Jonathan Nolan interview on Fallout and comparison to Oppenheimer: “I joked with my brother, I did the Barbenheimer show” | web series

A few years after Westworld, director-writer Jonathan Nolan is back with another sci-fi dystopian show, Fallout, based on the popular video game franchise. To promote the series, Jonathan visited India last month, more than a decade after he failed to make it to the country for his brother Christopher Nolan’s 2012 superhero film The Dark Knight Rises. In an exclusive interview, Jonathan revealed that Fallout took him back to his Batman days, where he felt like a kid lost in a candy store.

(ALSO READ – EXCLUSIVE: Oppenheimer book author Kai Bird explains the hits and misses of Christopher Nolan’s film)

Adaptation of the game into the show

“It allowed me to take something that you experience as a fan, as a gamer that you love… I knew nothing about the game when I sat down to play Fallout 3. I just wanted to play and I knew it. That they were good and different. I hope the audience experiences in this show what I did in the game – you never know what’s going to happen next, what’s around the corner, what the game is going to be. It has different rules than anything I’ve played before and I hope the audience will feel the same about everything they watch so far,” said Jonathan.

Fallout may borrow its aesthetic from retro-futuristic and atompunk sci-fi shows of old, its genre-bending storyline giving it a breath of fresh cinematic air. “The first thing that attracted me to the show was its unique tone. They are nothing like before. They are dark, ambitious, violent, but also funny and strange. There’s political commentary and satire about what American became before the world blew up. I’ve never seen all these flavors together in one place,” Jonathan explained.

He feels the show has become more relevant in the five years since it was greenlit. “It is very important for me. We started talking in 2019. Then we had the global pandemic and the fear of nuclear war with Russia invading Ukraine. I thought it was all great marketing for the show, but now we want it to be less relevant,” Jonathan said with a laugh. He said that the humor put into the show helped make it more fun and enjoyable rather than dark. and depressing. “We were shooting in the middle of a pandemic with masks on, so it was good to be on the lighter side. The shoot was strangely upbeat, and I hope the show is hampered by that.” Jonathan said.

The Barbenheimer Show

The sense of strange optimism at the heart of the show is perhaps what sets it apart from other stories that explore the relationship between nuclear technology and apocalyptic risks, such as Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning film last year, Oppenheimer. Jonathan and Christopher have co-written films such as Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight franchise and Interstellar. So it’s only natural that brothers approach the same topics through different lenses. Jonathan agrees that he sees Fallout as a companion to Oppenheimer.

“Yeah. It certainly plays in a similar space, but with a very different tone. Last year, I joked with my brother that I might do a Barbenheimer show. Because it has a little bit of each. I was also surprised when I saw the poster, Which we did for South by Southwest, where Lucy drinks from a Nuka Cola bottle,” Jonathan said, noting how Fallout is a marriage of Oppenheimer and her box office rival, Greta Gerwig’s satire, Barbie. .

Fallout’s Barbie is Lucy, played by Ella Purnell, who was also seen in Zack Snyder’s 2021 zombie apocalypse film, Army of the Dead. But Fallout was unlike anything he had seen or had seen. I knew about games, I played games. I got it all through the 65-70 page pilot. But I wasn’t very good, so it doesn’t count,” he told us with a laugh. But not knowing helped her play Lucy, who, like Barbie, rises from the privileged bunker to the post-apocalyptic world.

“Lucy lived underground all her life. He then leaves the basement and goes into the desert. So he is like a newborn baby, he knows nothing, he is incredibly innocent and naive. So it was really about stripping him down to the purest version of a person he can be,” Ella added. Jonathan said his casting did 90 percent of the job. “Lucy had to be both the audience and this smart, capable woman who’s also a little naive and wide-eyed,” he noted.

Unlike Jonathan, Ella may not be a Fallout geek. But meeting fans of the game like him made him even more grateful for the opportunity. “The magnitude of what we were doing was lost on me. It’s overwhelming and intimidating to know that people just passionately, fiercely love the game. It’s a crazy experience. “To meet people who say, ‘The game changed my life, it’s how I bonded with my brother, it’s how I met my wife,’ is very humbling,” he said.

All episodes of Fallout will start streaming on Prime Video starting April 11.

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