‘Fallout’ Producer Jonathan Nolan on AI: ‘We’re in Such a Frothy Moment’

Jonathan Nolan saw this coming. As a screenwriter, he’s worked on several of his brother Christopher Nolan’s films, from Interstellar to the Dark Knight movies. Partnered with his wife Lisa Joy, he created HBO’s Westworld and executive produced Amazon Prime’s Fallout. But before that, he cut his TV teeth creating Person of Interest, a CBS procedural about a solitary tech billionaire who creates a piece of surveillance software aimed at stopping crime before it happens. It was fiction, but it’s hard not to feel its prescience.

With Fallout, now in its second season, Nolan also has his sights on the future. Based on the video game series of the same name, it’s about a postapocalyptic America where everyone must survive in any way they can. It’s also wickedly funny and full of 1950s-era retrofuturism.

So, what does Nolan see happening in the coming decades? A lot. For one, he doesn’t think AI is going to replace human filmmakers. In fact, he thinks it could help aspiring directors get a foot in the door. (Though, he says, he will never use it in his own writing.) He’d also like to see the demise of (most) social media—but understands that may never happen.

For this week’s episode of The Big Interview podcast, I asked Nolan about all of those things and more. Below you’ll find his thoughts on writing Batman movies, classic cars, and what he’d actually bring to his own doomsday bunker.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Jonathan Nolan, welcome to The Big Interview.

JONATHAN NOLAN: Thank you for having me.

I’m delighted to have you here in person in New York. It’s very cold. I’m from Canada so my barometer is a little off, but …

I’m from Chicago. I tend to think of New York as wimpy cold.

No, no, this is real. The older I get the weaker and more frail. So I can’t tolerate [it].

I've been in LA for 25 years. Completely useless.

So we're both totally useless. It's going to be a great conversation. We always like to start these discussions with a little warmup. Actually, this might help today of all days. But this is just a warmup for your brain, some very fast questions. Are you ready?

The reason I became a writer is because I was no good at answering fast questions. So I’m going to flub this.

Oh good. This will be the whole hour.

That's it.

What is the most overused sci-fi trope?

Ooh! Faster-than-light travel.

Why?

Because it's a sort of story convenience, and I guess we used it in Interstellar, but we use it in a slightly backhanded way, which is a wormhole. Which doesn't quite feel the same, but effectively it's the same thing. It's just a way to skip the boring bits.

What's a book you go back to over and over?

Of late, I go back to all of the Iain Banks Culture books. Years ago, I was looking for positive portrayals of AI in science fiction.

Oh, interesting. We're going to talk about this.

It was almost nothing, really nothing. It's kind of James Cameron on one side, and no one on the other side of the roster and Iain Banks, who wrote those books over the course of 20 years, starting in the late ’80s, I think, until his death in the early 2010s. Far too young. But they are the most fully realized and brilliant depiction of a hybrid civilization where you've got people and you've got AI and they have sort of figured it out.

What is the weirdest app on your phone right now?

The one that has captured the most of my attention—and it's disastrous—is an app called Bring a Trailer.

What is that?

It’s for buying classic cars. I'm from Chicago. I emigrated to the States when I was 11. When I got my driver's license, I became an American. I've never gone back. Always loved cars.

You're a car guy. This did not come up in my research. So you're using an app to look at cars to potentially acquire.

Classic old cars, those sorts of things. You know, I love electric cars. I've driven electric cars for years. They're fantastic. But it's very clear we're in this moment, like, I miss the Cretaceous cell phone age, when you had like a million different shapes. You had the ones that flipped and rolled and did all that stuff. Then the iPhone came along and then it's just this banal, incredibly functional [object]. You know, there is no diversity of shape or function. That's what's happening in cars. Like vanishingly quick. Like Trump is trying to hold on and, I mean, you look at China and the barn door's wide open.

So you're looking for the eclectic, the diverse …

… older, internal combustion cars with manual transmissions.

Wow. OK. Well, that is a weird app. What's harder to write—a perfect ending or a perfect pilot?

Perfect pilot. Perfect endings are more important. You ascribe value to them because if you don't have an ending, you don't have anything. But in truth, a beginning without an ending is like a joke without a punch line. I walked into JJ Abrams’ office one day, and we talked about movies for a while and I walked out as a showrunner, kind of. I liken the experience to getting my tie caught in a shredder. It was sort of like, “Oh, I’ll do a little bit of this …” Then, 15 or 16 years later, here I am. But writing pilots was a maddening experience. As a film writer, you look at all this cool stuff you have and you'll probably have to cut a few things out. With TV it’s like I have a hundred cool things and I’m going to show you four, and I have to pick the most strategically sound combination of those things. There’s no closure. It’s very difficult.

If you had to be trapped in one digital simulation, which would you choose?

Oh, wow.

We like to have fun with these.

You know, and we're both parents, but being able to access, honestly, these years right now, where your kids are still so close and they're relying on you for everything. But they're filled with fascinating insights and it's just, you know, that level of closeness and intimacy and it's just incredible. My brother's kids are older. I see how this goes. It's wonderful. It's wonderful the whole way through. But you never quite get this moment again.

Well, don't make me cry. So you would want to live in a digital simulation of your reality with relatively young kids, who still love and adore you and think you're the best thing.

Well, let’s not get carried away. I'm not sure if they love and adore me, but they tolerate me.

You want to live in a digital simulation where your kids still tolerate you.

Yes. I'll take it.

That hits. I would, too. I would love to live in that world forever.

Yeah. Ugh. For sure.

Google Search or ChatGPT?

Google Search for sure.

Agree. Now, you wrote the short story that became the film Memento. Do you have any tattoos and what are they?

My sister-in-law, Emma, and I, who produced that film, were talking during the production about getting tattoos. Then we chickened out.

No, come on.

If you don't get one when you're making that movie, you're never getting a tattoo, so …

Never.

I am a blank slate, as they say.

What is the most Luddite part of your creative workflow?

I wouldn't categorize it as Luddite, but we're still shooting everything on film. I mean, we can come back to this later, because it relates to the AI of it all, but the promise of digital cameras was that they would save enormous amounts of money. My contention is, and this relates to AI as well, there is no technology that I've ever been presented with, and I've been doing this for 25 years, that has made anything that we do for television cheaper, ever. If you plot the economics of film or television over the last 50 years, I would challenge anyone to point to the inflection point where digital cameras came in and democratized it. Because they never did. So we shoot it on film because it costs the same, and it looks better.

Lastly, what is one must-have for your doomsday bunker?

Nintendo Switch.

And some games, I assume.

Yeah, for sure.

Do you have a doomsday bunker?

If you have a doomsday bunker, I think it's like Fight Club: The first rule is you don't tell people you have a doomsday bunker. There's no bunker.

Not yet.

I'm a techno optimist.

Let me ask you: When I was getting ready to meet you, I was looking back at your career and looking at Person of Interest. Reading about that really took me back. Interstellar. Fallout. There aren't many people, I would say, in film and TV who have so consistently approached tech and science and AI with the consistency and the breadth that you have. You have stuck with these themes. What keeps you coming back to those subjects?

That’s a very flattering way of saying that I get a little stuck.

Come on. It’s a big field.

I wrote a film for my brother and David Hayman at Warner Bros. that never got made, that had enough overlap with Inception and then with Person of Interest. We never quite circled back to it. But it was about AI, it was about AI as a bad guy.

And is this sort of early 2000s?

2005. And it didn't go, but I got fascinated by the subject. I did a lot of research; I did a lot of looking into it. The next hit for me was the robot characters in Interstellar. I went from one project to the next and I was like, “Wouldn't it be fun to write robots?” You know, the tension of the robot crew member, whether it's Alien or pretty much any version of this, is that they will eventually mutiny and murder everyone, and they have a secret agenda.

But what if they didn't? What if they were just all of the virtues that we found the most beautiful, right? What if they were brave, self-sacrificing, sarcastic, and funny. Amazing leaders. What if they just embodied those values the whole way through? Maybe you'd give the audience a slight discomfort at first. Then this kind of interesting feeling of, “Oh, OK, that's one path.” Right? It's not written that the path has to be this sort of human form of xenophobia.

I’d also gotten fascinated with this idea of what happens when you have this fire hose of data that's out there. What if something could pick through it and find patterns and find meaning.

That proved to be very prescient, I must say.

Actually, sorry, I missed a piece there. In The Dark Knight, there is a plot twist about mass surveillance. Bruce Wayne builds this ethically-challenged system of stealing information, doing echo location from everyone's cell phone and giving him the ability to map the city all at once. That was sort of wrestling with this idea of how much do we trust the people protecting us, with the government surveilling us, and what good could they put that to? So the idea of mass surveillance being organized into and filtered into something that could help people is something I've been fascinated with, and that is an origin point for AI, a natural one.

When we were trying to put together Westworld, which is obviously where we got closest to this subject, Anthony Hopkins was interested. Then, as always happens, the studio and the agents kind of battled back and forth for a little bit too long and we started to get a sense that we were going to lose Tony on this one. So I wrote him a letter. The letter had a line, it was a thought that had occurred to me walking home one night, and it went like this: “We lived before, before.” What is a little harder to define, but you can feel it, you can feel this bump in the road, this inflection point. It's a really big one, and you feel it coming very quickly. You can't quite picture a big wave like Interstellar. You don't know what's on the far side of it, but you know it's coming. For me, that has been about this moment that we're now standing in the middle of.

So, we started writing these films and watching what was happening in the series. And this is the story of our time. So the question for me would be like, “Why would you write about anything else, really?”

When you think about writing that letter and of feeling like you were on the precipice of something that I think a lot of people had no idea they were on the precipice of, how do you feel standing in the middle of it, having been someone who years ago was pointing at it? What is that experience like for you?

There's no trace of “I told you so,” because I didn't know what to say, and I still don't know. I think we're in the middle of that wave, but a lot of what's happening right now with salesmanship … a lot of what's happening right now is hype. We're dealing with that in our business. We were very scared, in film and television, about what was right around the corner. A lot of that was hype. We're two years into it, now we're up against the next contract negotiation and it's like, OK, well, how much fruit has that borne? How much does that really change what we do?

I think when we actually sit down to use these tools and think about what these tools do, I'm almost completely riven between two totally opposing worldviews.

One, that these tools are really just sort of a glorified browser search function with the right economic activity and brilliance being applied to them. I never imagined that consciousness. I don't believe that there's something specific or privileged about human consciousness. This is something, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about for Westworld.

The flip side of that belief is that something as simple as an LLM could give rise to cognition on a level that becomes increasingly hard to distinguish from human cognition. At which point we are certainly in the middle of the thing that I was seeing. Because there've been so many false starts with AI over a hundred years. These moments where it’s like, “here it comes,” and everyone kind of braces for it, and we have a lot of conversations like this, and then a couple of years later it peters out a little bit.

Right around when I started my job here at WIRED, so like two-and-a-half years ago, it was all of a sudden the only thing anyone could talk about. Of course a lot of that was genuinely fascinating advances in this research and in these tools. Then, to your point, it was marketing and hype and hyperbole. And commercialization. There’s a need for some of these companies to show a return on their investment. It's really hard to make sense of it. How do you educate yourself when this is all moving so quickly?

It's tough. One of the ways, and it wasn't anything we set out to do, but because of the success of Westworld—HBO at the time was positioning itself as a tech company to try to get sold and compete with Netflix—so the first time we showed that pilot to any large group of people was an event that [former HBO CEO] Richard Plepler arranged with [investor] Yuri Milner at his enormous house in Mountain View. We showed the pilot and then did a Q&A afterwards. Sam Altman was the MC. He had all his Y Combinator folks there watching.

So from the beginning we were picked up and tossed into that group of people; over the course of making that show we wound up becoming quite close with some of the people leading the charge here. So I was hearing stories 15 years ago about what was happening at DeepMind before Google acquired it. There's sort of a criteria for when to terminate an experiment, and that went straight into Westworld. And weirdly, [we] unintentionally had a front-row seat to a lot of what has transpired in the last 10 to 15 years. So staying close to it and listening to it.

But even now, the pace, the pitch, the tenor of things is moving so quickly. We're in such a frothy moment. Which I immediately distrust …

Yeah, I don't love froth.

It usually means a bubble burst or a sleight of hand rather than [something] genuine. We're still invited to these conversations, these closed-door conversations with people who are leading the charge here.

So you are still very close to that industry. You're getting a front-row seat.

Yeah. Yeah.

Must be very interesting.

It is fascinating.

I know these are closed-door meetings. I assume they're off the record. But has anything come out of them, even a notion or something that nudged you in a certain direction or changed the way you were thinking about the technology?

A hundred percent.

I think an observation that I started, and then was bounced back and forth with a friend who's leading one of the leading companies, was we'd spent a day working with this team talking about what you can do with these things. You know, where's it all going? What are the applications for it? Because I think that is one of the bigger questions.

I think for the first time in a very long time, there may be moments like in the middle of the Second World War with so many technologies just kind of pouring out of the war effort. You know, the amount of brilliance over 40 years to get to this place, you don't want overnight success, right? The actor, singer, who finally gets the Oscar, Grammy, whatever, has been doing this for 20 years. These neural nets have been around for a very, very long time. Not an overnight success, but pretty much to your point, two-and-a half years ago, suddenly went from an obscure talking point for computer scientists to an everyday fact for all of our kids. Everyone. All over the place.

It occurred to me that unlike some of these technologies over the years, the applications for which were slightly more clear, this is more like an alien spaceship crash-landed on the face of the planet. Each of these companies and all of us are exploring the ruins of it. We kind of walk into one room and we're like, “Oh shit, I can do teleportation.” Go to another room and it's like, “OK, I can make movies.” It's less like we're making these things and more like we're sort of stumbling upon them, because we've created something so powerful and so recursive that it can spew out, almost weekly or monthly, these wonders.

I remember the first time I saw videos from Veo, the first launch where you kinda looked at it and you went, “Oh boy.” Because this is what I do for a living. And we spend an awful lot of money to build shots, with effects that look good.

I have a lot of friends in the gaming space, I know how much money they're spending to do stuff. Then you've got a product that's like, oh, it's a $10 subscription and you can make this, this, this, the other thing. You know, it is this extraordinary moment where instead of thinking of an application and then chasing it down over the course years using a handful of advanced degrees, it's more like, here is this giant morass and, and you're going to dig around in it and you're going to pull out something from here and something from there.

Beyond the hype, these technologies are genuinely transformative. There's no question about it. They're going to transform education and medicine, all the usual things that everyone talks about. They're going to transform culture. We haven't reckoned with the social consequences. Forget putting the genie back in the bottle. How do we convince the genie not to destroy whole segments of the economy?

Who can tell the genie what to do and what not to do? I’m sure that’s top of mind in the context of your industry, but even more broadly than that. You’re a parent. You’re thinking about what this means for your kids in 20 years.

Or next year.

Exactly.

It's scary, it's exciting. Certainly some of these products give you lots of good reasons to be cynical, but I've had a couple of conversations with people who were at the forefront of these things who really have a very clear and very compelling humanist perspective on this.

They think about kids who are disadvantaged, who don't have access to the kinds of things that our kids may have access to. We saw this in a pandemic, right? We were able to take our kids and make a little school in the back of our house and hire a teacher. We just re-created what we could do.

The idea that these tools could be, say, a tutor that never forgets a question they’ve asked you. That, while you’re sleeping, researches scholarships. That might be a perfect way to get these things, especially for kids who don’t have those advantages. It might really be leveling the playing field. These tools are largely free. So the paradox of this thing is you say, “Who has the keys to these things?” You know, I'm very—I am very concerned about that.

One of the interesting comments that you made about AI, this was in an interview in Semafor last year, was about how you use it. They asked if you used AI to write and you said, “Oh god, no. That’s crossing the Rubicon.”

Yeah.

Do you see uses for it? Do you draw a hard line in the sand and just say “absolutely not.” Where do you see AI in terms of art and creativity?

I guess there's one way to take that quote, which is that it is sort of a political thing. It's not at all; it's more superstitious, right? There are writers who love to write. There are writers who suffer through writing. I suffer through writing, I find writing exceptionally difficult. I love having written. There's nothing like the feeling of having written something and feeling that you got it.

How does that look for you?

A lot of sitting there and kind of bashing my head against the wall. A lot of pacing, a lot of chocolate, a lot of walks. And that's the problem, right? I used to smoke. When I was writing the first movie I ever got paid to write, which is The Prestige, I started out smoking as I had smoked through college. And I realized that if I finished that script and I was still smoking, I would never quit. Because if the script was good …

I think many writers, if you're listening to this, you know exactly what he's talking about.

I managed to quit cold turkey halfway through the script, so that I could never point to that script if it was a good script, if it worked, and think like, “I really gotta go back.” It would just pull you in every time. I think about AI the same way. That’s no assessment of its virtues. I just think if I let it into my creative process, which is already so fraught, that I would never find my way back.

But it's terrific for research. Say you’re doing an adaptation or a reboot or something like that. You can get into it and you can ask questions. Like, “Tell me where in the book series such-and-such character first talked about their childhood.” It’s a way to speed through some of those harder aspects of corralling. So it has enormous use.

There is a wonderful notion that we’re going to save money somehow. It’s never gotten cheaper. I was talking to [Fallout video game director] Todd Howard about this on the gaming side of things. Those games are just like big movies. They’ve just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. Nothing ever makes it cheaper. Digital cameras didn't make it cheaper. The digital postproduction process didn't make it cheaper.

So you think the idea that artificial intelligence could wipe out a bunch of jobs and take costs down for film and TV production is nonstarter nonsense?

It's entirely possible. There's this wonderful quote from The New Yorker a few months ago where it basically said that it’s about the gullibility of management of these companies if they think these tools can replace everyone. It’s because they’ve been overhyped, right? It managed to scare all of us during the strike. This is part of the reason the strike went on so long. If they made bad decisions, the consequences would be catastrophic.

But assuming that people still want a certain number of big movies every year and a certain number of big shows every year, the applications for these tools … You know, there's been a lot of hand-wringing, a lot of arguments, a lot of conversations in my town. And God bless them, that technology companies will come down to sort of make nice. It's literally like the delegation from Northern California comes to visit with the Southern California delegation.

I mean, they barely bother with the New York delegation of journalism anymore, so I’m glad to hear they’re still talking to you guys.

Sometimes those meetings are somewhat contentious. Last time I was at one of those, someone sort of trotted out this metaphor that they were Uber drivers and we were taxi drivers. I said, “OK, maybe. But maybe you’re Uber and we’re Formula One drivers.”

Oh, I like that.

Not to sound self-aggrandizing.

Oh, seize the power.

Uber has no relevance to, you know, Ferrari. I'm a car guy, right? Maybe Uber helps the fans get to the race, but it's not the race, right? Those technologies have nothing to do with the race. What these technologies will do, and I think they're incredible in this, is give access to the next generation of filmmakers who don't even have it.

There's a generation of filmmakers who would never have got to Hollywood. I hope that Hollywood will remain an important epicenter of culture creation and filmmaking, because these people will eventually get fed up with the prompt version of filmmaking and they'll come, as so many of us have done for a hundred years now, and try to convince someone to give them some money to hire a proper Hollywood crew and go make a real movie.

I would point to Sean Baker, a terrific filmmaker. After he made Tangerine famously on an iPhone, the next year I was watching The Florida Project and I was taken aback. I was like, “I gotta reconsider my whole position on film, because this movie’s beautiful.” Then I got to the end and I Googled it and, of course, he shot it on 35 millimeter. He got there with an iPhone, and his last three films have been shot on film, because you use the tools that allow you to raise your hand and say, “Hey, look at me. Look at what I'm doing.” This is my fervent hope.

Because film is ultimately a collaborative medium. That’s maybe the scariest part of these technologies, they’re not collaborative.

The isolationist aspect.

That’s like writing. Writing sucks.

It does suck.

Filmmaking's amazing because it's me and 800 of our friends.

So it’s this idea of ,“Well, how did you get your big break?” “Oh, I made a film with AI and someone saw it.”

I think that's awesome. As long as it doesn't replace [anyone] and as long as we don't go through this moment where people think, “Oh, we can do all this content for peanuts.” It's like, “Well, no, you've always had the ability to do that. It's called B movies.” B movies have always been there. And independent films, which is where I started. You've always been able to make the lower-cost version of it. But then there has always still been the AAA version of it.

I sometimes describe my job as photographing beautiful people in beautiful places. And the people part is important. The fact that the actors are real people and it matters to audiences. I think that matters a lot. The culture of celebrity, the idea of that connection you have to them. Then I started working in television and the bond that people have with television actors is different and much deeper. This is a long-lost member of their family.

You seem very sensitive about cost and the idea of spending less money to produce great work. You gave a speech at the Saturn Awards and said, quote, “As producers, we are not just here to save people money.” You were speaking in the context of bringing production back to California, which you did with the second season of Fallout. What do you think about the financial pressures of your industry? What kind of fight are you fighting to try to get the resources that you need to do the work you want to do?

It's a great question, and it reminds me that there is one technology over the years that has radically altered the economics of film. I'm not sure if you'd say it's actually materially changed the trend line, but it definitely altered the economics and that technology is the tax rebate. That’s not a technology, but it is an innovation.

As the recipient of funds from the great state of New York, the great state of California, the United Kingdom, Utah—everywhere we go, if there's a rebate, we'll try to take advantage of it. You know, you want to put as much money on the screen as you can.

Part of the reason I was so worked up in that speech was not just that a fire had destroyed the homes of 10 of our crew members on Fallout and a dozen of our friends. It was that I had just started to get an idea from my crew. We have a terrific crew. A lot of them worked with us on Westworld, so we’ve worked with some of these folks for a decade or more. These are folks who are the best at what they do, and usually when we have a wrap party, not so many people can make it because they’re in such high demand. They’re already on to the next thing. For the second season of Fallout, everyone’s at the wrap party. I was like “Oh no, this is a problem.” They haven't been hired. There's no production. I mean, it's been a catastrophe, an absolute catastrophe.

Also, the complicity of studios, and studio production heads and producers being willing to go along with, “Well, look, we could make this in California or New York, but we’re going to make it in Hungary because we'll be able to do it for $30 or $40 million less."

I think that's been an incredibly shortsighted and foolish thing for us to do.

The New York Times story where I found that quote, by the way, is actually about you bringing the second season of Fallout to California. You moved production back, and you were really vocal about pushing for the industry to do the same with more projects. Have you seen progress in that direction since that push?

I think it's very easy to be cynical about state politics. But they were incredibly thoughtful and smart. In a year in which you have enormous challenges from the incoming Trump administration, enormous challenges for the state of California's budget, they cleared a much bigger incentive to try to make sure that California remained competitive.

It's not big enough. It’s never big enough. Georgia essentially has an uncapped one. But it was a huge shot in the arm. These things move slowly. It's a really big cruise ship. It turns really slowly.

It'll take a while to undo some of the damage, but I'm hopeful that what the state legislators and the governor was able to pass will give us the best shot for keeping Hollywood Hollywood for another hundred years.

I have to ask you about Fallout. The show is, of course, based on a video game franchise that has many decades of history. The second season of the show premiered about a month ago, and new episodes are now coming out on Amazon every week. How do you describe the show to people who aren't familiar with the game, who maybe don't have the years of lore and history and maybe haven't watched it yet?

I don't think I ever quite dialed in the elevator pitch, but it is along the lines of: What if the world ended but it didn't completely end? I started as a fan of the games …

You've said you played, I think, Fallout 3 and it destroyed a year of your life, consumed a year of your life.

It's the Annie Hall thing, right? There goes another novel.

These games are incredible, and one of the things about the games that Todd makes—Todd Howard is the creative mastermind behind the latter-day Fallout games—is that they're essentially infinite, right? You can just play them and play them and play them and play them.

One of the things they had, I thought, that was very unique about them—and this was a bit of a stretch for me as a filmmaker—was that they are this combination of darkness and violence and interesting questions about technology and identity, but they're also really weird and funny and gonzo and strange. Yes, they're about the end of the world. There are lots of stories about the end of the world. But these ones are weirdly optimistic. It feels like they're more about the beginning of a new world. They're more about, OK, well, culture would rebuild itself. Let's play in the mess that ensues.

It's a retro-futuristic world. It resembles the 1950s, right? The music, the imagery, this focus on traditionalism. You didn't make that choice. It was inherent in the franchise, but why do you think it's set in that time period, which I think is not representative of the experience of all Americans. I think it was actually a very dark time. But there's this fixation on 1950s Americana as this perfect moment for the United States, at least in hindsight. How have you thought about that in working on the show?

The sort of common lore is what defines the Fallout universe. Each of the games have different characters, they have a different setting, but they're all connected by this world, the world that was before. Look, you've seen a whole political movement built out of the nostalgia for that world, right? That world had a coherence and an appeal, even if it was rooted in all kinds of ugly, terrible shit.

There was an unadulterated vision of America as the victor in the Second World War, and this force for good. Was it true? Well, in so many ways no, but in several important ways, yes. You know, they hadn't yoked the entire world under a Pax Americana; they hadn't taken over all these countries. They found maybe a sneakier way to do it. They pulled everyone into the Bretton Woods system. They pulled everyone into this kinda like free-to-play, free-trade system, which was powerful, and it created a world where you didn't have another world war for a very long time.

American culture predominated and American culture had a lot of darkness in there, but largely spoke to values that I think a lot of us can get behind in terms of freedom and equity. And eventually, even if it was hypocrisy in the beginning, all these wonderful things that it's easy to be nostalgic about, and I think is therefore kind of ripe fruit.

If you're going to think about America’s fall from grace, you'd probably fall from that moment. But if that moment is extended, that’s a fascinating thing. What if you extended that for a hundred years and you took the promise of nuclear technology seriously? I always thought that was such a lovely and incisive and satirical place to start.

Was anything surprising to you about how the show has been received? When it's based on this franchise that has such a fandom and lore and such history—it's a lot of pressure.

A lot of pressure. I sort of trained at the DC school of fan pressure with the three Batman movies that I worked on with my brother. I learned a lot of lessons there in terms of approaching something because you love it, not because you’re trying to figure out why someone else loves it. And you have to trust that hopefully you’re finding the right things in there. You're never going to please everyone. But if you come at it from a place of genuine respect and love, I think you'll probably do OK. There's going to be some people who are pissed off at you, and you just have to be OK with that.

Just don't read the comments.

Oh God, no. Yeah. I gave up on that a long, long time ago.

I think when you talked to GQ, you said your disappointment with the internet over the last 20 years is “fucking bottomless.” So I had to assume that you were no longer reading Reddit threads about your show.

No, sadly. Because I really love that community.

I wanted to make sure to ask you a little bit about the politics of it all, which is to say that there are a lot of political themes that emerge in Fallout. We've talked about surveillance and the tools of the state. The apparatus. When you are working on a show and you're weaving these themes in, how do you make determinations about how overt and obvious to be as opposed to doing it in a more nuanced way?

Look, fundamentally, philosophically for me, I do not feel qualified to tell anyone how to believe. I'm much more interested in poking and asking questions and saying, “Well, should we believe this? Should we question this?” Working on Batman, I made this analogy to a friend with regards to politics and engaging with it. Working on Batman felt like being a Yankee, right? You don’t play for the Yankees as a Democrat or a Republican, right? Taking a 60-year-old American icon and pressing that character into service for a specific, timely political point felt like a very fast path to losing relevance for the story.

If you’re reading Dante's Inferno, it's stood the test of time, but it's kind of amazing how much regional politics is still laced into the first three chapters. He's still pissed off with his landlord in the third level of hell, right?

Oh my God.

It’s like, OK, come on, let's get onto the next part. So, for me, there was always a bit of responsibility to be asking questions, not giving answers. But I have strong political beliefs, and I think as the world has started to feel more incoherent, and making sense of things has become so hard to wade through, and it’s so hard to just talk to each other, it was really nice to work on a project like Fallout. From the very beginning, Graham Wagner, one of our showrunners, was joking that the first season, or the first game rather, could have been written by Adbusters.

There's a strong point of view there, and it's a strong political point of view. Poking at things, this is the beauty of working in speculative fiction or in apocalyptic fiction. The world is gone, so we're not talking about this president, we're not talking about that. We're talking about a fictitious world a hundred years in the future, and 200 years after that, where everything has been blown to hell.

But you get to pick up the bits, the detritus of our present political situation, potentially, and kind of look at it. That gives you that longer view, which I think allows you to engage. You know, I would challenge anyone to watch both seasons of Fallout and not find a group that doesn't come in for a drubbing. There's this slightly nativist progressivism of the Vault, where it’s like “freedom and safety for everyone, except we're not letting anyone in.” You know, it's kinda the lifeboat, progressivism. Then you have the wild libertarianism, if you want to call it anything, of the Wasteland. So we get to look at all these different things. Again, I don't have any answers, but it's really fun at this moment in time to be able to poke a little more aggressively at some of these things.

I don't want to put too much on you, but we’re looking at this show that’s about the world after a collapse at the hands of very powerful conglomerates. So you're out there, you're talking about this show, you're working on the show, you're thinking about it all the time. You read the news. Is it hard for you, as someone who describes themselves as an optimist, not to see collapse everywhere?

Yeah. It's kinda what we do, right? We look for the signs. I'm hopeful that we will pull ourselves back from the edge. We've managed to. I thought my brother's movie Oppenheimer ends brilliantly with that warning: It's not over yet. We haven't solved this problem yet. Yeah. We may still yet destroy the world. I think it's incredibly important for us to always remember that.

That's why working on a show like Fallout, the timing sadly felt good as a gentle reminder that OK, it may be amusing to live in the wasteland that follows. I don't think any of us watch that show and wish to live in that world, or hope no one wishes to live in that world. But, I think with some thoughtfulness and a little compassion and maybe some slightly better heuristics for our social media, we might make it.

We shall see. Before we end, I would love to play a very quick game. It's a game we came up with. It's called Control, Alt, Delete. So, what piece of technology would you love to control? What would you love to alt, so alter or change, and what would you love to delete? What would you vanquish from the Earth if given the opportunity?

Got it. I would control AI generated video.

All of it.

Like I said, I'm so excited not necessarily for what we can do with it—I think it's limited for us—but what it can do for the next generation of filmmakers all over the world. I think it's going to be incredible. It's going to unleash a group of new voices. That's extraordinary.

However, one of these conversations with the [tech] folks who come down occasionally and check in with us to let us know how the end of our world is going in very nice ways pointed out, “We watermark very carefully. Every piece of video we generate. But it's totally invisible and no one can see.” I said, “Probably the biggest social problem right now is that you need to make it extremely visible.” You go back to Blade Runner, and I always thought to myself, “God, it's so weird that they don't want the replicants to live on Earth. It was so tragic.” Now I totally understand. Like if you can make a video of the president saying whatever you want, and it's indistinguishable from reality, that has to be regulated yesterday. It will create absolute chaos. If we don't get a handle on that imminently, we're in very, very serious trouble.

Well, we're going to hand it to you, so you'll solve that one.

For alt, gene therapy. Crispr. Lisa and I are very engaged with someone very close to us in our lives who has a condition caused by a novel nonsense gene. There are thousands of these sorts of conditions, they can have devastating results. I think there's an assumption with everyone that once we got Crispr, we just Ctrl+V and away we go. Right? That's not how it's going to happen. You have these catastrophic diseases where the tool will be there, but the funding won't be there, the resources won't be there. The boring bit is just getting the business model right. Or abandoning the business model and saying, OK, is the government going to start funding some of these things?

Um, delete. Social media. I would say all of it, but I have conversations with friends who have kids with special needs and this is their community. So maybe social media’s algorithmic feed. Gone. Dumpster fire. It’s like trans fats or ringtones.

Trans fats, ringtones, and the algorithmic feed—Jonathan Nolan’s three agents of destruction.

That’s it.

I love it. Thank you so much. This was such a fascinating conversation.

Likewise.

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