Fallout: Jonathan Nolan Reveals Why He Keeps Blending Westerns and Sci-Fi

Amazon's Fallout TV show is finally dropping on Prime Video next week, and it marks the latest series to be executive produced by Jonathan Nolan, who is best known for Westworld. While the stories and source material for Westworld and Fallout are quite different, they do have one big thing in common: they are both sci-fi shows with extreme western influences. ComicBook.com recently spoke with Nolan about Fallout, and he revealed why he keeps blending the two genres. 

"I don't know, I can't escape it," Nolan shared with a smile. "I grew up in a household where Sergio Leone movies were in constant rotation. With Geneva [Robertson-Dworet] and Graham [Wagner], we talked endlessly about The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly on this project. Lisa [Joy] and I had talked endlessly about Once Upon a Time in the West on Westworld. I think it's so fascinating to me how film and television converge on a genre, and kind of strip-mines it until there's almost nothing left, and then sets it aside. That's what happened with the western in the '40s and '50s when virtually all movies were westerns."

"And we just lived through a 20-year period in which virtually all movies were comic book movies or all of the biggest movies in any given year. It's as if we're kind of exploring a genre from the inside out, and trying to figure out all the different story ideas that can come out of it, and then you set it aside for a while, and you come back to it 20 years later. I was saying just the other day, I can't wait to see the comic movies of the 2050s, because that's when you'll get a Sergio Leone-like figure [who] will come in and pick up what's left of that genre and invert the pieces and find something new. So I think the way that film and television can play with genre is endlessly fun to me."

You can watch our interview with Nolan at the top of the page.

What Is Fallout About?

While the show's main characters – Lucy (Purnell), Maximus (Moten), and Cooper Howard (Goggins) – are entirely new, they fit certain archetypes established in the games. Lucy is a Vault Dweller, and the start of the series centers around her leaving her Vault for the very first time and heading to Los Angeles. Maximus is a squire of the Brotherhood of Steel, while Cooper is a bounty-hunting Ghoul. All three get a significant amount of screen time in today's trailer, and it should give fans a better idea of the overall narrative. 

"It's an uncertain time in television. So the art form of season finales has become: provide enough closure, but leave the door open for more," writer Graham Wagner told Total Film. "But we feel we've barely scratched the surface of the Fallout universe. We literally have documents and documents of stuff that we're, in success, eager to dig into. Our fingers are crossed that we're going to get the opportunity to do all that stuff." 

Fallout premieres on Amazon Prime Video on April 11th.