IIf you were to ask director Jonathan Nolan what his favorite movie of the year was from the late 2000s, he would most likely name a video game instead. “I started playing Pong years ago with my brother Chris because I grew up watching the whole history of the medium, and the storytelling, the tone, the things that we were doing in the game had this level of audacity. That’s when I started,” he says. “That's what I felt [2008’s] Fallout 3: Audacity. Frankly, I didn't feel that way in the film and television industry at the time. ”

Director Nolan, who has just finished directing the first series of Amazon Prime's Fallout TV show, will be sitting next to video game director Todd Howard, who led the development of Fallout 3 and 4, and will be attending a number of premieres for the first series. Two episodes told to me before time. It's clear within minutes that Nolan understands the game almost as well as Todd. He says he's drawn to games where your options are open, where you decide for yourself who you want to be, and where your decisions affect the world around you – games like Todd Howard's . The two meet like old friends, are comfortable around each other, and are passionate about each other's work.

“I talked to a lot of people about making a Fallout movie or TV show, and I kept saying no to everyone,” Howard says. “I loved the work that Jonah did in film and television, and in some of the interviews he did, he mentioned his love for the game…I told someone he was perfect. I said, ‘Can someone help me?’ We met and luckily hit it off. I found out he was very familiar with Fallout.”

That conference took place in 2019. At the time, there was no precedent for a proper video game animation, despite many ill-fated attempts over the years. (We're in a different place now; the curse of video game movies is broken, and there are now plenty of TV and movie adaptations.) Todd also envisioned Fallout as a movie. There wasn't, he says. “My take in 2019 was that it’s hard to translate games because a lot of games are about specific characters you play. But for me, it’s the world of Fallout, the characters…the people always wanted to condense Fallout 3 and 4 into a two-hour experience, and I always felt that way too. But high-end television can tell a long story.”

The first two Fallout games punished '90s computer RPGs with a dark sense of humor and a strong anti-nuclear message. As the show's writer Graham Wagner points out, they could have been written by: adbusters. Over 200 years after the first bomb was dropped, he emerges from an underground vault as a survivor of a nuclear war and quickly realizes that life above ground is short, cruel, and dangerous.

When Bethesda revived the series in 2008 with Fallout 3, it brought a bit more hope and lightness to its wasteland, maintaining its retro-futuristic aesthetic and dark humor while still offering its biting satire, punishment for nature. , toned down some of the overt anti-American rhetoric. Military expansionist message. Fallout 3 and 4 have a lot of emotional stories, but they also have a lot of mini Nucruncher weapons and comic violence.

The show leans into this vibe. Unlike HBO's The Last of Us, this isn't a self-indulgently serious look at a post-apocalyptic world. Featuring cowboy mutants, terrifying wildlife, toxic vault dwellers, a malfunctioning jetpack, and plenty of jokes. be many of Goa. Like the game where you cheerfully scavenge while turning on the radio, it can turn into a life-or-death battle with super mutants in a matter of seconds, and the series changes its tone from comedy to horror from moment to moment. . . One scene shows the horrifying moment a nuclear war breaks out, while another sees a slapstick battle with an irradiated bear.

The show plays with different aspects of Fallout's personality quite cleverly by splitting the perspective between three characters. Lucy is a Vault-dwelling genius with a tough personality that makes her the most suitable replacement for the player. Her behavior when she leaves the vault is very similar to my behavior in the game. She approaches people to greet them, peeks into abandoned buildings to find something useful, and inadvertently gets caught up in escalating fights. And pranks.

That wavering tone is a challenge for filmmakers, but it's exactly what Nolan loved about the game. “It was a world and a tone! I had never experienced anything like that. [mix of] Darkness and emotion – the politics of it are so delicious and fun and it feels alive and important… There are all these weird pockets of a previous world that has escaped the apocalypse and metastasized into something else, but with elements of comedy There is also. I had never really worked on it in my career. ”

“I think that was the hardest thing they had to do, to weave it onto the screen in a way that you would be there.” do not have I’m in control,” Howard said. “When you play the game, you Please be the director. ”

I've always viewed the world of Fallout as somewhat nihilistic. Most video games, especially the post-apocalyptic ones, offer some degree of hope for saving or restoring the world. You have a reason to be a hero. But in Fallout's wasteland, the world is already broken, so you might as well do what you want. Nowhere is this more evident than in Obsidian's Fallout New Vegas (2010), with its faded but still glittering city of vice and morally ambiguous story.

But Nolan sees it the other way around. “Look at the great Cormac McCarthy and The Lord. It's a fucking black hole. No light leaks out of that story. Nobody's going to make it. On the other hand, one of my favorite things about Fallout It feels like the beginning of a thousand new worlds, not the end of the world.”

Ironically for a TV show based on a video game, the Fallout series has very few CG effects. Everything from gore to retro-futuristic aesthetics was achieved with practical effects. Howard says it was amazing to step into the world of Fallout that the television production team had created in real life. “I thought there would be more movie magic because we were going to do a set, but they literally just built a multi-level vault,” he laughed. “They were obsessed with everything. I went into the superintendent's office and sat down at the desk and there was a pile of papers and someone had written a note. Then I turned it over and it was about the power in the safe. There was a report. There was also a real jet pack!”

“At that point I almost lost the support of the producers,” Nolan interjects wistfully. “I just thought it would happen. Better If only I had a real jetpack. ”