In an age when a great deal of television is shot the same way regardless of the genre, with the same straightforward coverage that’s been standard industry practice for decades, FX ‘s “ Fargo ” stands apart. It’s a show with a genuine visual philosophy that evolves from season to season, with camera movement, framing, and lens selection that’s creatively motivated and not simply dictated by the need for a crew to make its days. For series creator and showrunner Noah Hawley , the visual approach began with the filmmakers whose movie provided him with his source material.
“The Coen brothers are not just great screenwriters,” Hawley told IndieWire’s “Filmmaker Toolkit” podcast. “They’re the great directing team of our generation. They write or rewrite a lot of scripts [that they don’t direct], but those movies never turn out to be Coen brothers movies.
So there’s got to be something in the translation from the page to the screen that makes it a Coen brothers movie, and my job wasn’t just to write like them, I had to figure out, what’s that sensibility?” In the first season of “ Fargo ,” Hawley put what he learned about the Coen brothers’ cinematic language into practice. “They don’t like unmotivated camera movement. They want to work in a straight line: The camera moves in, it moves out, it moves up, it moves down, it moves left, it moves right.
They like to shoot on wider lenses for the comedic aspect of it. There were a lot of tec.