Noah Hawley says Hollywood's true enemy is YouTube

Not that the Google-owned video site is the only threat from big tech’s increased interest in entertainment over the last twenty years, in Hawley’s reckoning: “It’s a larger question about what tech companies have done to Hollywood—we have all been impacted by it. They tend to come into the industry, flood it with money and everyone feels: ‘Oh, it’s a renaissance.’ Then it all dries up.” Which doesn’t mean Hawley hasn’t heard the siren song of AI. Referencing his currently between-seasons Alien: Earth, he noted that he hasn’t dabbled in employing AI on the show yet, but, “We’ve had these conversations. If I’m spending $150 million to $170 million to make a season of Alien, that’s a lot of money, and corporations are desperate to find ways to spend less. I remain open-minded about how storytellers could use it, but it shouldn’t replace them.”

(We always love that “storytellers” line from filmmakers flirting with AI, by the way, because it really underscores who some Hollywood types consider actual artists, and who—i.e., special effects artists, among others— are just cogs it’s safe to replace with computer-generated crap. But we digress.)

As to specific shows, Hawley embraced his title as the “franchise whisperer,” describing that his goal with Alien was to recapture the horror and wonder of learning about the alien lifecycle in the original film. And for Fargo, he emphasized the political underpinnings of the show’s fifth season, which aired back in 2023: “In Season 5, everyone in that show was a Republican. Different versions of a Republican, but still. I was trying very hard not to be political with a capital P, but to talk about the humanity underneath it all.”

Hawley’s certainly keeping busy: Besides season two of Alien, he’s also working on development of a TV adaptation of the Far Cry video game series, and was recently attached to a remake of Argentine horror film Terrified.