Executive Producer for Prime Video’s upcoming Fallout series Jonathan Nolan shared that he did not set out to please fans and even claimed attempting to do so is “kind of a fool’s errand.”
Ella Purnell (Lucy) in “Fallout”
As reported by MeriStation, Nolan attended a press event where he was asked about how he balances pleasing fans and creating something to attract new audiences.
Nolan said, “I don’t think you really can set out to please the fans of anything or please anyone other than yourself.”
“I think you have to come into this trying to make the show that you want to make and trusting that, as fans of the game, we would find the pieces that were essential to us and the games to try to do the best version of those that we can,” he elaborated. “I think it’s kind of a fool’s errand to try to figure out how to make people happy.”
Nolan concluded, “And that way you’re gonna make yourself happy and I’ve made myself very happy with the show.”
Power Armor Suits in “Fallout”
It’s no surprise that he did not set out to please the fans, Nolan and his wife Lisa Joy previously confirmed the show would be laden with social commentary.
Speaking with Vanity Fair’s Anthony Breznican back in November, Nolan said, “The games are about the culture of division and haves and have-nots that, unfortunately, have only gotten more and more acute in this country and around the world over the last decades.”
“We get to talk about that in a wonderful, speculative-fiction way,” he added. “I think we’re all looking at the world and going, ‘God, things seem to be heading in a very, very frightening direction.”
Ella Purnell (Lucy) in “Fallout”
Nolan went on to reveal the show will provide moral commentary and do it through the character of Lucy, a vault dweller played by Ella Purnell.
He detailed, “So many of us have such naive ideas, even now, about everyone else’s experiences, and it’s one of the things I love about America. It’s this giant, manic collection of different experiences, different points of view.”
Next, Nolan explained how the show will use Lucy to moralize to viewers, “Lucy is charming and plucky and strong…and then you see she’s confronted with the reality of, hey, maybe the supposedly virtuous things you grew up with are not necessarily that virtuous. If they are virtuous, they’re couched in a circumstantial virtuousness. It’s a luxury virtue. You have your point of view because you never ran out of food, right? You guys were able to share everything—because you had enough to share.”
He then declared that the series follows “her collision with the hard reality of other people’s experiences and what happened to the people who, frankly, were left behind, left to die.”
(L-R) Ella Purnell (Lucy) and Kyle MacLachlan (Overseer Hank) in “Fallout”
To this point, while describing the character of Maximus, who is a squire in the Brotherhood of Steel, Nolan states, “One of the things we’re trying to gently sidestep here is that kind of binary thinking, like, ‘They’re the good guys, or the bad guys.’”
“Whoever the good guys and the bad guys were, they destroyed the whole world. So now we’re in a much more gray area,” he asserted.
As for the Brotherhood of Steel, Nolan described them as “a little bit of the Marine Corps. It’s a little bit of the Knights Templar. It’s this kind of weird fusion” and “a mutated version of patriotism, religion, loyalty, and fraternity.”
Brotherhood of Steel and Vertibirds in “Fallout”
What do you make of Nolan’s comments about not setting out to please fans while making an adaptation of a video game series?
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