(Cannes) “A vast mine of stories”, video games will “probably become Hollywood’s first source of inspiration”, believes Jonathan Nolan, brother of filmmaker Christopher and British-American producer of the series falloutadaptation of a saga well known to gamers of which he is a part.
Expected Thursday on Prime Video, the series takes place 200 years after a nuclear war and follows the privileged inhabitants of fallout shelters, forced to return to the irradiated surface, where violence, anarchy and mutated creatures reign.
It is produced by Jonathan Nolan – who also directed the first three episodes – and his wife Lisa Joy, the duo behind the series Westworld.
Its launch comes a little over a year later The Last of Us, another series based on a post-apocalyptic game. The public and critical success of the latter has in the meantime proven that the transition from console to live-action fiction could work.
“It helped us enormously that this series came out first, that it was so brilliant and so well received, because it takes a lot of pressure off,” assured Jonathan Nolan, a good sport, to a handful of journalists at the Canneseries festival in Cannes (south-east of France), where “Fallout” was screened out of competition.
Adaptations of games into film and series are not new, but their quality often left something to be desired, from the film Super Mario Bros. from 1993, to the series resident Evil released on Netflix in 2022.
The situation seems to have changed thanks to creators who “grew up with video games” like Jonathan Nolan, who played Pong, a minimalist ping pong simulator, released in 1972, with his brother, and marveled 16 years ago Fallout 3immersive role-playing game.
“It’s like being born at the end of the 19the century and to witness the birth of cinema,” says the 47-year-old producer.
“I realized at that time that video game storytelling had become, in many ways, more ambitious, more avant-garde and more punk rock than cinema or television,” says Jonathan Nolan, who would clearly see the universe of Half Life, Bioshock Or Portalfilled with “breathtaking moments”, adapted into series.
“Not a type”
“We will hear a lot about the video game genre in the coming years (in cinema or television), but video games are not a genre[…] it is a medium for telling stories, and even […] the biggest medium given the number of people who play it and the size of the industry,” judges Jonathan Nolan.
Video games could thus dominate, in the years to come, Hollywood production, which is fond of easily identifiable brands.
Especially “as we begin to feel a decline in (superhero) films adapted from comics,” believes the man who revisited Batman with his brother by co-writing The Dark Knight And The Dark Knight Rises.
Unlike the series The Last of Usmodeled on the eponymous game, fallout creates new characters and a new plot, drawing inspiration above all from the “tone” of his model, which mixes “drama, emotion, black humor, satire, politics”.
The creator of the game, Todd Howard, and “his team participated in every step” of the adaptation, argues Jonathan Nolan, who did not seek to satisfy fans of the franchise.
Another guarantee of success was the support of Amazon, which enabled filming in natural settings in Utah or in Namibia, on the Skeleton Coast. “When we adapt a video game, which only relies on computer-generated visuals, very beautiful visuals at that, we add nothing to the franchise by giving the public even more virtual images,” explains Jonathan Nolan .
But this immersion comes at a cost. And fallout will have to “walk with the public” to experience other seasons, concedes the creator, “realistic” and frustrated at not having been able to finish his series Westworldabruptly canceled after four seasons.