Fallout: do you have to be a gamer to make a good video game adaptation?
It is as an assumed “gamer” that Jonathan Nolan brought Fallout to Prime Video. “Video games have been able to elevate themselves to a higher form of art,” say the creators of the series, who explain themselves in Première.
For years, the Hollywood industry has failed to bring cult video games to the screen. No need to list the failures that followed one another between the 1990s and 2010, there were too many. So much so that with each new cinematographic or television adaptation, the “gamers” would turn a blind eye. But in just a few years, the trend has reversed dramatically. There was the phenomenon The Last of Us (on HBO), obviously. Also the incredible buzz generated by the series Arcana derived from League of Legends (on Netflix). Or the monstrous cardboard box of Super Mario Bros. the film at the cinema last summer. And this spring, it's fallout which shines on Prime Video, succeeding in transposing the rich universe of a post-apo franchise, 25 years old. So what has changed?
Beyond the size of the budgets, significantly larger than before, “What's changed is that we now have a whole new generation of directors who grew up actually playing these games.”analysis Jonathan Nolan in Premiere. The creator of fallout is a self-confessed “gamer,”even if I play less since I had children” he smiled. He devoured Fallout 3 in 2007, spending dozens of hours exploring the world of Todd Howard. So when he decided to make a series of it, it was with conscientious deference. “Craig Mazin also loved playing The Last of Us before making The Last of Us series. This new generation of which I am a part looks at video games without contempt. On the contrary, we look at them with admiration.”
Jonathan Nolan believes that video game creators have too often been looked down upon, even though they too were extraordinary storytellers. “At the end of the 2000s, when people asked me my favorite film, I said: Fallout! Bioshock! Portal! The games became sophisticated and that's also what changed. They took a punk-rock path that was left free by cinema. Todd Howard, dared some really ballsy stories. The films have gradually abandoned this. They are less and less provocative. Video games have really plowed that furrow.”
“They were able to elevate themselves to a higher form of art.”, adds his colleague Graham Wagnershowrunner of fallout. He too has been a fan of the saga for ages. “I've been playing it for about 25 years…Bethesda has seriously disrupted my life!” he replies, laughing. The screenwriter (passed by The Office Or Portlandia) considers that, if it is not “You don't necessarily need to be a player to make a good adaptation, this allows you to be aware of the risks of backlash. This allows us to remain faithful to the original work… So if there are viewers of the series who find that certain elements of the story do not fit with the games, it's my fault.. The other showrunner, Geneva Robertson-Dworetalso argues that the Bethesda studio (the one behind the video games fallout) was very involved in the development of the series, which also explains the success of this serial version: “We worked hand in hand with them. They oversaw everything, down to the shade of blue in the outfits of the Vault dwellers. There was a producer from Bethesda on set, every day.” The creative director of games (for two decades) Todd Howardis also producer of the series… like Neil Druckman collaborated directly on the adaptation of The Last of Us with Craig Mazin.
On the other end of the spectrum, Walton Goggins admits not being a “gamer” at all. The 52-year-old actor readily admits to having never laid his hands on a title fallout and rarely on a controller in general. And for the star who plays the “Ghoul”, that's no problem: “I was in the Tomb Raider movie in 2018 and I've never played Tomb Raider! No, I'm going to play where there are the best stories and it turns out that video game stories are among the coolest and most sophisticated these days!”
It thus joins the point of view Jonathan Nolanwho even believes that what happened in the Hollywood industry with superhero comics could happen with video games: “There was this same distrust at one time with comic book adaptations. They were made with cynicism! Be careful, I'm not saying that you have to be a fan in the first place. Chris (Nolan) is not a Batman fan. But he knew the Batman Begins universe very well. He gave me my first Batman (Year One by Frank Miller) when I was 14. He knew there was quality storytelling in these pages. He had respect for the material and when he adapted it, he did it seriously. Early video game adaptations were not taken seriously. When you see the 1993 Super Mario…I'm not saying they made a bad movie on purpose, but they approached it in a cynical way. It was a time when directors didn't know anything about video games, they didn't play games at all, and they didn't give a damn. They didn't understand why it was important, so they focused on stupid things! They didn't understand that the most important thing is the narration itself.”
In other words, they had to go wrong for their successors to find the right approach: “It's simply learning.” summary Walton Goggins. “The first western certainly wasn't very good. But all the great westerns that were made afterwards were built on his failures. This is true for films adapted from video games. We gradually understood what the fans expected, what pieces of the story to highlight and to what extent we could move away from it or not..” Now that Hollywood seems to have found the recipe, we imagine the industry cooking up a ton of adaptations for us on big and small screens in the years to come. Video games could thus become Hollywood's new golden goose , after having exhausted the comics source.
Fallout, season 1, on Prime Video since April 11, 2024
