‘My brother and his kids are big fans of Fallout,’ says Jonathan Nolan: ‘It’s what a Christopher Nolan TV show would look like’

The first season of Emmy Award-nominated post-apocalyptic show Fallout ends on an explosive note. Lucy (Ella Purnell) discovers her father Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan) has been instrumental in causing the apocalypse for reasons of his own. With season 2, her quest to find her father continues, for different reasons, as she sets out on a renewed mission across New Vegas, a post-war city located in the ruins of Las Vegas, in this video game adaptation.

“The Fallout games have always been about going to new places, meeting new factions and moral dilemmas. We’d like to keep our characters moving in honour of the structure and nature of the games,” says showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet Lucy in an exclusive interview with SCREEN. With relentless action taking place in the heart of the desert, the opening of Fallout season 2 gives a lot of Mad Max, George Miller’s blockbuster dystopian franchise.

Walton Goggins as The Ghoul in Fallout season 2.

“I always imagined that the game developers would say there’s a nod to Mad Max there as well. There’s such a fun and spirited post-apocalyptic feeling in Mad Max, and that’s what Fallout is about as well. It’s not a depressing Cormac McCarthy version of the post-apocalyptic world. Ours is an upbeat and gleeful post-apocalyptic world,” reasons Geneva.

“What the Fallout games and Mad Max films had in common is the fascination with how culture evolves and emerges in the ruins of civilization,” says executive producer Jonathan Nolan. A fan of the Mad Max movies, he feels Fallout is even a step ahead. “What I love about Fallout is that there’s a little bit of civilization happening there. It’s a little less desperate, and there are more people. And these weird pockets of benign civilizations here and there gives it a Star Trek feeling. It’s something that the show captures really nicely,” he adds.

Ella Purnell as Lucy and Walton Gogins as The Ghoul in Fallout season 2.

The idea behind Lucy navigating New Vegas also holds symbolic resonance to the distance (both physical and ideological) she’s travelled so far. “Lucy has had a very sheltered upbringing. As a character, she’s getting further and further from that. So, we wanted to mirror her journey by bringing her further and further away from home. The tone of the New Vegas game is a little rougher around the edges. We got a snake pit feeling to the show to capture the spirit of the game,” says Geneva.

Kyle, who plays Lucy’s father, explains the equation his character shares with his daughter. “Working with Ella was more about creating the father-daughter relationship. They had a very close relationship without a mom being around. She was the apple of her father’s eyes. So, we became very good friends in the course of filming. We have genuine love for each other. I care a great deal about her. She’s very special,” he says. But since Hank appears only in the first and the last episodes of season 1, he had to find a way to make his presence felt in little time.

Ella Purnell as Lucy and Kyle MacLachlan as Hank in Fallout.

“It was challenging. In the original script, there were actually scenes that were scattered across the episodes, but ultimately, they were removed. They didn’t really say much. They were just me in an isolated environment. We didn’t really know where I was, just that I was being held captive somewhere. They felt we needed to remind the audience that I’d been kidnapped,” recalls Kyle.

But it worked in the show’s favour once those scenes were chopped off from the final cut. “It was nice that they were able to remove all of that in the middle, and have me just in the beginning and the end, because Lucy kept going for it anyway. Also, they felt they didn’t want the audience to know if my character was still alive. That made the end reveal more powerful. It was a great opportunity for me to play the dad Lucy thought she knew. So, I had to justify, to the best of my ability, what I’d done,” says Kyle.

Kyle MacLachlan as Hank MacLean in Fallout.

The actor has made a career out of playing the good dad, even voicing the character of the eponymous Dad in Pixar’s seminal coming-of-age franchise Inside Out. It helps that he’s a father to a son in real life. “It’s a very unusual experience to be a parent. I thought I knew all about how I operate, how I love, but then this baby comes along. You realize there’s a whole another layer, a whole experience of love that I wasn’t prepared for and didn’t even know existed. Suddenly, you hold this child in your arms, and you’re not alone,” says Kyle, adding, “Regardless of what the character I’m playing goes through, the common thread through it all is that you’ve helped create someone who’s a part of you and whom you’ll always have a connection to. So, that is constant. What happens on top of that — the layers and the situations — vary.”

The layers and situations of a post-apocalyptic world like Fallout can be rather bizarre, especially for someone unfamiliar with the video game. Kyle is no stranger to immersive and extensive worldbuilding, having played Paul Atreides in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune. But he admits he wasn’t too acquainted with the Fallout games when he was approached for the part. “Prior to my conversation with Jonathan Nolan and the creators, I did my research and found out that it was an incredibly rich, complex, and immersive world. I really appreciated that complexity. When I read the script, I felt these are well drawn-out characters that just happen to be in a world and in circumstances that are very difficult, challenging, and offer all sorts of different approaches. So, I was really excited,” says Kyle.

Still from Fallout.

Even the makers — Jonathan and Geneva — took into account that they had to strike a balance between staying faithful to video game nerds and not alienating those not up to speed with the world. “I always find the tone of the show very appealing. It was very important as we were building out season 1 that we were holding the hands of new audience members just at the same time as welcoming longtime gamers,” says Geneva. “That was one of Jonathan’s instincts that we stay with Lucy’s character so that all newcomers have a POV character with whom they were learning more about the world of the wasteland for the first time. That made us all feel very secure. Just like Lucy’s eyes are experiencing everything batshit crazy that’s going on, the audience are going through all that with her,” she adds.

Jonathan describes Lucy as his “spirit animal” since she goes about traversing the various facets of the wasteland with her signature “Okie dokie”. He admits he got “panicked” when Geneva first pitched him the character of The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), given his peculiar appearance. But then he would’ve let out a Lucy-like “Okie dokie” in his head and tapped into the growing visual effects ecosystem at their disposal. “You can do the character as a bad guy or as a one off, but to make a point-of-view character that the audience cares about, with hundreds of shots in every epis0de, it’s an extraordinary undertaking,” says Jonathan. “The Ghoul has become a protagonist. To make a character like that, you need to be able to read the emotions. You need to be with them, not just for them,” he adds.

Walton Goggins as The Ghoul in Fallout.

The tricky area with having multiple close-up or POV shots of The Ghoul was to crack that nose. Jonathan attributes it to a “combination of Walton sitting in the make-up chair for hours and hours, and hundreds of artists around the world using extraordinary techniques to make it work.” While he claims that VFX is their secret sauce, he confirms that Walton’s “fine looking nose” actually came from India’s FutureWorks. “I knew that the steps that have been taken in visual effects in the last few years include global production. We have incredible partners around the world. There’s an enormous amount of visual effects production in India, with incredibly talented artists. They’ve unlocked possibilities that you couldn’t have imagined even five or 10 years ago in television,” adds Jonathan.

Geneva claims that while “some sci-fi shows rely far more heavily on VFX,” Fallout production designer Howard Cummings “gives an incredible amount of attention in trying to recreate these environments as much as we possibly can physically.” “Of course, we use VFX as a tool to achieve the ultimate look of the show, but we try to make everything physically and practically as much as we can. That makes the whole world of Fallout more tactile. As you watch the show, you can tell that things are real,” she adds. Her vision was supported by Jonathan’s resourcefulness at every juncture right from season 1.

Still from Fallout season 2.

“When we were working on season 1, I remember pestering Jonathan with a lot of ‘Can we do this?’ And he was like, ‘Stop it! Just bring me your best idea and I’ll figure out how to do it.’ That’s very much the attitude. No idea is too big for this show, which was very exciting for me. Once in a while, we may have to tweak something, but we really don’t hold back. Somehow, we manage to do all the things we want to do, which is tremendously liberating,” says Geneva.

Jonathan claims that as much as he’s been a pioneer of IMAX with his brother Christopher Nolan, he realized the same scale was possible once he watched HBO’s groundbreaking fantasy show Game of Thrones. “There’s no compromise anymore. In the final seasons, Game of Thrones leaves nothing in terms of scale and scope. They made that show in all the same places that we made Interstellar (2014), The Dark Knight (2008), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). There was nothing that they lacked there. Obviously, there’s nothing more compelling theatrically than to watch an IMAX film. I’ve always loved IMAX. But I don’t think we’re giving up anything on scale when we’re working on this show,” says the filmmaker, who co-wrote the above films with Christopher.

If you’re going to think what a Christopher Nolan TV show would be like, here you are! Chris and I figured out together how to make things work on a big scale. Our first movie together was Memento (2000), which had a tiny budget and a tiny scale. We learnt piece by piece how to incorporate scale into movies,” recalls Jonathan, who reveals that his brother and his kids are “big fans” of Fallout and “thoroughly enjoyed” it. “He’s always been very supportive of the things I’ve worked on and vice-versa,” says Jonathan.

Christopher’s next, The Odyssey, is the first film to be shot only on IMAX cameras. Jonathan has taken on a completely different path as he’s busy developing season 3 of Fallout. In a previous conversation with this writer, he joked that the poster Lucky downing a Nuka-Cola as nuclear bombs go off in the background made him tell his brother he’d made his own “Barbenheimer.” When I remind him of that, Jonathan is quick to hit back, laughing, “I started working on Fallout before he began Oppenheimer. So how much he’s inspired by me taking on this world, you can ask him.”