The greatest thriller in cinema history, according to Noah Hawley: “It’s so tense”
Noah Hawley’s career has spanned six novels, two soundtracks, half a dozen TV series and three films. Best known for creating and writing the FX comedy crime series Fargo, now in its fifth season and inspired by the Coen brothers’ 1996 film of the same name, Hawley knows what it takes to craft an addictive crime thriller.
When Paste asked the director-writer to choose his favourite thriller, Hawley looked to films like Memento, Zodiac, The Jinx and LA Confidential for what he described as having characters that “complicate the narratives”.
“It is those moments, and those thrillers, where you really feel like you can’t breathe,” Hawley explained, adding, “When you turn that page or when the next scene happens, you’re going to know something more, and it’s visceral for you.”
But there was one film that shook Hawley to his core, and it’s another Coen brothers feature, a neo-western thriller that’s a frequent star of many celebrities’ ‘four favourites’ lists, No Country for Old Men, based on Cormac McCarthy’s eponymous 2005 novel.
Widely regarded as their magnum opus, thee film is set in the Texan desert and follows three main characters: a hunter named Moss, played by Josh Brolin, who discovers two million in cash at the site of the aftermath of a drug deal, a merciless killer and hitman named Chigurh, played by a spine-chilling Javier Bardem, who tries to track Moss down, and an aging lawman, Sheriff Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who is investigating the case.
“There’s no music in the whole movie, and yet it’s so tense,” reflected Hawley, “And you’re jumping around with point of view, and there’s an inventiveness to the storytelling that takes you out of predictability.”
No Country for Old Men was considered one of the best films that year and is to date one of only four westerns to ever win the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’ (the others being Cimarron in 1931, Dances with Wolves in 1990, and Unforgiven in 1992). The Coen brothers expertly balanced western romanticism, Hitchcockian suspense, comical moments of entertainment, and a psychologically disturbed hunter, creating a dramatic and eerie story of fate and determination.
In Hawley’s own book, Before the Fall, which involves a plane crash mystery that jumps back and forth between characters to relive the final days before the crash, he tackles the motivations that could explain the tragedy while exploring what it means to survive in the wake of such great loss.
Speaking about the book in 2016, his explanation of what makes a good thriller aligned with the premise of the Coen brothers’ film that ultimately earned it such high acclaim and made it truly terrifying: “I like stories with a lot of moving pieces, because it creates the element of randomness on some level. You know they are going to collide with each other at some point, but how and which ones collide—there’s an element of chance to that, and I think that’s exciting.”
Hawley is writing and directing the upcoming FX series Alien: Earth, based on the film franchise, which is due to premiere in August this year, and we can be sure to expect more chaos and fear in a contained setting.
