Jonathan Nolan: "A vision of the future shattered into tiny pieces"

Jonathan Nolan (47) is a director, screenwriter and the younger brother of Oscar winner Christopher Nolan. With him he wrote “Memento”, the “Dark Knight” trilogy and “Interstellar”. His series “Westworld” about a dystopian robot theme park was a success with audiences and critics. ZEIT ONLINE meets Nolan at the German premiere of his new series: a film adaptation of the video game series “Fallout”.

ZEIT ONLINE: Mr. Nolan, when the series The Last of Us was released, which is based on the video games of the same name, some gamers complained that the cast and plot were too diverse. There were racist and homophobic comments and a lot of negative reviews. How are you feeling in the run-up to the release of Fallout ? Are you afraid of shitstorms from the community?

Jonathan Nolan: I learned a long time ago to ignore the comments of certain groups on the Internet. I believe that our Internet is designed to amplify negativity. And so I stopped reading feedback on my work on the Internet a long time ago. I find it far more interesting to have face-to-face conversations and see people’s real reactions. And so far we’ve received a lot of positive feedback from both fans of the Fallout games and people who have never played them.

ZEIT ONLINE: The Batman adaptations by you and your brother were also successful because you did not opt for a typical comic book look, but rather told a darker and more adult Batman story. The games in the Fallout series are about fighting your way through a nuclear-contaminated future. How do you interpret the original?

Nolan: I find the adaptations most interesting, where you can add something or change something. I’m a storyteller, I’ve never been particularly interested in the literal translation of a story. Fallout is perfect for that, because as an open world RPG there is no one story, your experience of the game can be very different to mine. Todd Howard …

ZEIT ONLINE: … the executive producer of Bethesda, the development studio behind the Fallout games.

Noland: He told me at our first meeting: One of the most important characters in the Fallout series is the world itself. And we immediately agreed on that: We wanted to tell a new story that was connected to all the other games in the series through the shared mythology. And that captured the feeling of the games.

ZEIT ONLINE: How would you describe this feeling?

Nolan: Fallout has a dark side, but also a brash and humorous one. The humor was what surprised me most about Fallout 3 at the time. From the cover, which shows a soldier’s head, I expected the series to be very serious. It can be, but then again it is charming, strange and eccentric with its retrofuturistic, satirical view of America. It is Eisenhower’s America, which never had a moment of national self-reflection, everything is nuclear-powered, from toasters to robots. It is a vision of the future that has been blown up into tiny pieces that are now being put back together. That is what gives the series its unique tone.

ZEIT ONLINE: You played video games when you were young. What would your teenage self say about you making a video game adaptation?

Nolan: I think he would have preferred it if I had made a video game! ( laughs ) No, I think my teenage self would be happy. Games were a very important part of my childhood and my adulthood. I don’t play games anymore, but I have kids who play and I love watching them. It’s incredible to me that I’ve seen a whole new art form emerge in my lifetime. As kids, my brother and I played Pong , and from Pong to Fallout, we’ve followed every step and been there.

ZEIT ONLINE: What did you and Christopher play together?

Nolan: We played games whenever we could. We spent our summers in Florida back then, and there were coin-operated arcades like in Stranger Things . My brother and I would beg our parents for coins. We wanted to beat all the games in the arcade! Later, we played together on console. And I think the last time we sat down and played together was Halo on Xbox. Games were always something that bonded us.

ZEIT ONLINE: Were there any games that particularly influenced you?

Nolan: Without a doubt! I moved from the UK to the US when I was 11, which was a huge change for me. After we arrived I got a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), which helped me a lot. Later the Nintendo 64 came along, along with GoldenEye . I’ve always liked first person shooters, and role playing games, which is maybe why Fallout suited me so well. The first thing I played was Fallout 3 , I’d never heard of it before. I was on a break between watching The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises , I put the disc in and was completely blown away. I spent a lot of time in that world!

ZEIT ONLINE: Have games influenced how you work today as a director and screenwriter?

Nolan: They gave me a different perspective. For a while I felt that games were often a pastiche of movie cliches. And then, slowly, for me, from the first Half-Life of   1998, they became increasingly complex until the late 2000s. When I was asked about my favorite film of the year, I often named a game. In my opinion, all media goes through cycles: from innovative to avant-garde to conservative. In the late 2000s, the film business felt more conservative, and I found the stories in games more interesting. Fallout 3 is a good example of this because it is irreverent, political, subversive in the best sense of the word. You couldn’t find that in the cinema or on TV back then.

Jonathan Nolan (47) is a director, screenwriter and the younger brother of Oscar winner Christopher Nolan. With him he wrote “Memento”, the “Dark Knight” trilogy and “Interstellar”. His series “Westworld” about a dystopian robot theme park was a success with audiences and critics. ZEIT ONLINE meets Nolan at the German premiere of his new series: a film adaptation of the video game series “Fallout”.

ZEIT ONLINE: Mr. Nolan, when the series The Last of Us was released, which is based on the video games of the same name, some gamers complained that the cast and plot were too diverse. There were racist and homophobic comments and a lot of negative reviews. How are you feeling in the run-up to the release of Fallout ? Are you afraid of shitstorms from the community?

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