Writer-director Noah Hawley has a style he’s developed over the past 16 years working with editor Regis Kimble across their FX shows Fargo, Legion and, now, Alien: Earth: What is the lowest number of cuts they can get away with?
“Noah’s totally into trying to tell the story with the least amount of cuts,” Kimble says. “He likes to give the audience an opportunity to extract what they want from [a scene], instead of force-feeding people coverage.” Another stylistic preference: holding wide shots and rarely indulging in close-ups. “We stay wide in a lot of places and sit in shots for quite a long time,” he explains. “We do use close-ups, but they’re earned by the time we land on them, rather than having every line of dialogue in a close-up.”
It’s a style that’s somewhat similar to that of Stanley Kubrick, as well as the Coen brothers (the latter whom, of course, created the original theatrical version of Fargo). It’s also quite suitable for an outright horror series like Alien: Earth. There is something quietly unsettling about a shot that’s held for a long period of time, or that’s wide enough to include plenty of areas where a creature can hide.
Yet surprisingly, concealing the franchise’s famous H.R. Giger-designed Xenomorph wasn’t a priority for Kimble, even though the movies in the franchise tried to minimize the monster’s presence. “Everybody’s seen so much of the Xenomorph, that cat’s been out of the bag since 1979,” says Kimble, referring to Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking Alien.
That said, Kimble was asked to scale back one scene with the creature — an attack on a solider in episode two that turned out so gory, Hawley deemed it too much for even FX. “We shortened the shots and darkened some of the material, so it wasn’t quite so in your face,” Kimble recalls.
Overall, Kimble modestly makes his job sound relatively simple: “If you have three-dimensional characters that people can identify with and they have a believability to them — everything starts from that,” he says. “If it’s written that way, and it’s shot that way, then it’s just a joy to cut the material.”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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