According to the infamous Doomsday Clock, established in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to measure and symbolize man's hubristic creep towards nuclear self-immolation, we are now just 90 seconds from catastrophe. On this cold February morning in the frosty parking lot of a Long Island film studio, however, it's more like 11 am.
Inside, on an expansive sound stage, a recreation of Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory has been scalped by flak and gunfire. It’s the future, around 2296, and visible through gaping holes in the dome is an alternative version of the LA skyline, battered by a salvo of nuclear warheads that arrived over 200 years earlier. The backdrop is displayed on a staggering LED screen; such is its astounding clarity, you can get within an arm’s reach before seeing a single pixel.
This is the set of Fallout, Amazon’s TV adaptation of Bethesda Game Studios’ immensely popular, Mad Max-like video game series. A stunt performer in a hulking suit of “power armor” stomps his way into the observatory’s atrium. He’s followed by the actor Ella Purnell, wearing the blue and yellow jumpsuit of a Vault dweller—inhabitants of gigantic subterranean bomb shelters built before the bombs dropped. She checks the pulse of a body on the floor. Fallout’s tagline puts it best: War. War never changes.
Watching the scene is Jonathan Nolan, executive producer, who—along with his wife and creative partner Lisa Joy—is best known for co-creating Westworld, HBO’s cult hit about a dystopian theme park inhabited by androids, which expanded in later seasons to be a broader, eerily prescient critique of artificial intelligence. You’ll probably recognize the surname: Jonathan is the brother of Christopher, Oscar-winning director of momentous head-spinners like Interstellar, which Jonathan wrote, and Memento, the script for which was based on Jonathan’s short story Memento Mori. (Jonathan also co-wrote the Dark Knight trilogy.)
Despite critical acclaim (Westworld won nine Emmys out of 54 nominations) the show struggled to keep its audience, and was cancelled in 2022 before a fifth, concluding season could start shooting. Fallout is Nolan’s next big swing, taking in a similarly dystopian future. “It has so many different flavors: it’s funny, it’s emotional, it’s dark, it’s moving, it’s filthy, it’s incredibly violent… And it doesn’t really pull punches when it comes to some of the cultural politics,” Nolan (who prefers to be called Jonah) tells a few of us, standing outside around the catering truck.
He’s a broad guy, with long hair and a pointy beard—think a put-together Jeff Bridges from The Big Lebowski. “This has been a frustrating, frightening couple of years. To be able to take that and put it into a richly comic, dark, fucked-up narrative has been therapeutic.”
That was in 2023. A year later, with filming concluded and Fallout due out this month, we caught up again over Zoom. In the interim, the other Nolan had released Oppenheimer, another cautionary tale about humankind’s tendency to stray far too close to the sun. And video game adaptations, once a byword for on-screen disappointment, are now resurgent; HBO’s The Last of Us proved a hit with critics and audiences, and the Super Mario Bros. Movie was beaten only by the fuchsia might of Barbie at last year’s global box office.
For most of last year, Hollywood had been on pause because of the writers’ and actors’ strikes—in large part due to concerns over Nolan’s specialist subject, artificial intelligence—and the world teetered seemingly ever-closer to nuclear war. The perfect time, then, to pick up our conversation.
GQ: You grew up in London in the ’80s, but visited your grandmother in Florida every year before eventually moving to Chicago. You’ve spoken of the US at that time as feeling like “the future.” Did being an outsider afford you a unique way of looking at American society?
Jonathan Nolan: Converts make the most zealous people. I love this place. I think I may have a different perspective on it. And it has been interesting to see the conversation around America evolve through my lifetime. Things changed here after 9/11, and then again post-Trump.
There’s a certain amount of nostalgia in Fallout itself. It is this vision of an America that never went through the Vietnam War, or Watergate; there was a civil rights movement but it took a different shape. There was never that national collapse in confidence that America had in the 1970s.
When Bethesda director and Fallout executive producer Todd Howard and I first sat down in 2019, we had no idea how relevant, sadly, the world of the games would become. It feels like we’re in this completely unreconstructed universe now, where the conversation about Russia is completely different to what it was when Todd and I had lunch—in a way that is incredibly depressing, but poignant.
You make the connection to Russia. Can you compare living under the shadow of nuclear Armageddon in the Cold War to now, post-Ukraine?
I know my brother has been talking about this as he’s been [promoting] Oppenheimer. We’ve never been in more nuclear peril than we are right now. However things work out with Russia in the next 18–24 months, it’s very, very hard to imagine that the nuclear detente becomes more stable. It’s in its most unstable moment—we had another Cuban missile crisis moment in the very early days of the Russian invasion.
Joe Biden made that comparison.
There’s a guy who lived through that, right? There’s a conversation about Biden being too old, but he’s old enough to fuckin’ remember what everyone else seems to have forgotten. Which is the stakes. The stakes could not be higher.
That sense in the ’80s of the end being right there, right at the touch of a button, it’s a weird thing to grow up with, and something that I hoped my children would be spared, even if the reality is that it’s only gotten more and more dangerous over the years.
Fallout has a huge online fanbase. How do you strike the balance between servicing fans and making a series accessible for others?
We’ve approached these games as fans. [But] I think it’s possible to do a good adaptation of something that you’re not necessarily a fan of. Chris wasn’t a huge Batman fan… [but he] approached it with respect. I think if you approach things with respect, you do fine.
In terms of worrying about the fans, it’s a fool’s errand. [On The Dark Knight], Chris sat down with Heath Ledger, and he was 100 percent in with Heath right out of the gate. Then that news leaks online, and the combination of bad faith arguments—because of Brokeback Mountain, because of outright homophobia, because of fans talking shit, and because of the way the internet is designed… My disappointment with the internet over the last 20 years is fucking bottomless… It just pushes the conversation into the most negative place. So the thing that I learned very quickly in 2006–2007 when we announced Heath Ledger’s casting was: “All right, fuck it”… The lesson there was: you stick to your guns… If you start playing mind games, like: “Are we gonna get cancelled? Are we gonna make everyone happy?” Fuck it, who cares? No one’s ever happy online.
How does the toxicity of social media affect your job, be it as a writer or as a high-profile TV creative?
As long as the people that we’re working with understand the same thing, which is that it’s all bullshit. There’s some reality under there, if you can get to it. But if you’re looking for affirmation online you’re in real trouble in 2024. You just have to ignore it.
From your perspective as a producer and writer, how can Hollywood best insulate itself from the effects of AI over the coming years?
I think the conversation that the Guilds started last year [during the writers’ and actors’ strikes] was an incredibly important one, [such as] that the director has to be a human being… There’s an opportunity for the government to say, “No, no, no.” The argument that we should just roll with these things without asking questions, I find lazy and stupid. And honestly, at this point, only writers with low self-esteem are going to use GPT. Because they’re not at the point yet where they’re close to what a properly trained and skilled writer can do. It would be embarrassing for anyone to even imagine that they could.
I want to ask you about the challenges of the streaming era. Westworld was removed from HBO Max at the end of 2022, for example, and then appeared on Tubi in the US. Is it concerning as a TV creative that streamers have demonstrated the will to remove work from their platforms?
I don’t have much nice to say about the phenomenon of film or television being disappeared. My television career started on CBS with Person of Interest, which was written to a five-act structure, and the script included commercial breaks. So this idea that Westworld will wind up hopefully reaching a larger audience [on platforms like Tubi], but with commercial breaks, was one of those moments where you go, OK, you could be upset about the way the world is going, but the reappearance of the commercial break to me felt—while it might be regrettable in some ways—a return to the norm.
The phenomenon of taking things and disappearing them, it’s a different thing, and something that I don’t think anyone’s seen in this business, maybe ever… You make a film, for better or worse, [or] you make a series, for better or worse. The idea that it wouldn’t be seen by anyone is really scary.
How do you look back on Westworld being cancelled before you got to make season five?
It was heartbreaking. There’s still very much hope at some point that we’ll get a chance to finish that story.
You directed three episodes of Fallout, three episodes of Westworld, and an episode of Person of Interest. Could a feature film be on the cards?
I’d love to make a feature at some point. The truth is that the opportunities in television have just been extraordinary for the last 10 years… I think part of it was for me, growing up with Chris, it was kind of his thing. It took a little longer for me to realize that, as a fellow control freak, I like being able to guide the process all the way through.
In terms of your own directorial style, you had a wonderful opportunity in terms of your education.
I’ve been watching [Chris] direct since I was literally zero years old. He picked up a camera before I was born. Many of my childhood memories of Chris are of making movies in the basement. I got a chance to watch Chris change his game from a homebrew friends-and-family crew to a proper Hollywood crew.
Do you still do passes on each other's scripts?
Oh yeah.
Did you have eyes on Oppenheimer?
I read the script very early in the process. My sole position on Oppenheimer was just being unflaggingly enthusiastic about him making it… But yeah, he still reads all of my shit, I read all of his shit, and he’ll come in and look at an early cut, I’ll look at early cuts. It’s lovely.
Did he give any feedback on Fallout?
Yeah, he came in and watched an early cut.
Was he familiar with the games?
No. It’s fun because we always talked about—and we started writing together just after Memento— while [it] was still in kind of purgatory, we’d made it but no one wanted to release it—we started to figure out what to do next.
He and I sat down and started writing an action-comedy together, which we never finished, and then he got an opportunity on Insomnia, and kind of stepped away. But there’s always been this lingering fascination with comedy as a genre, so both of us are kind of gratified that I finally got a chance to play closer to comedy [with Fallout].
You once described yourself as a techno-optimist. Does that still hold true?
It’s still very much the case, though obviously it’s modulated a little bit by bitter experience over 20 years of watching the internet just become the lowest common denominator and just a flaming dumpster fire… If you look at the last couple of hundred years of human existence, we have performed miracles; we have managed to feed, clothe, and elevate ourselves out of the muck in so many different ways, and create opportunities for so many more humans. We’re a really fuckin’ smart species: really adaptable, really clever. And our cleverness can get us into terrible trouble.
I just have to believe—I look at my children, I look at the people I interact with, I look at the incredible people that I get to work with, who are so smart, and so innovative, who are so thoughtful. And you have to believe that that adds up to something.