EntertainmentTVSci-Fi ShowsFallout TV showFallout TV show writer explains how Todd Howard and Batman helped shape an original storyWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
EntertainmentTVSci-Fi ShowsFallout TV showFallout TV show writer explains how Todd Howard and Batman helped shape an original storyWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Prime Video)
There is a moment near the beginning of Fallout 3 – the landmark 2008 action role-playing game from Bethesda Games Studios – that is imprinted on anyone who experienced it at the time. In it, the player-created main character opens the exit to the subterranean vault they’ve called home for 19 years, and steps into the blinding light of the Wasteland for the first time, a literal world of potential stretching as far as the eye can see.
‘I was, right out of the gate, blown away,’ says Jonathan Nolan, the co-creator of HBO’s Westworld and co-writer ofThe Dark Knight,The Dark Knight Rises,The PrestigeandInterstellar, alongside big brother Chris. During a conversation withTotal Filmin early February, Nolan is reminiscing about ‘looking for a new distraction’ in late 2008, months after The Dark Knight hit cinemas, and being drawn to a copy of hot new thing Fallout 3.
SUBSCRIBE!(Image credit: Amazon MGM Studios/Total Film)This article first appeared in Total Film issue 348.Subscribe here to never miss an issue!
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(Image credit: Amazon MGM Studios/Total Film)This article first appeared in Total Film issue 348.Subscribe here to never miss an issue!
(Image credit: Amazon MGM Studios/Total Film)
This article first appeared in Total Film issue 348.Subscribe here to never miss an issue!
‘I was obsessed with the game, and obsessed with the world of it,’ a visibly animated Nolan says over Zoom. ‘The ambition of it, and the mythology of it, and the sophistication of the world, and the gravitas of it. What really got to me, though [was] the weirdness of it, and the gonzo, satirical, impossible-to-place tone of this thing. You very seldom see anything like this.’
Contradiction is at the heart of Fallout. Take that first in-game glimpse of the open world. The paradox of this moment is that, for all the freedom it promises, everything in front of you is extremely dead. The toxic landscape is dotted with the decrepit relics of a once-thriving civilisation, some two centuries after a nuclear judgement day has driven the haves underground and left the have-nots to fend for themselves on the surface with irradiated cockroaches the size of house cats and even more monstrous mutants.
Life is as grim as it gets in the Wasteland, yet the tone of theFallout TV showis anything but. Nolan describes the series as ‘closer to comedy’ than anything he and Lisa Joy have made to date. Leaning into Fallout’s contradictions, Nolan and Joy, who were still working on Westworld while initially developing Fallout in 2019, made the unusual decision to hire a pair of showrunners with wildly divergent backgrounds: Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel, Tomb Raider) and Graham Wagner (Silicon Valley, The Office).
‘Geneva comes from the comic-book world like me, whereas Graham comes from comedy,’ Nolan points out. ‘That was kind of the approach – a little bit of David Lean, and a little bit of straight comedy,’ he nods. Much of Fallout’s humour comes from its deeply embedded critique of consumer corporatism. The Wasteland is littered with the retro-futuristic detritus of mega-corporations like Vault-Tec, and its grinning mascot Vault Boy, who is often glimpsed giving a big, incongruous thumbs-up.
‘There’s all this branded stuff,’ Robertson-Dworet says. ‘And it seems to imply that whatever brought the world to the end was the hyper-corporatisation of that pre-war society.’ ‘It’s given us a fair bit of joy to be able to do that on Amazon Prime Video,’ adds Wagner, with a chuckle. ‘That is the paradox of America.’
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Game changer
(Image credit: Prime Video)
Both may be violent stories set in a post-apocalyptic America, featuring zombie-adjacent creatures, but the comparisons between TLOU and Fallout end there. Most significantly, while the former faithfully (some might say slavishly) replicates the game’s narrative on screen, Fallout is telling an original story in a new location for the series – Los Angeles – but all set in the same canonical American Wasteland as the games.
‘From the first conversation with Todd [Howard, game director of Fallout 3 & 4, and an executive producer on the show] we were most excited about an original story,’ says Nolan. ‘Fallout, in my career, is closest to the work we did in adapting Batman, where there’s so much storytelling in the Batman universe that there is no canonical version of it, so you’re free to invent your own. Each of the [Fallout] games is a discrete story – different city, distinct protagonist – within the same mythology. Our series sits in relation to the games as the games sit in relation to each other. It’s almost like we’re Fallout 5. I don’t want to sound presumptuous, but it’s just a non-interactive version of it, right?’
Ghoul & the Gang
(Image credit: Prime Video)
A standout supporting player in The Shield, Justified and two Tarantino westerns, but with criminally few leading roles to his name, Goggins admits to having no idea what Fallout was initially. ‘All I needed to know was that Jonathan and Lisa were behind it,’ he nods. ‘Then they started describing the character. And I was like, “Really? So I don’t have any hair? I’ve been walking in a Wasteland for 200 years? OK!”’
Certainly, The Ghoul has a swagger and a confidence in his capabilities that make him cool, calm and collected, even when drastically outnumbered in a gunfight. Goggins turned to numerous iconic western stars for inspiration: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, James Coburn, Alan Ladd, James Arness, Paul Newman, but in particular, ‘I really, really watched, over and over again, Henry Fonda in Once upon a Time in the West, and the way in which his energy comes into the room before he does. The way he moves with very little effort, and he never really speaks above a whisper.
The Ghoul is hired to track down Wilzig (Michael Emerson), a scientist with a valuable secret in his head, causing him to cross paths with Ella Purnell’s former Vault-dweller Lucy and Aaron Moten’s Brotherhood of Steel squire Maximus, who make up the cast’s interconnected core trio.
When we meet Lucy, a life-long resident of Vault 33, her father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) has arranged for her to be married to a suitor from Vault 32. Her destiny as a wife and mother is about to unfold exactly as she’s always been told it will.
‘Lucy is highly trained and smart, and is this A1 put-together type,’ Purnell says. ‘She truly is a good person, and believes in the Golden Rule, and that her children’s children will go to the surface one day, and rebuild America. She believes in doing her duty, and procreating, and creating the future. And then through a series of unfortunate events, she ends up going to the surface and leaving the Vault, and finding that may not be entirely true.’
On the surface, Lucy quickly learns that morality is a privilege. ‘Lucy is able to be this noble person back in her Vault, because she’s never wanted for anything,’ Robertson-Dworet says, ‘And as soon as she’s on the surface, every decision becomes a lot harder.’ That’s certainly true for Maximus, a member of the quasi-religious Brotherhood of Steel – a technocratic paramilitary order whose primary aim is to locate, preserve and regulate pre-war technology. This is achieved through the use of Power Armour (see boxout, right), metal suits that turn Brotherhood Knights into walking tanks. ‘They usually use violent means in order to achieve their goals,’ says soft-spoken Moten. ‘Maximus enters as a young initiate, and is hoping to rise in the ranks of the Brotherhood.’
Armor Wars
(Image credit: Prime Video)
For the cast, the suit was a special effect whose impact never waned. ‘It’s one of those things where you needed someone to tell you to close your mouth,’ says Moten. ‘You’re just gaping at this thing. And the way that you see people behave – whether it’s background actors or our crew – everyone needs to move out of the way.’
‘I remember there was one point where he took a couple of fast steps towards me,’ adds Purnell. ‘I backed up off my mark and was completely out of focus, because that’s your gut reaction to this robot transformer-looking dude who’s humungous.’
Nolan himself directed the first three episodes, shooting primarily on location on the Skeleton Coast of Namibia and the Western Salt Lakes of Utah to capture a sense of the games’ ‘beauty and scope’, while staying uncompromisingly true to the series’ outrageously OTT violence (‘It’s definitely a hallmark of the game that we knew we had to translate into the series’). He also thought deeply about how to replicate the experience of playing the game in a passive medium. ‘The way in which you interact with these games, there’s as much cultural anthropology as there is violence,’ he explains. ‘You’re sifting through the leavings of a world that has been destroyed. To take that freedom and eliminate it as a filmmaker is intimidating. You’re taking away interactivity, and you’re replacing it with intentionality, which is exciting. I think that’s why there’s a place for adapting video games.’
Fallout is released on Prime Video on April 11. For more, check out all the otherupcoming video game adaptationson the way in 2024 and beyond.
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