Now that the highly anticipated adaptation of the hit video game series Fallout has been released, enthusiasts can rest easy knowing that the show’s creatives — director and executive producer Jonathan Nolan and showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner — have done bien. la franchise.
However, it’s been a long road for Jonathan Nolan, nicknamed Jonah, and his collaborators since they met Todd Howard at his company Bethesda Softworks in 2019 about the adaptation of the streaming series Fallout.
After all, fans have been very protective of beloved properties, such as video games that receive treatment in series or feature films. The time between the announcement of a video game adaptation and the time it is finally released as a series or movie can increase. ugly, especially in social media circles.
Thankfully, Nolan is all too familiar with dealing with social media commentators due to his past collaborations with his brother, Christopher Nolan, on the final two films in The Dark Knight trilogy.
“Given my pleasure of running with Chris in the Batman movies, you have to forget about the online noise of what other people are speculating about what that means and what it means,” Nolan said. “I don’t forget when Chris chose Heath. ” Ledger [as the Joker]
Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) in a scene from “Fallout. “
Fallout follows the story of Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a Vault resident who lives in one of the interconnected bomb shelters buried deep in the ground. Generations of people lived in those vaults after the nuclear apocalypse that decimated the United States 219 years ago.
Once Lucy embarks on a private project involving her father, Hank (Kyle McLachlan) on the scorched surface of Earth, she encounters beings such as the nuclear-irradiated gunslinger The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), as well as Maximus (Aaron Moten), a member of the militaristic organization The Ghoul (Walton Goggins). Brotherhood of Steel. All 8 episodes of the series are streaming on Prime Video.
Having enjoyed the invaluable pleasure he gained from working with Christopher Nolan on The Dark Knight, Jonah Nolan knew all too well the obstacles that awaited him in Fallout, and he accepted them wholeheartedly.
“I’ve argued for a long time that you have to accept the threat from the beginning that other people will be very much with you, but that’s the only way to do it honestly,” Jonah Nolan said.
Nolan said the first thing a video game adaptation wants to perceive is “what makes a series a series a series and what makes a movie a movie. “
“If you take a look at early video game adaptations, other people thought it was vital that it be from the perspective of the first user,” Nolan said. “There have been some amazing movies made from the point of view of the first user and there have been about 4 in total in a hundred years of cinema. We don’t shoot on the first user because it’s higher if it’s on the 3rd user of a film.
On one level, Nolan loves to bet on first-person in video games, but he also knew that it would be an injustice to a game like Fallout if it stuck to the first-person format.
“Right off the bat, you have to understand, grammatically, that you’re not respecting anything by mimicking their maximum surface attributes,” Nolan said. “I think it’s about going below and reaching for the soul of anything and realizing, ‘What’s unique and different about Fallout and all games from the beginning?’ What’s the tone?’There’s a great commitment to storytelling.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – APRIL 9: (left to right) Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy attend the world premiere of. . . [] Prime Video’s “Fallout” at the TCL Chinese Theatre on April 9, 2024 in Hollywood, California. Tommaso Boddi/GA/The Hollywood Reporter (Getty Images)
Despite all the negative comments Jonah Nolan heard while filming Fallout, he said the most productive thing to do in such conditions is to “keep your head down and know how to be as productive as possible. “
For Fallout, there was no doubt that Nolan was pulling out all the stops because he’s a huge fan of the Fallout video game series. However, when creating the series, it wasn’t so much about seeking to discover the endless amounts of commentary. about what enthusiasts wanted to see, but also about how the Fallout games made him feel while playing them.
“You have to forget about a lot of things and you have to be motivated through what you love about the franchise,” Nolan observed. “You have to work on things that you love and respect. You can feel it when a filmmaker is running. “About anything they don’t care about, they don’t care.
On the other hand, Nolan, who also produced the hit streaming series Westworld with his wife and artistic partner Lisa Joy, in addition to Fallout, said he’s been fortunate in his career to be able to paint things he likes.
“Fallout is one of the things I loved,” Nolan said. I first played as a fan and enjoyed the games. I enjoyed Todd Howard’s version of the Fallout universe from Fallout 3 onwards. So when the opportunity arose, I settled on Todd. – who is a fan of mine and I’ve been a fan of his – we got along well from the beginning. From that first meeting, I knew we were going to do something pretty special together.
All 8 episodes of Fallout stream on Prime Video.