Jonathan “Jonah” Nolan has quite the CV. Yes, he’s been a screenwriter on his brother Christopher Nolan’s films – his short story Memento Mori inspired his older sibling’s 2000 breakthrough Memento. He wrote The Prestige and was a writer on the Batman Dark Knight trilogy, and Interstellar. In television, he created the sci-fi surveillance drama Person of Interest and, with his wife, Lisa Joy, the big-budget HBO dystopian sci-fi western Westworld.
Also on his resume, somewhere, is “dairy farmer, Kaipara, New Zealand”.
On a Zoom call from Los Angeles, the London-born, US-raised Nolan tells the Listener he spent a college gap year on a cousin’s farm near Warkworth. If it wasn’t for the rural experience, all those screen credits might not exist.
He was halfway through a degree in international relations at a college in Chicago and decided it wasn’t the right path for him. Assisting with milking 800 head of dairy cows might help him figure himself out. It wasn’t the early mornings with the Holsteins, though, that did it, but the farmhouse book collection.
“It was a library of classics. They had the farmhouse [where]each book you opened, the spine kind of cracked. And I read Moby-Dick, which I’ve never been inclined to read otherwise. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is the shit.’ It’s a very cinematic book, much more cinematic than I expected. And I was like, ‘This is what I should be doing.’”
He went back to college in Washington DC, majored in writing, then a few years later, found himself jointly nominated with his brother for a best original screenplay Oscar for Memento.
Fast-forward 20-plus years and his brother’s Oppenheimer has just swept the Oscars, and he has Fallout, a retro-futuristic show that starts with atomic bomb explosions on the Los Angeles horizon.
“In my defence, I started making this project before Chris. I was amused by the fact that we were both going to have sequences depicting similar things in different projects that we’re both working on. I was quite annoyed by the fact that he figured out the same thing that I did about [atomic bomb explosions] … that you saw it long before you heard it, and of course, that becomes a feature of the opening of our show, but it’s fun.
“Chris and I collaborated for many, many years and we’re still the first audience for most of the stuff we work on. So, it’s interesting to be working in somewhat similar spaces.”
Well, Fallout isn’t that similar to Oppenheimer, really. In a way, it’s closer to Barbie (more of which later). The show is the latest in a line of video game to streaming adaptations. The Fallout game line started about the time Nolan was playing his part in New Zealand’s dairy boom.
It was Fallout 3 released in 2008 – the same year as the Nolans’ Batman epic The Dark Knight – that caught his attention. Actually, he says, it almost devoured a year of his life and “almost derailed my entire career”. It wasn’t just the first-person shoot-em-up excitements on offer, it was the world and the characters and the dystopian tribes to which they belonged that hooked him.
“One of the reasons I got excited with this game was that in that moment, there were some good films – we made a couple of good films at the time – but it felt a bit soft. Whereas games like Fallout and Portal, they would do things with a story that you could not believe. They had guts in ways that you could not believe, and they would bend and twist the genre in ways that films had given up on.
“They had better storytelling and Fallout was one of those with this unusual, ambitious way of engaging with pop culture.
“I just could not believe how weird and dark and funny and goofy this thing was. Every second you have a different flavour being thrown at you. So, we could easily recreate that in a series.”
With the end of Westworld, he and Joy signed a $20 million first-look deal with Amazon Studios. That delivered one series of The Peripheral, an ambitious adaptation of the William Gibson time-travel, virtual-reality novel that lasted a season before the studio scrapped it because of the 2023 Hollywood actor and director strikes.
About five years ago, Nolan had lunch with Todd Howard, the boss of game developers Bethesda Softworks, and shook hands on turning it into a television show. Fallout follows last year’s HBO hit The Last of Us, another post-apocalyptic survival thriller based on a game.
But as Fallout players will know, the source material is dense and quirky. The show exists in a future America that had blown up some time in the Cold War, with some characters that have happily survived in bunkers since then, their mid-20th century values intact. If the game was a B-movie mash-up, the show is even more so.
“It’s an America that never had a Watergate, never had a Vietnam, never had a moment of self-reflection in a world in which the Cold War never ended – or rather, it ended in a fiery ruin for everyone. In the game, you have this social commentary about an exceptionalist America and arguments about communism, capitalism – all these things have now bubbled back into the cultural conversation again, and unfortunately back into geopolitics again.”
Meanwhile, in both the game and the show, robotic armoured “knights” of the Brotherhood of Steel roam the landscape with their “squires” while some regions have reverted to the wild west in shades of Westworld.
Among those in Stetsons is “the Ghoul”, a nose-less, seemingly immortal mutant gunslinger who was a cowboy actor in his former life, played by Walton Goggins. He’s this show’s possible answer to the Man in Black played by Ed Harris in Westworld. That show was actually set in a game of sorts – an Old West amusement park where guests could role-play among the androids.
“One of the things that drew us to Westworld in the first place was video games and this larger question of, as our interactive entertainments become more and more immersive and real, where is the line drawn between game and reality?” says Nolan. “So, it’s sort of a feedback loop.
“Westworld was one example of the western being a fantasy because it represents the pre-apocalypse. Same rule set – no law and order. Your fate is what you make of it and it’s just you and your gun against an unforgiving world. Well, the post-apocalypse is the same thing, right? But civilisation has now come and gone and it’s still just you and your gun. Or, in this case, your automatic weapon in a world in which there are no rules.
“I was drawn to all these stories, in part, because they allow you to talk about what’s happening right now but from the safe remove of fantasy. It’s not our world that ended, it’s a different world, which allows you to get people to engage with topics that they otherwise wouldn’t be comfortable engaging with when it comes to politics or when it comes to the satire.”
Apart from Nolan’s cousin’s cows, the show has some other NZ connections. It’s shot by veteran Kiwi cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh, whose work on An Angel at My Table, The Piano and Once Were Warriors led to an international career in many genres. Fallout’s co-showrunner and executive producer Geneva Robertson-Dworet is a dual US-NZ citizen. It’s something that she addressed in a Fallout media event when the trailer was launched last month.
“We often talk about how [countries like NZ] … as these wonderful, peaceful utopias, and ‘What if everyone was like there?” And the reality is not everywhere is like those countries. But what would it mean if those countries were to open their borders and let everyone in, and everyone could have a better life?
“We saw the vaults [survival shelters] as basically a mirror to that … what does it mean that not everyone gets to live there, and people suffer on the surface?”
The lead vault-dweller in Fallout is Lucy, played by Ella Purnell. For the rising English actress, it’s another American survival drama after Yellowjackets, in which she was Jackie, captain of the high school soccer team whose plane crashed in the wilderness and things went downhill from there.
So, when Lucy ventures out of her bunker, where she’s enjoyed a nice, hermetically sealed life in a time capsule of 1960s America, isn’t she essentially the Barbie of Fallout’s very big toy box?
“I never thought of it that way. Now I want to write an essay about comparing Fallout to the universe of Barbie because I’m sure there’s a lot of really interesting parallels to pull into that,” Purnell replies to the Listener via Zoom from LA.
“When you take this innocent, naive, morally good character, and you put her in that stark contrast of the chaos of the Wasteland – that’s comedy, as well as the heartbreak of realising everything she’s ever known, everything she’s ever believed, is a lie.
“What interested me in this character was ‘where is she going to go; who is she going to become?’ When you do a movie, you’ve got it all planned out. With TV, you just have to jump and hope that the writers and the director are going to catch you. But the writing is there, the ideas are there and the concepts are there. It’s smart and it’s intelligent.”
The Lucy character isn’t a direct lift from the game series and the show’s storylines exist in the game’s world but aren’t from it, which sets it apart from The Last of Us. The show is another adaptation of material into which gamers have invested a lot of money, time and energy. Does Nolan, who directed the first three of the first season’s eight episodes, think the original Fallout fan club will be pleased with his adaptation? Does he care?
“I don’t think you really can set out to please the fans of anything, or please anyone other than yourself. You have to come into this trying to make the show that you want to make and trusting that, as fans of the game, we would find the pieces that were essential to us about the game and try to do the best version of those that we can. It’s kind of a fool’s errand to try to figure out how to make people happy in that way. You’ve got to make yourself happy. I’ve made myself very happy with the show.” And you get the feeling that, like Westworld, Nolan will be happy to do further Fallout seasons until the cows come home.
Fallout’s eight episodes will be available on Prime Video from April 11.
