BIG INTV: Fallout Director Jonathan Nolan Says He's Still a Techno-Optimist

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25:17going back to sort of your analogy about the the spaceship and you're going into different rooms and discovering and what i was thinking about as you were saying that is what worries me is who has the keys to those rooms right and who doesn't who can unlock the door and who can't who can tell the genie what to do and what not to do yeah and who is choosing to do it and not do it Yeah. And that, I'm sure, is of top of mind for you. 100%. Even just in the context of your own industry, but much more broadly. I mean, again, you're a parent. Yeah. You're thinking about what this means for your kids in 20 years.

25:49Or next year. Or next year. Exactly. Yeah. Scary. It's scary. It's exciting. And certainly some of these folks and some of the products give you lots of good reasons to be cynical. But I've had a couple of conversations with people who are at the forefront of these things who really have a very clear and very compelling humanist perspective on this. I think about kids who are disadvantaged, who don't have access to the kinds of things that our kids may have access to. You know, the idea that these tools could be used to be, you know, a tutor who never forgets a question they've asked you. Yeah.

26:23Who, while you're sleeping, researches scholarships that might be the perfect way to get, you know, these sorts of things. especially for kids who don't have those advantages, might really be leveling, right, in terms of the playing field, right? And these tools are largely free. So the paradox of this thing is you say, who has the keys to these things? And, you know, I'm very – I am very concerned about that. But one of the interesting things that's happening is that these tools are being given away essentially free to everyone. And I think that's a possibility I didn't quite see coming. I mean, you can see the promise so clearly, even just thinking about kids and education, right?

27:00You want so desperately, I want so desperately for that to like come true. And it's almost like waiting to see if it does, right? Right. One of the interesting comments that you made about AI, this was in an interview, I think, with Semaphore maybe last year, which was around how you use it. You reacted very viscerally. You said, quote, oh, God, no, that's crossing the Rubicon in terms of using AI to write. To write. Yeah. Do you draw sort of a hard line in the sand there and just say sort of absolutely not? Like, where do you see AI in terms of art and creativity? How does that sit for you? Yeah, I guess there's one way to take that quote, which is that it's sort of a political thing and it's not at all.

27:38It's more superstitious, right? I find writing, there are writers who love to write. 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, you know, that you got it. Exceptionally difficult. How does that look for you? A lot of sitting there and kind of bashing my head against the wall. Yeah. A lot of pacing, a lot of chocolate, a lot of walks. And that's the problem, right? I was writing the first movie I ever got paid to write, which was The Prestige. And we wrote it, I wrote that in 2001, and I started out smoking.

28:12And I realized that if I finished that script and I was still smoking, I would never quit. Right? Because it becomes a crutch that you use to, I think, many writers, if you're listening to this, you know exactly what he's talking about. And so 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, it was a pretty good script, as like, no, no, no, I've really got to go back. It would just pull you in every time. And I think about AI the same way. It's no assessment of its virtues as a writer, although I would happily dive into that topic.

28:45I 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, right? It's amazing for research. Sure, yeah. So you're doing an adaptation or a reboot or something like that. You can get into it and you can ask your questions. Like, okay, tell me the book either. You know, a series of books. Where's the book where, you know, such and such character first, you know, what do they talk about their childhood? Extraordinary on that level. Visifex. Visifex is in my business where we're probably going to see some significant enhancements.

29:15I'm not interested. I'm in this position right now with AI where in terms of what I do, there is a wonderful notion that we're going to save money somehow. Again, point to the moment in the history of film and television where it ever got cheaper, right? There's sort of like AAA productions, big movies, big shows. It's never gotten cheaper. I was talking to Todd Howard about this on the gaming side of things, right? And those games have 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. You know, the digital post-production process didn't make it cheaper.

29:44So you think the idea that artificial intelligence could wipe out a bunch of jobs and just take costs down for film and TV production is a non-starter? No, no, no. It's entirely possible if, and there's this wonderful quote from the New Yorker a few months ago where it was about the gullibility of management of these companies. if they think, right, that these tools can, you know, replace everyone because they've been overhyped. Right. Because these folks have showed up in front of Congress and been like, please regulate me, which is like the greatest PR boon ever, right? And scared the crap out of everyone and managed to scare all of us during the strike.

30:21I mean, this is why, you know, this is part of the reason that strike went on so long. If they make bad decisions, it will absolutely, you know, it'll be, the consequences will be catastrophic for what we do. But assuming that the folks who are running things, assuming that people still want a certain number of big movies every year and a certain number of big shows every year, you know, there's been a lot of conversations in my town. And God bless them. The technology companies will come down to sort of make nice. I mean, it's literally like the delegation from Northern California comes to visit with the Southern California delegation and we'll sit, right?

30:51I mean, they barely bother with the New York delegation of journalists anymore. So I'm glad to hear they're still talking to you guys. For now. For now. For now. And sometimes those means are somewhat contentious. The last time I was one of those, someone sort of trotted out this metaphor of like, oh, they're Uber and we're taxi drivers. It's okay. Maybe. But maybe they'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 Ferrari to, you know, I'm a car guy, right? Uber has no relevance. Maybe Uber helps the fans get to the race.

31:23But 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 the next generation of filmmakers who don't even have access but a tool that allows you to make a whole film just yourself sitting in a room prompting that's extraordinary and I think what it will do and this is where I'm excited about these tools is there a generation of filmmakers who would never have got to Hollywood and I think and 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 will come and they will, as so many of us have done for 100 years now, try to convince someone to give them some money to hire a proper Hollywood crew and go make a real movie.

32:08And I'd point to, you know, Sean Baker, terrific filmmaker. And 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've got to reconsider my whole position on film because this movie He's beautiful. And then I got to the end and I Googled it. And of course he shot it on 35. 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. And then, and this is my fervent hope. Not because I love Hollywood or all of the gatekeeping and all the, you know, I think to myself if I'd arrived at a moment where I'd be defending the status quo in Hollywood, I would be shocked, right?

32:48But just the ability, you know, to have a place, a locus of talent where people come. Because film is ultimately a collaborative medium. I think that's maybe the scariest part to me of these technologies. They're not collaborative. The isolationist aspect. Yeah. Yeah. That's like writing. Writing sucks. It does suck. Filmmaking is amazing. Because it's me and 800 of my friends. It's a team sport. It's amazing. Yeah. But it's sort of this idea of like, well, how did you get your big break? Oh, I made a film with AI. Yeah. You know what I mean? And someone saw it. Yeah. Sort of like that's more of the future.

33:18No, I think that's awesome. As long as it doesn't replace it, as long as we don't go through this moment where people think, oh, we can do, you know, all this content for peanuts. And 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. Right. There have always been, and independent films, which is where I started, right? 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. Movie stars, you know. I sometimes describe my job as photographing beautiful people in beautiful places, right?

33:48And the people part is important. The fact that the actors are real people. You think it matters to audiences? I think that matters a lot. The whole idea, the culture of celebrity, the idea of that connection you have to them. I then started working television and the bond that people have with television actors is different and much deeper. And that's crazy. You hang out in the airport with a movie star, hang out in the airport with a TV star. The way that people interact with you is completely different. This is a long lost member of their family. Oh, wow. Yeah, well, you hang out with them every week.

34:14You are creating an extended family for millions of people. Yeah. And I hope that that institution, that ability remains. And I trust it will. And I think part of the reason it will is for a million different things that touch on the midbrain rather than the neocortex. I want to ask you about Fallout in a minute, but a few things you have said reminded me, to make sure to ask you about this, you seem very sensitive about cost and the idea of spending less money to produce great work. And you gave a speech at the Saturn Awards, I think it was last year? The speech landed me in a little bit, yeah.

34:51You said, quote, as producers, we are not just here to save people money. The Times didn't include the expletive you apparently added to that line in a very Timesian move that just said he also swore something like that. And you're like, of course, New York Times is not going to print whatever bad word he said. But you were talking there in the context of bringing production back to California, which you did with the second season of Fallout. But I'm curious about how you think about the financial pressures of your industry and sort of the, you mentioned gatekeeping a minute ago, right? And sort of what kind of fight are you fighting to try to get the resources that you need to do the work you want to do?

35:29You know what I mean? It's funny. 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. And that technology is the tax rebate, right? Yes. An incredible innovation. Yeah. Yeah. And look, you know, as the recipient of funds from the great state of New York, the great state of California, the United Kingdom, Utah, you know, everywhere we go, if there's a rebate, we'll try to take advantage of it because, you know, this is how it works. You know, you want to put as much money on the screen as you can. But I do think that that is an example of an idea kind of run amok.

36:07part of the reason I was so worked up at that speech was not just the fire, which had destroyed the homes of 10 of our crew members on Fallout. Right. And a dozen of our friends. A lot of them are folks who worked with us on Westworld. So we worked with some of these folks for a decade or more. And these folks are the very best at what they do. Usually when we have a wrap party, you know, not so many people can make it because they're already, they're in such high demand, they're already on to the next thing. And we went to the wrap party for the second season of Fallout. I was like, oh no, this is a problem.

36:36everyone's at the rap party. Oh, because they had nowhere else to go. They hadn't been hired. There's no production. It's been a catastrophe, an absolute catastrophe. And it's almost like a textbook example of watching, not a new technology, but just government incentives from around the world and the complicity of studios and studio physical production heads and producers being willing to go along with like, okay, well, look, we could make this in California or New York, but we're going to make it in Hungary because, you know, we'll be able to do it for$30 or$40 million less and I don't like the studio happy.

37:11And I think that's been an incredibly short-sighted and foolish thing for us to do. The reason why Hollywood was such a force to be reckoned with, I mean, there's so much, you know, and your latest issue, all these questions about China and the U.S. and who has cultural... Oh, thank you for reading. Of course. Cultural dominance. Yeah. Can you imagine a dumber move than to gut Hollywood? Just give it all away. Yeah. for just this gradual marginal thing of like, oh, we save a little money here, we save a little money there. We love, I love, my brother loves, my sister-in-law, all of us love on-location shooting.

37:45We shot part of Fallout Season 1 in Namibia. It was extraordinary. It was an extraordinary experience for us, for the cast, for the crew, working with the South African and Namibian crew. And we shot Westworld in Singapore and Spain. Shooting around the world is fantastic. When you're there for a reason. We're in Namibia because it's the Skeleton Coast and they have all these abandoned German diamond factories that look nothing like anything else in the world. We shot in Spain for the architecture, Singapore, same reason. But shooting somewhere just to save someone else money is cynical. I understand it.

38:14If you've got a great movie and then there are great filmmakers who are fighting to get things that were not terribly commercial and this is one of the tools they had in their, you know, one of the arrows in their quiver was, okay, I can go make it somewhere else. But I think if you extend that logic across the entire industry, you take something that's the center of, you know, American, again, I don't mean this in just real politic terms. I mean this in, in, in creative terms, right? And when you have these places, Silicon Valley being another great example, just up the road or Taiwan for semiconductors, or, you know, you get in the process of how these places get so good at what they do.

38:47It is intensely local. And it is the collision of all these people who came to this place because they want to do this one thing and they're talking to each other and they're collaborating with each other. And letting that would be, you know, you can't just have LA as the center of like finance for film. Right. That doesn't work. Sounds very boring. The New York Times story I'm referring to, by the way, is actually about you bringing the second season of Fallout to California. You move production back. And you were really vocal about pushing for the industry to do the same with more projects, right?

39:20Have you seen progress in that direction since that push? It was following the fires. and that gave, you know, state legislators, I met a lot of them. I was very impressed. I think it's very easy to sort of, you know, to be cynical about state politics and they were incredibly thoughtful and smart and in a year in which enormous challenges, the incoming Trump administration, enormous challenges for the state of California and its budget, they cleared a much bigger incentive to try to make sure that California remained competitive. It's not big enough, right? You can always never be big enough.

39:55Sure. Atlanta, you know, Georgia essentially has an uncapped one. I mean, you know, but it was a huge shot in the arm. These things move slowly. It's a really big cruise ship. It turns really slowly. I think culturally it's sort of become how you make movies. You make a really big movie. You're certainly not making Los Angeles, which is crazy. Yeah. So I think it'll take a while to undo some of the damage, but I'm hopeful that what the state legislator, what the governor was able to pass will give us the best shot for keeping Hollywood for another hundred years. Yeah.

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43:05I have to ask you about Fallout. Yeah. So as listeners probably know, but in case you don't, the show is, of course, based on a video game franchise that has many, many decades of history. The second season, though, of the show premiered about a month ago, right, mid-December. 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 yet? I don't think I ever quite dialed in the elevator pitch. But it is along the lines of, you know, what if the world ended, but it didn't completely end?

43:39I started as a fan of the games. I heard you. Yeah, you said that you played, I think, Fallout 3 and it destroyed a year of your life, consumed a year of your life. Maybe it didn't destroy your life. It's the Annie Hall thing, right? There goes another novel. Yeah, yeah. Um, these games are incredible. And one of the things about the games that Todd makes, um, and Todd Howard is this sort of creative mastermind behind the latter day Fallout games. They're essentially infinite, right? I mean, you can, you can just play them and play them and play them and play them. There's no end to these things.

44:06You can continue to explore the, I mean, you know, sort of seen the scripts of these things that thousands of pages long, but really is a simulated reality that you can just kind of jump into and you can steer it any way you want. You can be the proverbial bad guy or the good guy or anyone in between, and our ensemble kind of tries to capture that. One of the things they had that I thought was very unique about them, and it 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.

44:43There are lots of shows about the end of the world. but these ones are weirdly optimistic right it feels like they're more about the beginning of a new world they're more about okay well you know culture would rebuild itself right how would it rebuild itself and let's play in the mess that ensues it's like a retro futuristic world i'll just describe it that way resembles the 1950s right like the music the imagery this focus on traditionalism. You didn't make that choice, right? 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 in the 1950s, right?

45:23I think it was actually like a very dark time. But there's this fixation on like the Pollyanna aspects of that, like 1950s Americana as this like 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. They're all connected by this world, the world that was before. And I think that world, 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, you know, an unadulterated vision of America as the victory in the second world war and this force for good was it true in so many ways no but in in several important ways yes you know they they had they hadn't yoked the entire world under a pax americana they found maybe a sneakier way to do it right they pulled everyone into under the breton woods system they pulled everyone in this kind of like free to play free trade system which american culture predominated and american culture again 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.

46:37And even if it was hypocrisy in the beginning, it's easy to be nostalgic about. And I think it's therefore kind of ripe fruit. But that moment extended. And one of the fascinating things, where if you extended that for a hundred years and you took the promise of nuclear technology seriously, a nuclear powered car, a nuclear powered blender, and you had this kind of, you know, this kind of idealized version of it, what would come out of that? And 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?

47:10When 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. And I learned a lot of lessons there in terms of, you know, come at something because you love it, not 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. Don't read the comments as a general rule. Oh, God, no. Yeah, I gave up on that a long, long time ago.

47:45Yeah, I think 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.

48:04I 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 your work, right? There's a lot there in Fallout. We talked about surveillance, the tools of the state, right? The apparatus, all of that. But 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, right? As opposed to how much to weave those themes in in a more nuanced way, if that makes sense. 100%. I felt for a long time it was never clearer than on Batman. Look, fundamentally, philosophically for me, I do not feel qualified to tell anyone how to believe, right?

48:46I'm much more interested in poking and asking questions and saying, well, should we believe this? Should we question this? I remember working on Batman and I made this analogy to a friend, you know, with regards to politics and engaging with it. Working on Batman felt like being a Yankee, right? You don't play for the Yankees necessarily as a Democrat or Republican, right? You're a Yankee. And, you know, taking an American, 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. You want to be kind of looking beyond that a little bit.

49:25You know, if you're reading Dante's Inferno, it's kind of amazing. Look, it's to the test of time, but it's kind of amazing how much regional politics is still laced into the first three chapters, right? He's still pissed off with, like, his landlord is in the third level of hell, right? Oh, my God. Okay, come on. Let's get on to the next part. So, you know, for me, there was always felt like a bit of a responsibility, asking questions, not giving answers. But I have strong political beliefs. And I think, you know, as the world has started to feel more and more incoherent and making some of these things so hard to wade through and so hard to just talk to each other, it was really nice to work on a project like Fallout where from the very beginning, I mean, Graham Wagner, one of our showrunners, is joking the first game could have been ridden by adbusters.

50:04Like there's a strong point of view there and it's a strong political point of view. Yeah. This is the beauty of working in speculative fiction or in apocalyptic fiction is, you know, the world's gone, right? So we're not talking about this president. We're talking about a fictitious world 100 years in the future and 200 years after that. 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. And that gives you that longer view, which I think allows you to engage. I mean, 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, right?

50:35Right, right. You know, there's this sort of like nativist progressivism of the vault, right? Where it's like, you know, freedom and safety for everyone except we're not letting anyone in. And, you know, it's the kind of lifeboat progressivism. And then you have the wild libertarianism of the wasteland. So we get to look at all these different things. And 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 wanted to ask if that was fun. And I don't want to put too much on you, but, you know, we're talking about this show that looks at the world after collapse at the hands of, you know, a very powerful conglomerate.

51:15Seeing some themes here. Maybe some other shadowy players there. Yeah, to the world that we live in now. 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 you describe yourself at the start of the conversation as an optimist? Is it hard not to see collapse everywhere? Yeah. Yeah, it's what we it's kind of 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, right?

51:55It's not over yet. We haven't solved this problem yet. We may still yet destroy the world. And I think it's incredibly important for us to remember that always. And that's why working on a show like Fallout, the timing sadly felt good because as a gentle reminder that, okay, it may be amusing to live in the wasteland. 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. And so I think, you know, with some thoughtfulness and a little compassion and maybe some slightly better heuristics for social media, we might make it. We shall see.

52:28Before we end, I would love to play a very quick game. If you have 60 seconds. It's a game we came up with. It's very powerful. It's called Control-Alt-Delete.

52:41So I want to know what piece of technology you would love to control. What piece would you alt, so alter or change? And what would you 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 think that I'm so excited for not necessarily what we can do with it. However, we have one of these conversations with the folks who come down occasionally and check in with us. You know, when asked, they pointed out, you know, they're like, no, no, no, we watermark very carefully every piece of video we generate. But it's totally invisible and no one could see it.

53:15Sure, yes. I said, probably the biggest social problem right now is that you need to make it extremely visible. Extremely visible. The fact that we've met these technologies, you go back to Blade Runner, right? And I always thought to myself, God, it's so weird that they don't want the replicants to live on Earth. It's just tragic. And now I totally understand. Right? Yeah. Like, if you can make a video of the president saying whatever you want, and it's indistinguishable from reality. If the president can make a video of himself saying whatever he wants. That has to be regulated yesterday. Yeah.

53:41It will create absolute chaos. And I think 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. Done. Done. One, alt gene therapy CRISPR-based tools coming online. 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. And we're getting close enough to see. I think there's an assumption with everyone that, you know, hey, once we got the CRISPR, we just control V and, you know, away we go, right?

54:18And that's not how it's going to happen. You have these, you know, catastrophic diseases where the tool will be there, but the funding won't be there. The resources won't be there. And then it's really the game, the boring bit is just getting the business model right or abandoning the business model and saying, okay, is the government going to start funding some of these things, you know? Right. Delete. I would say social media, all of it. But I have enough conversations with friends who have kids who have special needs and this is their community. Okay, so maybe the algorithmic feed. Yeah. Gone.

54:50Gone. Dumpster fire. Dumpster fire. It's like trans fats or ringtones or all these things that... 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. Thank you. Likewise.

55:13Thanks for checking out the show. We're taking a short break and coming back with a second season of Supercharged Guests. and we're adding all new video episodes. So now you can see me all the time and I still won't be wearing makeup. We're still releasing new weekly episodes of Uncanny Valley on Thursdays. And if you haven't listened to all my interviews, you should start. We're talking Margaret Atwood, Melinda French-Gates, Matthew Prince, Hassan Piker, Matt Garman, Kara Swisher, and a whole lot more. This show is produced by Jessica Alpert with help from Adriana Tapia and Sam Egan. Sound design, mix, and original music by Pran Bandy, Kate Osborne is our executive producer.

55:50And I'm, of course, your host, Katie Drummond, WIRED's Global Editorial Director. Thanks for listening.

56:03This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order. Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

56:44Thank you.