Making Fargo at 30: “Dude, don’t give me this role, I’ll shoot your dog.” Fargo

WWilliam H. Macy was originally scheduled to play the humble detective in Fargo. He then asked the film’s directors, Joel and Ethan Coen, if he would like to read for the lead part by Jerry Lundgaard. “I said: ‘Boy, am I!’” recalls Messi. He memorized the script that night and impressed the Coens but he needed to seal the deal.

Messi heard that the pair were in New York, so he got his “funny ass” on a plane and used some dark humor à la Quinn. “I said, ‘I’m worried you’re going to ruin your movie by casting someone else.’. I knew Ethan had just gotten a puppy and I said to him, ‘Man, don’t give me this role, I’ll shoot your dog.’

The Coens laughed and Messi got the part. Celebrating its 30th anniversary this week, Fargo is now revered as a snow-soaked noir, pushing the tonal boundaries of the thriller comedy, giving lead roles to Missy and Frances McDormand and introducing the concept of “Minnesota-ness” to the world.

Macy’s Lundegaard is a bumbling car salesman who hires two incompetent criminals to kidnap his wife in an elaborate scheme to extort a huge ransom from his wealthy, domineering father-in-law. The plan goes fatally wrong, drawing the attention of McDormand’s Marge Gunderson, a seven-months-pregnant local police chief with brilliant intuition. During the investigation, Jerry’s web of lies begins to unravel.

The title of the film is Sleight of Hand. While the opening scene is set in Fargo, North Dakota in 1987, the rest of the drama takes place in the cities of Brainerd and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Coen brothers have stated in interviews that they simply found the word “Fargo” more evocative than “Brainerd.”

Macy had seen their previous film, Blood Simple, and was immediately impressed by the script for Fargo. Speaking via Zoom from Los Angeles, he says: “Their dialogue is right up there with Dave Mamet’s dialogue. It’s brilliant. It’s beautiful. It’s got rhythm and rhythm and poetry, and the words they choose are better than any ad an actor could come up with.”

“It’s great writing and it was about time and place and style and everything. A good script will give you all the information you need. If it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage.”

John Carroll Lynch, who played Gunderson’s husband, Norm, had the same initial reaction to the script. “It was a masterpiece,” he says over the phone. “I opened the first page and the white of the pages was reflected in the landscape in the script. It was a pleasure to read, absolutely stunning work without a doubt. I fell in love with this script. It was perfect.”

Ironically for a film characterized by its desolate and frozen terrain, the production suffered from a lack of snow. The entire schedule had to be reversed. Lynch, whose scenes were mostly indoors, was rushed on a red-eye flight to film his bedroom scenes with McDormand.

At one point, jet lag caught up with him and he fell into bed between takes next to McDormand’s body double. “All the crew were very quiet,” he laughs. “They didn’t want to wake me up.”

Meanwhile, the outside crew kept moving further and further north, eventually having to turn to snowmakers to capture the stifling winter atmosphere. However, according to Macy, climate is key to understanding the film’s tragic mood.

“There’s a little bit of hunkering down that happens in those cold climates, especially if you live in the countryside, which creates a kind of desperation,” Macy says. “This is a story about a man who fights a battle for his family, to secure his family’s future and happiness. I don’t think Jerry Lundgaard was evil. He was stupid and desperate.”

Both actors remember the set as a place of complete calm and collaboration, aided by the distinctive energies of the Coen Brothers. “Joel is like a sphinx,” recalls Messi. “Not only is he deliberate and methodical, he moves that way.

“Ethan, on the other hand, is so hurt. He’s one of those guys like me who shakes his leg, can’t sit still. He was rocking and pacing. He was excited. He wore his emotions on his sleeve. You could tell what was going on when you saw Ethan.”

How do the two brothers collaborate in films? “They both write them. They both direct them. They both produce them, but Joel directs more than Ethan and Ethan writes more than Joel does. That’s my takeaway from it,” Missy says.

“They were on the same page. The deliberations they were going to have they did quietly to each other. They didn’t bring us, the actors, into it at all. When there was any question they would shoot two versions.”

Creating a simpatico connection This is what Lynch described as a “selfish-free” environment. “She didn’t want to change a comma, she didn’t want to change a word,” he says. “What I wanted to make sure you did was stay away from the scenario.”

However, there was room for happy coincidences and histrionic instincts. Messi improvised some doodles at the car dealership, which Ethan Coen filmed over his shoulder and kept in the final cut. He also played the painfully funny scene in which Jerry rehearses a frantic phone call with his father-in-law.

Lynch, who was a stage actor at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, succeeded in providing a hidden character for Norm One’s breakfast: He would cook eggs for his wife but not for himself, and would wait and finish her leftovers when she was called away to the crime scene.

“It seemed very appropriate to me, for the character, but also for anyone who has known me for a long time, my quote in my high school yearbook was, ‘Are you going to finish that?’ It was not unusual behavior for me.”“.

The deep, genuine love between Marge and Norm is what Lynch believes sets Fargo apart from the “coldness and detachment” typical of the Coen brothers’ broader filmography. “She has this warm heart at the center.”

McDormand, who is married to Joel Coen, won her first Oscar for Best Actress for Fargo. Lynch is effusive in his praise of his on-screen wife. “I don’t know many actors who have stood in so many American landscapes in the history of their film careers. The only person I can think of who did that is John Wayne.

“Fran has stood in the Ozarks, she has stood in the Badlands, she has stood in the desert, she has stood in the winter tundra of Minnesota, she has stood in the Iron Range. She has played so many quintessential American characters in the American landscape. It’s humbling when you think about it.”

Three decades later, Fargo is still amazing. Her distinctive “sweet Minnesotan” accent – which Lynch notes was absent from popular culture before 1996 – is still regularly shouted at Messi by excited fans.

The film spawned a popular anthology television series created by Noah Hawley, although Lynch admits he “felt creeps” while watching the first episode when he detected a direct, intimate homage to a gesture he and McDormand shared in bed in the original film.

There’s even a statue of Marge in Fargo, North Dakota, sculpted by a chainsaw artist and appropriately titled Wood Chip Marge, a nod to the unforgettable role the wood cutter played in the film’s climactic scene. Asked why Fargo has survived, Macy, who held screenings for it during the Hollywood writers’ strike, didn’t hesitate.

“Because it’s perfect. It’s one of those beautiful situations where everything – the way they made the film, the setting, the music, the tone, the screenplay, the story – is in harmony. It’s a great film. There’s not a false note in it.”