Now that the highly anticipated adaptation of the smash hit video game saga Fallout has been released, fans can rest easy knowing that the series’ creatives — director and executive producer Jonathan Nolan and showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner — have done right by the franchise.
However, it’s been a long road for Jonathan Nolan, who goes by Jonah, and his collaborators since they first met with Todd Howard at his company Bethesda Softworks in 2019 about adapting Fallout as a streaming series.
Fans, after all, have been very protective of beloved properties like video games getting either a series or feature film treatment. The time between the announcement of a video game adaptation and when it finally launches as a series or film can get ugly, especially in social media circles.
Luckily, Nolan knew the drill of dealing with social media commenters all too well because of his previous collaborations with his brother, Christopher Nolan, on the last two films in The Dark Knight Trilogy.
“Given my experience of working with Chris on the Batman movies, you really have to tune out the online noise of what people are speculating about, ‘What this means and what that means,’” Nolan said. “I remember when Chris cast Heath Ledger [as the Joker]
in The Dark Knight, it was six months of being told we’ve destroyed the Batman franchise.”
As A ‘Fallout’ Game Fan, Nolan Says He Knew The Series Was A Risk Worth Taking
Fallout follows the story of Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a vault dweller who lives in one of a series of interconnected fallout shelters deep in the ground. Generations of families have lived in the vaults following a nuclear apocalypse that decimated the U.S. 219 years before.
Once Lucy embarks on a personal mission involving her father, Hank (Kyle McLachlan) on Earth’s scorched surface she encounters beings like the nuclear irradiated gunslinger The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) as well as Maximus (Aaron Moten), a member of the militaristic group the Brotherhood of Steel. All eight episodes of the series are streaming on Prime Video.
Having gained the invaluable experience he got by working with Christopher Nolan on The Dark Knight, Jonah Nolan completely knew of the obstacles that were ahead of him for Fallout — and wholeheartedly embraced them.
“I’ve long held the position that you have to take a risk at the premiere that people will be very pissed off with you, but that’s the only way to do this honestly,” Jonah Nolan said.
Nolan said the first thing someone adapting a video game needs to understand is “what makes a show a show and what makes a movie a movie.”
“If you look at the early adaptations of video games, people thought it was important that it was always in the first-person point of view,” Nolan said. “There have been some amazing movies made in the first-person point of view and there’s been about four of them total in 100 years of filmmaking. You don’t shoot first-person because it’s better if it’s third person in a movie.”
On a personal level, Nolan loves playing first-person in video games, but also known he’d be doing an injustice to a game like Fallout if he stuck to first-person format.
“Right out of the gate you have to understand on a grammar level that you’re not doing respect to something by aping the most superficial attributes of it,” Nolan said. “I think it’s about getting underneath and getting to the soul of something and realize, ‘What’s unique and different to me about Fallout and all of the games from the beginning? What is the tone?’ There’s a beautiful commitment to storytelling.”
Nolan Respects The Fans Of ‘Fallout’ Yet Knows TV Is A Different Medium
Despite any negative comments that Jonah Nolan has heard while making Fallout, he said the best thing to do in situations like that is to “keep your head down and know that you’re doing your best.”
For Fallout, there was no doubt that Nolan was doing his best because he’s a huge fan of the Fallout video game series. To create the show, however, it wasn’t so much about trying to wrap his head around the endless amounts of comments about what fans want to see, but rather how the Fallout games made him feel while playing them.
“You have to tune a lot of that out and you have to be driven by what you like about the franchise,” Nolan observed. “You have to work on things that you love and respect. You can feel it when a filmmaker works on something they don’t give a f—k about, that they don’t care about.”
On the flip side, Nolan — who also executive produced the hit streaming series Westworld with his wife and creative partner Lisa Joy in addition to Fallout — said he’s been lucky in his career to be able to work on things that he’s really loved.
“Fallout is one of those things that I loved,” Nolan said. I played as a fan first and enjoyed the games. I enjoyed Todd Howard’s take on the Fallout universe starting with Fallout 3. So when the opportunity came to sit down with Todd — who’s a fan of mine and I’ve been a fan of him — we just hit it off right out of the gate. I knew coming out of that first meeting that we were going to be doing something pretty special together.”
All eight episodes of Fallout are streaming on Prime Video.
