What is the plan for Fargo season 3?
I've got a script. Obviously, I've got an actor in Ewan, who's phenomenal. The writers and i have been breaking story, we have the whole thing worked out, and we're just crossing the T's on outlines. We'll start shooting in the end of November and make 10 more.
Ewan's at a point in his career where I'm guessing he doesn't have to audition, but did you at least ask to hear his accent?
I didn't. That's probably dangerous. But we've had good luck so far. I remember showing Jeffrey Donovan the first episode (of season 2), and it's him and Kieran (Culkin) and Angus (Sampson) playing brothers, and Jeffrey said, "So, am I the only one who's doing the accent?" Angus was just this guttural thing, and Kieran wasn't even trying the accent, but Donovan is doing the hardcore northern Midwestern accent. I don't want to focus too much on it, accent-wise. We have a dialect coach. So we'll find something that feels organic.
How'd you come up with the idea of him doing a dual role like this?
To be honest, I didn't know what I was going to do for the third year. And then I took a nap, and I had the story. And part of the story about these two brothers was that they should be played by the same actor. I didn't overthink it. I just thought that was interesting, and would be exciting for an actor, and it's great to work with actors of a certain caliber in the film world, and this is a great hook for an actor to want to play with.
With season 2, you knew certain things. We knew Lou, and Hanzee tied in with Moses Tripoli. This is going to be almost entirely a new thing. Is that easier or harder so far?
On a certain level, it's easier, because you don't have one of your hands tied behind your back. With the second season, we knew at some point Lou had to be sitting on a front porch with a shotgun, and then the house we got didn't have a front porch, so, "Alright, fine, he's sitting on the lawn." But when in the episode did that happen? There were all these things that we said out loud that we then had to work our way around in the story. Now, we're not tied to any historical moment or fact or connection, so the fun is, "How is it similar or different? How is it a totally different story, but Fargo?"
With it taking place after the events of the first season, have you given much thought to how much, if at all, you might want to incorporate the survivors of that season?
I have given that a lot of thought, yes.
Would you like to tell me anything about that?
No. It's fun to find connections, both literal and tangential, either between the movie, or the different years of the show, but the fun of it is to maintain that surprise.
Last year, you had not only the Fargo movie, but Miller's Crossing and The Man Who Wasn't There. Have you figured out yet what other Coen touchstones, if any, you might be drawing on with this one?
No, nobody's starting a dry cleaning business. I don't want to say it out loud too much. For the second season, the Miller's Crossing parallel was pretty obvious. But this tends to go back to Fargo. It's a more intimate story. It's not as much of an epic, doesn't have as many moving pieces. But it still needs to have enough moving pieces to allow a certain level of randomness. You know all these things are on a collision course, but you don't know which of them are going to collide.
Could one of those moving parts be a hula hoop, by chance?
Maybe. That was one thing I think people missed in the second year was my homage to (Hudsucker Proxy). In the Waffle Hut diner, they have a placemat with a circle in the center that says, "You know, for kids!"
I can't believe I missed that.
Well, it was bloody, and we pan across it, but it's there.
Is there a Coen movie that you've thought over this time, "It's going to be really hard for me to work in a reference to that," or are you determined over time to fold them all in in some way?
No, I don't have an active determination. So I don't know. And some of them are kind of open to interpretation. Certainly, there's that moment at the end of season 1 where he's gotten Billy in the bear trap and is pointing the gun at the door that has a feeling like (Blood Simple). But they're still making movies, so it's hard to know where the line is. What I like is, when you make these homages or tell variations on these stories when you bring three people to a cabin in a kidnapping story, and yet the dynamic is completely different it creates this weird tension between a story that you know and a story that you don't know. Is it going to unfold in the same way as the one you know, or not? You're both reliving a story and watching a new story at the same time.
