‘Fallout’ showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner on incorporating that iconic line and Season 2 plans [Exclusive Video Interview]
Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner are longtime friends, but the two had never worked together. “Fallout” proved to be the perfect starting point. “Graham wrote one of my very favorite unproduced pilots ever, which was to the great ‘Star Trek’ show ‘Worf,’ which Graham always described as the ‘Baskets’ of a ‘Star Trek’ show,” Robertson-Dworet tells Gold Derby (watch above). “But I think what it showed me was that he has a really unique sensibility and he brought to that show — which is a very popular world that has been explored and very serious sci-fi tone for a long time — a lot of just sort of surprising comedy. And I think that was what ‘Fallout’ needed and I was very excited to partner with my longtime friend Graham. And when [Jonathan Nolan] offered me the IP for ‘Fallout,’ I knew I was never gonna do it alone. I was only gonna do it with Graham since ‘Fallout’ is really about that blend of tones that I do, which is drama and action, and what Graham does, which is comedy.”
“Fallout” is based on the video game of the same name, but one needs not to know anything about the game to watch the show. That’s because Robertson-Dworet, co-wrote “Tomb Raider” (2018) and “Captain Marvel” (2019), and Wagner created an original story that’s just set in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of “Fallout.” Unlike some other video games that have a specific narrative, “Fallout” is an open world for gamers to explore and choose their own adventure.
“The games are all a series of different stories set in a backdrop of a world facing the same dilemmas and situations, but there are personal stories inside of that. We approached this thinking, ‘The best way to be like the games is to do what the games have done’ versus trying to retread it,” Wagner says. “It would’ve been impossible to retread it anyway because they’re such open-world games and the amount of freedom you have in those games, no two people have played them the exact same way, so we just started something new.
The showrunners were sticklers about the timelines and the mythologies of the game, and tried to stay true to the game’s unique tone — a cocktail of surreal silliness, drama and stylized violence — and the depiction of the main factions. They decided very early on to base its core trio of vault dweller Lucy (Ella Purnell), Brotherhood of Steel member Maximus (Aaron Moten) and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) on “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966). “It was like, ‘Oh, three cowboys, so who would our three leads be if we were trying to let each one manifest a different faction of the games?” Robertson-Dworet says. “We wanted a wastelander and we felt like the Ghouls were so often the saddest, most downtrodden, no one’s looking out for them, so we knew we wanted to have a Ghoul as well.”
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The pair also stayed true to the game in another huge way, incorporating an iconic line from the game: “War never changes.” The line is uttered twice in the finale, first in a flashback by Vault-Tec executive Barb (Frances Turner), the wife of Cooper Howard (The Ghoul’s pre-apocalyptic self), to justify Vault-Tec starting a nuclear war itself. Later, The Ghoul repeats it, giving shade to his cynical outlook (that, and also surviving 200 years in the wasteland). Wagner, a former Emmy nominee for “Silicon Valley” and “Portlandia,” says they cycled through every character before landing on Barb as the one to deliver those loaded three words.
“We knew we wanted to get to it in Episode 8. We’re two writers with two different brains and Jonah’s a third brain in this process. We do a lot of trial and error, and we try things out here and there. Once we got to do this very ‘Dr. Strangelove’ scene at the end, it just made total sense for it to be Barb,” he shares. “We wanted to see someone say it in a way that hadn’t been said in the games so far.”
“The more we tried it out, it seemed like if she might be part of the ultimate villainy of our show — this larger question of who dropped the bombs in the past? Why is the world a wasteland? — using that line to explain the ultimate cynicism and to rationalize yourself felt ultimately like the most powerful person to say it,” Robertson-Dworet adds. “And a huge part of our show is commenting on 200 years of history and how it all interrelates, so it felt like it should be said by someone in the past first.”
The duo is currently working on Season 2, and while they are expectedly mum on the details, expect several new creatures. “We have a very fun board of creatures up on the wall. That’s part of the discovery process,” Wagner teases. “What creatures can we build really well? What creatures are we excited to see? What creatures make sense for the story? And it’s an 800-circle Venn Diagram and we’re honing in on — I don’t think we wanna say which ones and which man-made creatures as well. But there’s gonna be new flavors for sure.”
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