Fargo show runner Noah Hawley is very excited about his upcoming X-Men television show Legion. There is not a lot of details known about the show, but the first trailer is great. You can see that below, if you still need to catch up. Legion stars David Haller (Dan Stevens), who is Professor Xavier’s son in the comics. It’s not known if he will be the son of Xavier in the television show.
Legion will be the first time that Marvel and Fox are cooperating on a Marvel property. With this cooperation, there are a lot of big names from both Marvel and Fox coming together to help produce the television show. How has this affected the way that Hawley is approaching the show? According to Hawley via IGN, he welcomes all the input:
“Everyone has gotten along so well that I’m not really familiar with what the underlying issues were. But I think that what’s been very rewarding for me is that because everyone has come together because they are passionate about the material and so if there is a prior conflict, I don’t know about them.
I just find that everyone is together and they’re very excited about what we’re doing. And Simon and I have spent a lot of time together. Very early on when I first was flirting with the idea of doing this, I just called Simon because when you can talk to another writer that’s usually the better way to go. And he and I had a few phone calls early on where I said, ‘For the fun of it, let’s just start brainstorming.’
I had a sense of what I wanted to do, and I wanted to get his input because obviously he’s on many levels the creative brain that’s defining what the movies are and what this world is. So, in an abstract way, it began to be clear to me what the show wanted to be, and it’s great to have that sounding board and then to have Marvel as well as a resource. There’s obviously a rich history to this world and these characters, and they have a business model that works very well for them.”
Hawley says that he is attempting to spin the X-Men franchise in a new way. Some sources have stated that the show looks to follow the formula that Breaking Bad used. His aim is to be receptive to the universe that is already established, but he does want to explore new directions:
“You know what was important to me was to treat the material with the utmost respect, and yet at a certain point as a writer, you have to tell your own story. So my approach to the Legion material is similar, which is it’s about a respect for the world, but it’s not about telling stories in that world that the reader is familiar with.
It’s about taking that character and really exploring, almost on an existential level, what it’s like… What a television show can do that a movie can’t do is it’s not just a plot delivery device. It’s not about action, it’s about character and theme and as we see in Fargo, you can really play with structure and you can deconstruct the story in a big way. Whereas in a two-hour movie, it’s ‘What’s the problem? Where’s the bad guy? Let’s go get him!’
So, I would be remiss, I feel like, if I didn’t deconstruct this, if I didn’t really try to do something for the genre that feels personal and interesting to me and to really explore if you have a character who for his whole life has believed that he’s schizophrenic, and is now starting to think that he may have these powers, but he doesn’t know and he doesn’t know what’s real – well, that’s the experience the audience should have.
To be put into his world is to enter something that’s by definition surreal, because he’s hearing things, he’s seeing things… Are these things real or not real? What can you trust that you’re seeing? And he’s stuck in this moment until he meets a girl (Rachel Keller) and he falls in love and now he’s got something to hope for and that’s the catalyst that pushes everything forward.”
Legion will have its own feel, and it is in this visual aesthetic that the show will gain momentum. The show will tell a story:
“That’s kind of out of time and out of place. Once we started going down a path of a sort of, for whatever reason, mid-60s British design aesthetic, you have to follow that down the rabbit hole. But those visuals are really powerful.”
Legion is set to air on FX sometime in 2017.
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