With the release of Fallout on Prime Video just days away, the producers have shared the best parts of creating this "vast and crazy world".
The TV adaptation of Fallout explores the universe in a new way, from the perspective of three main characters; vault dweller Lucy (Ella Purnell), Brotherhood of Steel paladin Maximus (Aaron Morten), and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins). This allows us to see the wasteland from three very different points of view.
With plenty for long-time fans and newcomers to get excited about, this is the first time the game series has been fully adapted for TV, with Westworld's Jonathan Nolan directing.
Executive producers Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner spoke to What to Watch, where we asked them about favourite locations, the soundtrack, the iconic set pieces, and everything else that fans know and love about Bethesda's post-apocalyptic roleplaying game.
Here's what they had to say...
How did you balance Fallout's tonal shifts in the series?
Geneva: "I think that was very fundamental to how we approached it from the start. Five years ago they called and said we think we're going to get the rights to Fallout and at the time my friend Graham and I were looking for something to collaborate on together. And when I mentioned Fallout to Graham, he just lit up and was like 'This is that's the thing we should collaborate on'. Because it is a mix of comedy, which is his background and drama, which is my background."
Graham: "No one can smell up job security like me! I'm like, 'wait a minute, there's a job for me in there. Oh, now we're talking. That's a TV show. Let's make that one'."
In the games, there's only one protagonist. But you've got three, which I think it's brilliant because it gives an all encompassing view of the universe. Did you always want to have three characters?
Graham: "Yeah, it was it really sort of stemmed from an impatience. We just wanted to get to explore as much as we could possibly explore in the first season and like eight episodes, not a lot, when you compare it to the amount of time it takes to play through Fallout 4, New Vegas is like, hundreds or if you're like, some of us, maybe 1000 plus hours of playing through it!
"We felt a little like, 'oh, gosh, we will barely be able to scratch the surface.' And we still feel like we barely scratched the surface with the help of three POV characters. So it was absolutely necessary as a way as a means to explore the vast and crazy world."
Do you have any filming locations that stood out to you?
Graham: "Yes, we got to film at the Windover airbase in Utah, which was an incredible location. So a real-life Fallout is just sitting there. And we got to go shoot scenes there. They're pretty crazy!"
"We realize it's just a hangar which is now storing some float plane and we're looking at it with reverence but yes, it is an amazing place."
Fallout is known for plenty of fictional brands, Nuka Cola being the most recognisable. Did you have any brands you enjoyed exploring?
Graham: "Yes, there's a moment in episode four where the ghoul uses an intercom system. And it was a real vintage intercom that we changed the brand to some tiny corporation of no note whatsoever in the world of Fallout, but that too, is branded. And we just liked getting it in every corner, because that's sort of the experience of playing the game. It was a world of companies just scattered everywhere."
How did you adapt the player's Pip-Boy for the TV series?
Graham: "Through a series of 1000 meetings! There were probably more meetings about Pip-Boys and how they work and how to transport this sort of meta-game device into the world. Fom a starting point we tried to do one that was game-accurate. And it was massive, it was so massive that it became like, well, this is just getting silly.
"And you know, so we had to bring it down to size to make it like to make our characters not crazy for wearing one every day. But yeah, that was a really fun process and an amazing team of people thinking about every detail on every department helping us along the way."
I'm obviously very biased, because I do love the games. But did you think newcomers will get anything from the from the series?
Geneva: "I hope so! We wrote it very much with the fans in mind, of course, but we also wanted to make it approachable. And I think some of our decision-making in terms of making sure that we didn't take too much of what's great from the games just in the first season, limiting the first season somewhat in terms of how many creatures we made, how many factions we made. It was largely about making sure that the show was still approachable to newcomers because it would just be totally overwhelming."
"So we very intentionally held back. And it was also really interesting, we were having fun debates about which creatures, like do we want to use the obvious fan favorites? We didn't want to seem like someone who read the Wikipedia page for five seconds. Like, we wanted to also do deep cuts, to show you know, like, 'hey, we know this world'."
Fallout has a very iconic soundtrack made up of 40s and 50s music. Did you enjoy finding the right songs for the series?
Geneva: "It was a blast. Some of the cuts we put into the songs and the needle drops, we wrote into the script, songs we love, although you know, I'll warn you if you really want to ruin a song that you love for yourself, put it in a TV show, and then have to watch the edit 5 million times and you'll never want to hear that song ever again!
"That was my experience of a few of my favorite songs that I used to genuinely really enjoy listening to in my free time. And now I'm like, I never want to hear that song ever. But the music is part of the course, what is so special about Fallout and part of what makes the world feel more fun and less depressing. And we intentionally often use needle drops in our show, to create the juxtaposition in tone between the grotesque events happening on the surface of the Wasteland, with maybe the more sitcom-style events that are happening inside the vault."
All eight episodes of Fallout are streaming from Thursday, April 11 on Prime Video.
