Besides the name “Nolan,” The Dark Knight and Fallout don’t have much in common. One is based on a comic book, the other a video game. One is set in a modern setting, the other is post-apocalyptic. But Jonathan Nolan, co-writer of The Dark Knight and executive producer of Fallout, found the approach to one had a big impact on the other.
In Los Angeles this week, the Hollywood Reporter was on hand to watch Jonathan have a chat with his brother, the Oscar-winning director of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan, about the new Prime Video series. Chris asked his brother about the approach to adapting a video game and Jonathan explained that he felt confident about it because of Batman.
“I don’t know I would have had the guts to do it if we hadn’t gone through the experience on Batman,” he said. “I think often about your casting Heath Ledger [as the Joker] and the months of—I’m not even sure how aware you were of it, because you’re not online; I at the time was very online, and sort of very aware of the fact that people thought, ‘Oh, they’ve blown it,’ right? Because they couldn’t quite see it, it didn’t quite map onto their—it wasn’t Jack Nicholson.”
It’s funny to think back about internet backlash over something that’s now so beloved, right? Anyway, Jonathan Nolan continued. “I remember watching that and being terrified, because we’d written the draft, and you start of thinking, ‘How’s this gonna work out?’ And I think the answer was, it worked out very, very well,” he said. “That gave me the courage to sort of go, okay, look, if you approach these things not for the fans, but as a fan—find something that you love and try to treat it with as much respect as you can and trust that respect and love will show through, even if you have to, in the case as you pointed out, you have to make choices.”
Which is the approach he and the team took for Fallout and, putting it mildly, that turned out fairly well. Both fans and critics liked it, and now season two is on the way. Read more about the double Nolan convo over at the Hollywood Reporter.
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