“Wouldn’t survive 5 minutes”: Fallout maker Jonathan Nolan on sci-fi westerns, favorite scenes and his brother Christopher Nolan

Fans have been looking forward to it for a long time, now they have been rewarded: Amazon’s sci-fi series Fallout has started a win across the board. This is thanks in no small part to Jonathan Nolan, who produced the series and directed the first three episodes.

Fallout is based on a successful game franchise that has existed since 1997. There the player has to survive in a world contaminated by nuclear attacks. The series does not adapt a specific story from the original, but rather follows Lucy (Ella Purnell), who, after years in a bunker, enters the dystopian surface of her end-time world for the first time.

Interview with Fallout director Jonathan Nolan: Sci-Fi, Christopher Nolan and season 2

Jonathan Nolan is a master of his craft. He thrilled sci-fi fans with Westworld and, with his brother Christopher Nolan, he wrote the screenplays for The Dark Knight and Interstellar, among others. In the Moviepilot interview he turns out to be a big fan of the Fallout games, raves about the shoot and explains what he would do first after 200 years in a fallout shelter.

Moviepilot: After Westworld and Periphery, dark visions of the future are nothing new for you. What makes the Fallout dystopia so unique?

Jonathan Nolan: To explain this, you have to start with the games that have this unique, dark yet comical tone. Westworld is also satirical, but I never saw myself as a comedy writer.

Fallout is different. Fallout is a political satire from the start. We knew the adaptation needed that. So I joined in [den zwei Serienschöpfer:innen] Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner together. Geneva is more like me, she comes from the world of comic book adaptations. Graham, on the other hand, has worked in the comedy genre on Portlandia, The Office and Silicon Valley. The fusion of these two authors allowed for the unique Fallout tone.

Check out the latest trailer for Fallout here:

Before the Fallout adaptation, you also played parts of the video game series yourself. Was there anything you really wanted to implement?

[Produzent] Todd Howard and I knew from the beginning that we wanted to tell a new story. The games do it the same way: each game has its own setting and its own characters. It is connected to its predecessors only through mythology.

But open-world games have a different grammar than films. So there wasn’t a specific scene that I wanted to implement, but rather it was more about copying the feeling of playing: for example when you escape from the vault in Fallout 3 or the first nuclear missile explodes in Fallout 4.

In an impressive scene, the knight Titus insults his idealistic squire Maximus…

That was one of my favorite scenes from the script! This is reminiscent of the conversation in video games: you have irritated someone too much and now have several dialogue options depending on your charisma. There is the expedient option that will get you there, but it is morally questionable. Or there are options that are morally sound but very dangerous. By the expression on his face [Hauptdarsteller] Aaron Moten can be seen that he is in just such a predicament here.

Right at the beginning of Fallout we meet Walton Goggins as a cowboy before the apocalypse. How did you come to this scene?

Walton is a very loving person. It was important to show that his ghoul character was alive long before the nuclear catastrophe and made many questionable decisions. I love unpacking the emotion right at the beginning.

However, one thing is important to understand about Fallout [und auch deshalb zeigen wir den Ursprung]: The world that was destroyed was not our world. Fallout takes place in this bizarre 1950s Eisenhower world: essentially America on nuclear steroids.

The Westworld and Fallout series both combine sci-fi and western elements. Was there any experience from Westworld that helped you with Fallout?

Working with my brother [Christopher Nolan] taught me two things. First: to use a real film location. Especially in a video game adaptation. Even if we shoot everything with blue screens, we can never match the beauty of the Fallout games.

Second: to shoot on real footage. This is unconventional for a video game adaptation. But film just makes everything beautiful. People don’t understand how much better you can capture faces in it. It conveys so much more emotion than a digital format. It reflects the look of the games with the possibilities of the film medium.

Was there anything you would have liked to do for the first season that didn’t work?

I would like a deathclaw [also ein Monster aus dem Fallout-Universum] accommodated. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we can catch up on this in season 2.

Were there moments where you had to choose between the unique humor of the original and the dark dystopian background?

I worry about this all the time [den Showrunnern] Geneva and Graham chat. It was my first time doing comedy scenes. I usually stick to the script exactly. But with comedy, sometimes you have to put the script down and say, “Ok, we did that, now let’s try it again differently.”

On the one hand, we shot the series as if it were Lawrence of Arabia. On the other hand, we joked about someone bothering chickens. This is how we nailed the tone of the games.

If you came out of a fallout shelter after 200 years, what would you do first?

I probably wouldn’t last five minutes [lacht]. Or run straight back into the bunker. Even if I wore Brotherhood of Steel power armor, I would probably break it or simply tip it over.

The other day I was talking to someone about immortality. He asked: “Would you rather live 100 years longer or get a book that tells the rest of human history?” Personally, I would just want to live longer to find out what happens next. So if I came out of the Vault, all I would really want to know is what happened and what lies ahead.