On paper, Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner seem like strange bedfellows to adapt a postapocalyptic video game for TV. “Fallout really is a blend of our backgrounds,” Robertson-Dworet, a screenwriter whose credits include Tomb Raider and Captain Marvel, says of her partner, a writer-producer best known for comedies Silicon Valley, Portlandia and Baskets. “I come from action and genre, and Graham knows the TV and comedy sides. So Fallout is dramatic, but it’s also funny and weird.”
Fortunately for them, fellow executive producer Jonathan Nolan and Amazon Prime Video, Fallout is also a hit. Before receiving its 16 Emmy nominations, the series premiered as the streamer’s most successful launch to date and earned a swift renewal. Taking a break from their writers room — on the eve of Robertson-Dworet’s due date with her second child, no less — the pair discuss the five-year journey to marry their voices and what comes next.
You two come from very different worlds, and what you’ve made isn’t necessarily representative of either. How challenging was it to nail the tone of this show?
GRAHAM WAGNER We joke that neither of us can write this show. I’ll do a pass and it isn’t quite right. Then Geneva does a pass and it’s almost there. There isn’t anything on this show that doesn’t have to bounce back and forth between us a few times. We talked a lot about the Venn diagram of it — it has to be something that Geneva’s excited to write, that I’m excited to write and, especially for the first three episodes, Jonathan has to be excited to direct. The appeal is in the middle of those three seemingly unrelated circles.
As IP goes, do you find that video games make for looser adaptations than books?
WAGNER Jane Austen isn’t sacred anymore. There might’ve been a time when you were a Philistine if you deviated in an adaptation, but not anymore. For Fallout, we did alter the course of the game’s canonical history. There was a Reddit thread that had to get shut down. (Laughs.) People were so mad. So it is sort of the new sacred cow in a way. That makes it kind of fun to play with.
GENEVA ROBERTSON-DWORET Because it’s an open world game, there are many ways the narrative can unfold. It’s not as locked, sequentially, as The Last of Us — where they did a beautiful, very direct adaptation of the video game story. We didn’t have that option, because everyone who plays the game does it in a different order. That was wonderfully liberating, because we got to come up with our own story and our own characters within this world. When we started this project, we asked ourselves, “What characters would we want to create in this world and mythology?”
Video games can be a turnoff for some viewers, and a lot of us have dystopia fatigue, yet this is obviously a huge investment on Amazon’s part that needs to reach a broad audience. How conscious of that were you while making this?
WAGNER Regarding the dystopia part, we’re there, too. (Laughs.) That was our priority going into this, because we’re going to work on this show for a very long time. It has to be fun. Hopefully by being fun for us, it is fun to watch. Even though it’s an apocalypse show, we wanted to make sure that we focused on human behavior — which I don’t think can be obliterated by nuclear bombs. Our idiosyncrasies would survive. We didn’t know all the episodes were going to drop at once, so we asked ourselves, “What’s the apocalypse show you want to come back to next week?” It can’t be a trudge through the wasteland. That would be miserable.
ROBERTSON-DWORET That was why we ended up focusing on three characters, three points of view. Graham had just rewatched The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and pitched it as, “What if we did our version of that?” I thought it was brilliant because Fallout is all about factionalism, how humanity is doomed to break into warring factions over and over again. It let us create three point-of-view characters, each from a different faction.
Where are you with season two and what are your hopes for the show moving forward?
WAGNER We’re writing and we’re going as fast as we can while still hanging on to the quality. The real tension of season two is you want to turn it out as quickly as possible without sacrificing anything in the process. It’s been a much easier task writing this season, because we have a show to look to. We were still figuring out the tone of the show, right down to the sound mix, during season one. The work we did in season one is going to speed up season two.
ROBERTSON-DWORET It’s been fun playing with a lot of the same ideas, while also expanding on them and addressing other issues in the world that we see through our show. Graham and I have loved these characters for five years, so we’re excited that audiences seem to have connected to them as well. There are also going to be a lot of things from the Fallout mythology that we didn’t get to play with the first season. We only had eight hours! That was the painful part, cutting the things from the Fallout universe that we couldn’t do justice to in the first season.
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
