Amazon’s Fallout adaptation is set to release later this month, and in preparation the cast and crew have started sharing titbits about its production and their work on the series.
Fallout executive producer Jonathan Nolan – who co-wrote many of his brother Christopher Nolan’s films, such as The Dark Knight and Interstellar – said his love for the games began with Fallout 3. In fact, he had such a good time playing, he claimed this is the reason he didn’t write any films for two years.
“I didn’t know much about it and I was in the mood for a distraction,” Nolan recalled. “I think Chris had tasked me with writing The Dark Knight Rises and so if that movie was slightly delayed, it was probably in part because of Fallout 3.”
Nolan said he was constantly left surprised by the Fallout video game series, something that is less and less common these days. “It’s dark, violent, but it’s also satirical and in some places almost goofy. It’s all these amazing things in one. It’s a really ambitious game, and I’ve never really experienced anything quite like it.”
Nolan also shared more on the difficulties of adapting an open-world video game, compared to the likes of a book. “Usually when you’re adapting something, like a novel, you’re adding to it,” Nolan said. “You lose some things, but you’re largely adding light, picture, persona and humanity. With a video game, you’re taking things away, like the audience’s sense of freedom. The whole premise of a game like Fallout, it’s open world and you can go any direction you want.”
The producer noted this is something viewers can’t do when watching a television show, so the biggest challenge the showrunners faced was still conveying the “freedom” of a game. Amazon’s Fallout team did this by allowing the show’s story to be told through the eyes of its three main characters: the young and naive Vault dweller Lucy (played by Ella Purnell), Brotherhood of Steel soldier Maximus (Aaron Morten) and mutated outlaw the Ghoul (Walton Goggins).
Looking back on her casting as Lucy, Purnell said the Fallout team pitched the character as a “Leslie Knope/Ned Flanders-type”, but one with “something kind of dangerous lurking there”.
Goggins, meanwhile, added he liked the social commentary Fallout provides. “We live in a very, very chaotic time,” he said. “We’re seeing an erosion of morality and an erosion of optimism. And it’s really unfortunate, but [Fallout] is reflecting in some ways the world that is developing around us.
“I hope we don’t go any further than that, and we just stick to where we are, but that’s what’s so interesting to me about the show, the questions that it poses. And so, I’m just so curious how the rebuilding of society happens in this game and in this story as it goes forward.”
Fallout will be available on Prime Video from 12th April. Earlier this year, Bethesda’s Todd Howard revealed that some ideas planned for Amazon’s Fallout adaptation had to be nixed, because the studio has them earmarked for Fallout 5.