he’s run out of ideas.”
I don’t think anyone would ever think you were running out of ideas.
Well.
What about the most enjoyable part of the filmmaking experience for you?
I would say that the caliber of the actors, but obviously in television I get to work with movie stars and I find that really exciting. I’d never made anything you could watch in one sitting before. I found that really interesting. I wasn’t necessarily aware of it at the script level or even when we were making the film. But editorially, when I sat down and I realized, “Oh, this scene, I can’t just put this in another episode. Right. I really have to calibrate this experience and this journey that the audience goes on and to take them through these range of emotions and to take Lucy to places that the audience doesn’t necessarily want her to go. And have the audience root for her and not sit in judgment of her. And then I have to take her out the other side of that so that the audience ends the movie with enough distance from that bad feeling they had to get to a place that they really feel like, ‘Oh, she’s okay now’.” And I think it was worth the journey.
Originally, Reese Witherspoon was supposed to star in this and she had to drop out because of filming “Big Little Lies” season two. What did Natalie bring to the role that you might not have expected when Reese was involved?
Every actor is unique and I would imagine that the kind of movie that Reese would have wanted to make for herself is probably a different movie than I ended up making. What Natalie brought to it, and why I was so excited to get her into it is her availability, as an actor, to an audience. And the fact that the closer you get to her face and her eyes, the more you see of what’s going on inside of her. And it really is a role, because it’s so internal, that demands that the actor be available. Every micro expression and feeling is so raw and honest for us. She is a very self-deprecating, funny, smart, open person who’s nothing like the type-A, tightly wound characters that we often associate her with. And one of the miracles of those first few days of production was the swagger that she brought. The confidence, the shoulders back. Her gregariousness. I mean, there’s a moment where her husband’s like, “Did your suit fill up with water today?” And she’s like, “No, just my helmet.” He’s like, “Your helmet?” She’s able to do that was with such a dismissive sense of, like, “That’s no big deal.”
Something that blew my mind when I was watching the film was that I did not realize it was Stevens playing her husband until maybe a quarter of the way through.
Yeah.
Obviously you’d worked with Dan before, but when did you realize that he could transform himself so dramatically?
I’ll tell you a funny story. At a certain point after he’d signed on I sent him a text that just said, ” Mustache?” And he was amenable, and so he grew out his beard. And the day that we cut the beard and left the mustache we had a fitting and he was going home to his wife, and I said, “You have to text me her exact words.” And she texted back and she was like, “Oh no, God no, what have you done.” [Laughs.] But the thing with Dan is he’s a character actor. And for me, Natalie, you know, she’s a movie star, but she’s a character actor [too].
I guess just my last question for you is, I know you’ve been sort of working nonstop for quite awhile but have you been able to take a vacation at least?
I did. I took two months and I traveled over the summer. Because someone told me there was this word, “vacation,” and that you stop working. Why has no one ever told me that word before?
Did you go anywhere fun?
Yeah, I traveled in Europe and went to everyplace fun, with my family, and it was great. You know, you can’t bank a vacation though, right? So one week back at work and you’re like, “Oh, I’m tired again”. But my hope is to add a little more space, as I get older. Just, you know, to maybe make fewer things with more care.
“Lucy in the Sky” opens in limited release on Friday.
