Fallout director Jonathan Nolan and his Oppenheimer filmmaker brother Christopher Nolan are close, which may explain why they coincidentally were working on projects about nuclear destruction at the same time.
“I wouldn’t call it a happy coincidence, exactly, given the subject matter, but it’s just one of those things,” Jonathan Nolan, who goes by Jonah, told me in a recent Zoom conversation. “I was incredibly excited when I sat down with [chief Fallout video game creative] Todd Howard in 2019 and at some point, my brother told me that he was looking at Kai [Bird’s] book American Prometheus. I was so excited to see my brother tackle that subject matter but the tone of our pieces is very, very different.”
Oppenheimer – which won seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director for Christopher Nolan at the 2024 Academy Awards — tells the true story of how J. Robert Oppenheimer (Best Actor Oscar winner Cillian Murphy) developed the atomic bomb. Fallout, on the flip side, is an adaptation of the blockbuster video game set in a decimated landscape following a nuclear apocalypse.
The Nolan brothers have famously collaborated before, co-writing the Christopher Nolan-directed films Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar. In recent years they’ve worked on separate projects, but still discuss what they are working on with one another.
“There never has been anything that either of us have worked on that we haven’t shown each other and talked about,” Jonah Nolan said. “I think getting a gut check from him is an essential part of any project that I’m working on.”
As for Christopher Nolan’s observations about Fallout, Jonah Nolan said, “I think it was really important for me to get his input after [filming] on the cut because of the tone. This is the closest that I’ve come to working on — or that I think either of us have worked on — to a comedy.”
Luckily, Jonah Nolan said, the films he and his brother have collaborated on have had moments of levity.
“One of the things that I used to pride myself in my working relationship with Chris is how we tried to find those lighter moments in these darker stories,” Nolan said. “Fallout is the closest thing that I’ve come to in my career to comedy because it’s such a part of the original franchise.”
Jonah Nolan Says He Had Christopher Nolan Look At A Cut Of Fallout To Examine The Series’ Tone
Streaming on Prime Video, Fallout begins in a retro-feeling 1950s America where the threat of nuclear war looms. When the bombs finally drop, some inhabitants are saved by fallout shelters deep in the ground while everyone else on the surface is left to die.
More than 200 years after the blast, Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), who grew up in Vault-Tec’s Vault 33, is compelled by a personal mission to venture onto Earth’s nuclear-ravaged surface.
While traveling the wasteland, Lucy encounters a variety of creatures, humans and half-humans including The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a post-apocalyptic cowboy of sorts who before the blast 219 years earlier was Western film star Cooper Howard.
Nolan added that one of the reasons he wanted to make Fallout was because he’s never experienced anything quite like the tone of the games.
“They’re dark, they’re very violent, political, subversive and weird but they’re also funny — almost goofy — in places,” Nolan enthused. “I think that tone to me was one of the most exciting parts [about making] this.”
While Oppenheimer and Fallout are vastly different in tone, Nolan pointed out that the film and series do have one thing in common — a shocking nuclear blast.
“One of the most terrifying parts of a nuclear explosion is that you see it a long time before you hear it,” Nolan said, recalling how he looked at old atomic bomb test footage for reference. “It takes, in some cases minutes for that sound to reach you. The entire opening sequence around Fallout’s opening prologue is built around that horrifying reality — but Chris got there first.”
All eight episodes of Fallout are streaming on Prime Video.