William H Macy was originally slated for the modest role of a detective in Fargo. Then the film’s directors, Joel and Ethan Coen, asked if he would like to read for the lead part of Jerry Lundegaard. “I said: ‘Boy, do I!’,” recalls Macy. He memorised the script that night and impressed the Coens but needed to seal the deal.
Macy heard the pair were in New York, got his “jolly ass” on a plane and deployed some Coen-esque dark humour. “I said, I’m worried you’re gonna screw up your movie by casting someone else. I knew Ethan had just gotten a little puppy and I said: ‘Man, you don’t give me this role, I’m gonna shoot your dog.’”
The Coens laughed and Macy got the role. Celebrating its 30th anniversary this week, Fargo is now revered as a snowbound noir that pushed the tonal boundaries of the comedy thriller, gave seminal roles to Macy and Frances McDormand and introduced the concept of “Minnesota Nice” to the world.
Macy’s Lundegaard is a bumbling car salesman who hires two inept criminals to kidnap his own wife in a convoluted scheme to extort a hefty ransom from his wealthy, overbearing father-in-law. The plan goes fatally wrong, drawing the attention of McDormand’s Marge Gunderson, a seven-month-pregnant local police chief with brilliant intuition. As she investigates, Jerry’s web of lies begins to unravel.
The film’s title is a sleight of hand. While the opening scene takes place in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1987, the rest of the drama unfolds in the Minnesota cities of Brainerd and Minneapolis. The Coen brothers have stated in interviews that they simply found the word “Fargo” more evocative than “Brainerd”.
Macy had seen their earlier film, Blood Simple, and was instantly impressed by their script for Fargo. Speaking via Zoom from Los Angeles, he says: “Their dialogue is up there with Dave Mamet’s dialogue. It’s scintillating. It’s beautiful. It’s got metre and rhythm and poetry to it and the words they choose are better than any ad-lib an actor can come up with.
“It’s fabulous writing and it was of the time and of the place and the style and everything. A good script will give you all the information you need. If it ain’t on the page, it won’t be on the stage.”
John Carroll Lynch, who played Gunderson’s husband Norm, had the same first reaction to the screenplay. He says by phone: “It was a masterpiece. You opened the first page and the white of the pages were reflected in the landscape in the script. It was a delight to read, an absolutely stunning piece of work without a doubt. I fell in love with that screenplay. It was perfect.”
Paradoxically for a movie defined by its desolate, freezing geography, the production was plagued by a lack of snow. The schedule had to be entirely inverted. Lynch, whose scenes were mostly indoors, was hastily flown out on a red-eye flight to shoot his bedroom scenes with McDormand.
At one point, the exhaustion of the travel caught up with him and he fell asleep in bed between takes next to McDormand’s body double. “Everybody on the crew was very quiet,” he laughs. “They didn’t want to wake me.”
Meanwhile, the exterior crew kept moving farther and farther north, eventually having to resort to snowmakers to capture the suffocating winter atmosphere. Still, according to Macy, the climate is the key to understanding the film’s tragicomic mood.
“There’s a little bit of bunkering up that happens in those cold climes, especially if you live out in the country, that breeds a sort of desperation,” Macy says. “This is a story about a guy going into battle for his family, to secure the future and the happiness of his family. I don’t think Jerry Lundegaard was a villain. He was dumb as a post and desperate.”
Both actors recall the set as a place of supreme calm and collaboration, aided by the distinct energies of the Coen brothers. Macy recalls: “Joel is sphinx-like. Not only is he deliberate and methodical, he even moves that way.
“Ethan, on the other hand, is wound pretty tight. He’s one of those guys like me who shakes their leg, can’t sit still. He would rock and pace. He’d get excited. He wore his emotions on his sleeve. You could tell what was going on when you watched Ethan.”
How do the two brothers collaborate on movies? Macy says: “They both write them. They both direct them. They both produce them, but Joel directs more than Ethan and Ethan writes more than Joel. That’s my takeaway from it.
“They were on the same page. The deliberations they would have they did quietly with each other. They didn’t bring us, the actors, into it at all. When there was any question they would shoot two versions.’”
This simpatico connection created what Lynch describes as an “egoless” environment. “You didn’t want to change a comma, didn’t want to change a word,” he says. “What you wanted to make sure you did was get out of the way of the screenplay.”
There was, however, room for happy accidents and actorly instincts. Macy improvised some idle doodling at the car dealership, which Ethan Coen filmed over his shoulder and kept in the final cut. He also pitched the painfully funny scene in which Jerry rehearses a frantic phone call to his father-in-law.
Lynch, who had been a stage actor at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, successfully pitched a subtle character beat for Norm one breakfast: he would cook eggs for his wife but not for himself, waiting and finishing her leftovers when she was called away to the murder scene.
“It felt very right for me, for the character, but also anybody who knew me for any length of time, my quote in my high school yearbook was: ‘Are you gonna finish that?’ It wasn’t unusual behaviour for me.”
It is the deep, genuine love between Marge and Norm that Lynch believes sets Fargo apart from the usual “coolness and detachment” of the Coen brothers’ wider filmography. “It has this warm heart in the centre.”
McDormand, who is married to Joel Coen, won her first best actress Oscar for Fargo. Lynch is effusive in his praise for his on-screen wife. “I don’t know of many actors who’ve stood in so many American landscapes in the history of their film career. The only person I could think of who had done that was John Wayne.
“Fran has stood in the Ozarks, she’s stood in the Badlands, she’s stood in the desert, she’s stood in the winter tundra of Minnesota, she’s stood in the Iron Range. She has played so many quintessentially American characters in American landscapes. It’s humbling when you think about it.”
Three decades on, Fargo still fascinates. Its distinctive “Minnesota nice” dialect – which Lynch notes was absent from popular culture prior to 1996 – is still regularly shouted at Macy by eager fans.
The film has spawned an acclaimed anthology television series created by Noah Hawley, though Lynch admits he was “creeped out” watching the first episode when he spotted a direct, intimate homage to a gesture he and McDormand shared in bed in the original film.
There is even a statue of Marge in Fargo, North Dakota, carved by a chainsaw artist and aptly titled Wood Chip Marge, a nod to the unforgettable role played by a woodchipper in the film’s climactic scene. Asked why Fargo endures, Macy, who held screenings of it during the Hollywood writers’ strike, does not hesitate.
“Because it’s perfect. It’s one of those lovely situations where everything – the way they cast it, where they shot it, the music, the tone, the script, the story – is in harmony. It’s an exquisite film. There’s not a false note in it.”
