While he was known for years as Christopher Nolan’s co-writer, his younger brother, Jonathan Nolan, has really taken off in recent years and made his name for himself on television. Following shows like “Person of Interest” and HBO’s “Westworld,” a series he created and led for many years, the younger Nolan is about to debut his latest show, “Fallout,” on Amazon Prime.
A post-apocalyptic video-game adaptation about a dystopian, ravaged world and the strange inhabitants in it, Nolan was recently on the Armchair Expert Podcast with Dax Shepard to discuss it and his whole career.
Part of the two-hour-something podcast was Nolan talking about working with his brother Chris and how that eventually helped him evolve into a filmmaker and showrunner on his own, and telling stories going back as far as “Memento,” which was based on Jonathan’s short story.
Nolan notes that he doesn’t have screenwriting credit for “Batman Begins” but did work on it and got a consultant role. “I worked on ‘Batman Begins’ in this slightly arm’s length capacity, but it was the one comic book my brother ever given me as a kid, ‘Batman: Year One,’ for my fourteenth birthday, and ten years later, I was on the set working with him,” he marveled. “This is nuts.”
In telling the story of making movies with his brother, Nolan revealed that his older brother didn’t want to make ‘Batman’ films beyond “Batman Begins” at first.
“Chris was on the fence about making another one,” Nolan divulged about the period after “Batman Begins” came out in 2005, reminding that Chris immediately pivoted to making “The Prestige” next, one year later in 2006, instead of a direct ‘Batman’ follow-up. “I think he didn’t want to become a superhero movie director.”
Nolan suggested it was part of his prodding that convinced Nolan, along with then-Warner Bros’ studio chief Jeff Robinov, to make another one.
“And he was very proud of ‘Batman Begins,’ but… to me, it was like we built this amazing sports car, and I’m like, ‘let’s take it for a drive. Don’t you want to make another one?’” he explained, recalling his thinking at the time. “We spent an hour telling the origin story, and that’s great, but it’s like, ‘what [more] can we do with this?’ Can we take the same characters and shift ever so slightly into a different genre? Can we go from an adventure film to a crime film, to a mob movie, and bring that feeling into it?”
“So I was literally sitting with [producer] Charles Roven, and Chris was like, ‘Dude, don’t be a chicken shit. Let’s do this!’” he continued. “And I knew with the script—and he developed the story with David Goyer with a little bit of input from me—it was like first act detailed, second act somewhat detailed, third act…uh, he rides away at the end—once we had the script done, I was like, ‘This is going to be great. This is exciting. We gotta make this movie.’ And eventually, he came around. He did manage to avoid being pigeonholed.”
Nolan said he loved his time making films with his brother, but as a screenwriter only, he made an analogy that screenwriting was like being a chef and writing the recipe, but they never let you touch the ingredients. “You never get to actually cook the meal,” he said. This dilemma led him to do his own thing, which began with “Person of Interest,” then HBO’s “Westworld,” and now Amazon Prime’s “Fallout.”
That series, “Fallout,” premieres April 11 on Prime Video, so you’ll be hearing more about that soon. Our review will surely include more thoughts from Nolan. Listen to the whole Dax Shepard interview below.