Fargo Showrunner, writer and director Noah Hawley did everything he could to distract himself from the Emmys when the Television Academy announced its nominations last month.

“I just put my head down and didn’t really think much about it until (the series’ executive producer) Warren Littlefield called me and said, ‘Fifteen,'” he says. Weekly entertainment“And I thought, ‘Well, that’s pretty good.'”

Pretty good is a slight understatement. The acclaimed FX limited series based on the Coen brothers’ 1996 film of the same name not only received a nomination for Most Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, but also individual nominations for three of its stars: Juno Temple, Lamorne Morris and Jon Hamm.

In addition to the miniseries nomination, Hawley himself received two individual awards for outstanding directing and writing for a miniseries or anthology series or movie for his work on the show’s fifth-season premiere, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” It was the only episode he submitted for an Emmy.

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“The introductory episode is always a good choice, and in this case it was definitely the right scale,” Hawley explains his decision. “I saw this season as focused. Fargo. We weren’t messing around.”

In fact, in the premiere, Hawley puts his own spin on several key scenes from the original film, including the scene in which Dorothy “Dot” Lyon (Temple) is kidnapped by Ole Munch (Sam Spruell) and his lackey Donny (Devon Bostick), as well as a later moment when the henchmen are stopped by two police officers, including Deputy Witt Farr (Morris).

After escaping her captors at a traffic stop, Dot flees to a nearby gas station and encounters the now wounded Witt. There, the two form an unlikely alliance in a fight for survival. Witt defends the store’s front door from Munch while Dot overpowers Donny in the back restroom. The dark, dramatic sequence took five days to complete – two of which were used to film the drive-by and exterior shots, the other three for the quartet’s shootout.

“I really wanted to create a sequence as a filmmaker that was that level… not action for the sake of action, but (to focus on) the complexity of Juno’s struggles, the introduction of Lamorne’s character and then the double standoff,” Hawley says. “I wanted to have the scale, but when I sat down to write it, it was really just a question of: What happens next? In what ways can we create tension?”

He cites the use of sound—or in this case, the lack thereof—as a large part of creating that nerve-wracking anticipation as Dot prepares to confront a crying Donny in the bathroom with nothing but ice packs and a couple of glow sticks to defend herself with.

“The interesting thing I’ve discovered as a director is that as a filmmaker, you can feel any emotion except fear. You can film something, watch it, and have tears in your eyes. You can film something and get the joke, but you can never scare yourself because you have no imagination: you know exactly what’s going to happen,” Hawley explains. “So when I’m in the editing room on suspense films, I often have to guess how long I need to keep the tension going before the gun goes off or the guy jumps out of the shadows.”

He continues, “When Juno walked into the bathroom with the two bags of ice and Lamorne sat there with his injured leg looking out the front door… Capturing those two tense moments at the same time really made me think about both shots and the parts that help tell her story in there and his story out there.”

Other parts of the sequence came together naturally, simply because Hawley stayed present and proactive on set. “There’s a moment where Dot hits Old Munch with the shovel and he shoots backwards into the ceiling. We didn’t plan that, but I put the special effects guy on a ladder that had a butterfly net with plaster dust in it,” he says. “When she steps forward, she walks through this plaster dust falling from the ceiling. I could have added that later as a visual effect, but there’s something special about watching her do it because she flinches when she walks through it. The dust falls in her face. And all those little elements just create a vérité of it.”

Hawley recalls the end of the scene where Dot, having just demonstrated her solid survival skills by almost single-handedly taking out two grown men, reveals her softer, more motherly side by fixing Witt’s tourniquet and promising the cop that he will be OK.

“I was coming to the end of my 13-hour day, so I didn’t have a lot of time with Juno and Lamorne to really flesh out that sequence, and Juno actually felt at the end that she hadn’t really given me anything,” he recalls. “But in reality, she was so exhausted that she was just plain, and when I saw her in the room, I thought, ‘Well, that’s perfect.’ She doesn’t need to do more than that, does she? She does the action. And she exudes a certain tiredness that the scene needs.”

In general, Hawley emphasizes that as a writer he tries to “give the actors freedom” in his scripts wherever possible.

“There’s a tendency with networking and network news that if something isn’t said out loud, it seems like it’s not happening. And I’ve learned over the years that the actor is the best tool to convey a feeling or an intention,” he says. “It’s so much more elegant when you just feel that motherly care from her than if she has to say a lot of words in that moment. You don’t need a lot of words. You just need the moment.”

Fargo can be streamed on Hulu.