Jonathan Nolan Says ‘Fallout’ Success Marks the Start of a ‘Long and Exciting Stretch’ of Video Game Adaptations | Exclusive Video

From finding the right locations and cast to adapt its video game source material to combining visual effects and practical sets to bring Prime Video’s original story to life, developing “Fallout” into a hit TV show was a “high-wire act across the board,” Jonathan Nolan admitted.

Speaking in a behind-the-scenes featurette, exclusively debuting with TheWrap in the video below, the executive producer and director laid out how the production team’s hard work paid off. For starters, the Prime Video series became one of the streamer’s most watched titles and earned a total 16 Emmy Award nominations, including Outstanding Drama Series.

“I’m so proud of what we were able to create with an incredibly talented crew, incredibly talented cast, everyone pulling together and trying to breathe life into the idea of what Los Angeles would look like 200 years after the end of the
world,” Nolan said.

Watch the featurette below:

The show’s success, as evident in both fan and awards recognition, continues a trend for adapting large-scale video game IP set by HBO’s “The Last of Us” in 2023.

Speaking with TheWrap in a separate interview, Nolan admitted to feeling frustrated by “the failure of Hollywood to figure out how” to adapt video games. “The Last of Us” changed that conversation and “took the pressure off of us a little bit,” he said.

Whether “Fallout” wins or loses at this year’s Emmys, Nolan believes that the recognitions from the Television Academy are “really helpful” for the video game genre moving forward.

“I was there close to the beginning of the comic book movie explosion. I’ve seen how this works before,” he said. “I have no doubt that we’re at the beginning of a long and exciting stretch of people bringing these incredible stories to a whole new audience.”

Read on for Nolan’s full interview with TheWrap:

How did it feel to get the vote of confidence from the audience that the show was a hit?

Incredibly exciting. You never make anything planning on it being a giant global hit. I’m a big believer that you have to make the kind of stuff you love and not worry about whether it’s going to find a massive audience, but just try to make the best thing you can, and that’s what [cocreators] Geneva [Robertson-Dworet and] Graham [Wagnerand], myself, Todd [Howard] the rest of the team were trying to do.

I think we knew how popular the games were, and I knew that as a fan of the games, you never know if that’s going to survive adaptation. But the reason why we wanted to adapt these games is that the games had a tone that was utterly unique. I hadn’t experienced anything like it in games or in film or in television. This mix of the sardonic, dark, political, deeply funny and weak is such a delicious combination for me as a gamer, that I felt really confident there would be an audience out there.

What I didn’t count on was my mom loving it — I mean, my mom would have loved it no matter what, or she would have told me she loved it, but I think she actually, genuinely loved it – and I think that that speaks to the fundamental appeal of what Tim Cain and Todd Howard and all of the incredible writers and directors, developers of the game brought into the world. It’s just one of a kind.

What was the biggest challenge for you directing in Season 1?

Directing was an absolute dream. I got to work with a mash up of crew that I’d worked with on my first show “Person of Interest” and on “Westworld.” So it’s like a family reunion and some incredible new people as well. I’d always wanted to work with Walton Goggins, Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten.

I was just trying to recreate the world from the games, because the games really are about world. Each game is set in a different environment. The environment is every bit as much a character as the other characters. And the unique feature of gameplay in “Fallout” is that the world is simultaneously enormous and epic, but also microscopic. They’re telling a story in old toys and broken bottles and entries in journals and safes that you find hidden away in some of these environments. So that mixture of the macro and the micro, the cosmic and the microscopic, was a huge challenge for us to try to create the feeling that you get from the games on screen and capture that in the camera. We use a mixture of the old and new. We shot on film on a volume. We went practical, on location photography all around the world, but used the very best and latest physics techniques to try to bring it all together.

What was your favorite sequence or scene to work on?

If I had to pick a sequence that was my favorite, it’s probably the massacre sequence following the wedding. I think it’s scripted and burned into my memory as scene 86. We had so many setups that we went through the alphabet three times. Our script coordinator, who I’ve worked with for a very long time, said it was the the most setups in any scene he’s ever seen. And it pulled together all of the different amazing pieces of the “Fallout” universe.

You’re in the vault with the Vault Dwellers trying to defend themselves against this onslaught from the Raiders and these beautiful sets we stitched together from our volume set and our practical sets in Brooklyn, incredible stunt performances from our stunt coordinator, Casey O’Neill, and some really beautiful cinematography. We just got to do lots of slow motion of wedding cake exploding, which is hard to beat.

What lessons did you learn in Season 1 that you hope to apply in Season 2?

First season shows are always insane. You’re trying to figure out what the thing is, and no one can really help you because no one’s seen the thing. You have the enormous benefit of a crew, many of whom are fans of the games, but of course the story for the show is original. So first seasons of shows are always a lot of fun. They’re always wild and wooly. They’re always a heavy lift. And the light of a second season is now you all know the show. The actors know the roles, writers know the tone and the feeling of the show, the producers and heads of department know how to pull these things together.

We learned an awful lot about the characters and the way they interact and talk with each other and the exciting possibilities for different encounters between characters who maybe haven’t met each other yet. But we also figured out how to make all the monsters, and there are more monsters, more environments, more factions that we are currently designing and building right now to begin production quite soon. So we’re really excited.

It’s the same feeling I had when “Batman Begins” went into the world. I had worked on that for a little while with my brother and then written the script for “The Dark Knight” for him. And I just thought, ‘We built this thing. Let’s see what it can do.’ And that’s the same feeling we have right now. We’ve built this thing, and in Season 2, we’re going to find out what it could do.

For “Fallout” Season 1, you released all the episodes at once. What was the decision-making process behind that and is that something you expect to do for Season 2?

This is the first series that I’ve been a part of where we released all of the first season at once. We were really proud of what we made and really excited to put in front of the audience. We’re so aware of the fact that when you have a new series, even if it’s a well known and beloved franchise like “Fallout,” you don’t have a lot of chances to make a first impression. So we felt really confident with what we had and we felt like the best way to cut through the noise of all of these shows that are out there in the universe was to give people an opportunity to to dive head first into the madness.

Amazon has the flexibility and I think it’s smart to choose horses for courses. For some series, it makes sense to do it that way. For some series, it makes sense to do it that way for the first season and not necessarily that way going forward. And if you look at some of the big hit Prime Video series, they’ve put all the episodes out in the first season and then subsequent seasons taken a different approach. So we’re in conversation with them about that. We’re a long way out for making that decision. But it’s a real pleasure to work with a partner in Amazon that can take such a thoughtful approach to how a show like this should find its audience.

Have you and Bethesda come up with a plan in terms of how many seasons you see “Fallout” being rolled out over? Do you have a sense of whether you’d continue to stick with these original characters or expand the show to other new characters in the universe in future seasons?

The architects of the narrative for this show are Geneva and Graham, working with us, all of us talking it through. It’s important that from the beginning you have a plan, but that plan has to be flexible. It’s a classic, best laid plan. You can’t account for the fact that you set off on a show that the company you’re making the show for might not exist by the time you’re getting to the end of the run or might not exist in the forum that it was when you started. So you have to be a little flexible.

It’s not like making a movie, where you make one and that’s it. You are telling a story in good faith with both your partners in the studio and the audience in the hopes that you’ll get a chance to explore all the things you want to explore with that. But you also have to be flexible.

So I think you really do owe the audience. There’s an obligation there to set off with a story where you’ve done some thinking about where the story is going to go. I’m not in favor of the approach of just, throwing shit against the wall and kind of making it up as you go. But you also can’t be so rigid that you find yourself essentially in a situation in which your plans all come crashing down because there isn’t the real estate you hope to tell a story.

So there’s lots of conversations about where this story can go, lots of great opportunities and possibilities for where it can go. And we’re just delighted that the audience showed up for this one, because it makes us feel confident that we can continue telling a very ambitious story.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

The post Jonathan Nolan Says ‘Fallout’ Success Marks the Start of a ‘Long and Exciting Stretch’ of Video Game Adaptations | Exclusive Video appeared first on TheWrap .