‘Fallout:’ Creators Graham Wagner, Geneva Robertson-Dworet On Shaping the Video Game Adaptation

Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet are the creators of Amazon Prime’s Fallout, based on the incredibly popular series of video games. Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, they detail why their different writing approaches work perfectly for this show that deftly blends action and comedy. They also talk about how the collaboration made the show stronger because of both the different styles but also their separate personal histories with the game. Finally, they reveal that other showrunners can be very accommodating when you need Matt Berry as a robot.

Awards Daily: What made you decide that Fallout was a video game you wanted to turn into a TV show?

Geneva Robertson-Dworet: We’ve been looking for something to join forces on for a very long time. We have been friends for a long time and I have been a fan of Graham’s comedy work for years. But it wasn’t often clear to people why an action/drama writer from film and a comedy writer from TV would be teaming up. Fallout, thank God, had the perfect tone for us to join forces on. It is a world with action and drama as well as moral dilemmas and incredible violence. But also very weird comedy beats, so I was delighted when Jonathan Nolan in 2019 called and said he was getting the rights to Fallout, would you develop the show and write it for me? I said yes, but it would have to be with Graham. Thankfully Athena Wickham and Jonathan said no problem.

Graham Wagner: It’s the case of working in two different genres for so long. You get used to what you do but it’s also a little bit like the grass is always greener on the other side. I thought Geneva’s work was more exciting and just cooler. So working on this we get to integrate our skill sets and the one big lawn. There is no fence.

Awards Daily: The show is already well known for taking on the world of Fallout, even some of the character types that you can play within the games. But it isn’t based on any particular game or characters. What was behind that choice?

Graham Wagner: That is pretty much how all the games have been. Every game is just a new chapter in the world. So we had a choice to retell one of their chapters or do what the games have been doing all along and do another chapter ourselves. With all of our hubris we decided to do the latter. Partially because it was the most appealing and fun space to be in creatively and the other is, how would you adapt to Fallout 1 or 2 or New Vegas? Every player’s experience is completely different so it would be a losing exercise to even try, I think.

A story I tell is when I was playing Fallout 4 I shot my own son in the face. So that was my experience, and if we adapted that for fans a lot of them wouldn’t like that. Understandably, because it was the wrong move. I shouldn’t have shot my own son in the face like that.

Geneva Robertson-Dworet: For us it was so exciting because here’s this incredible sandbox of great lore that you can pick from. Then we got to develop our own story and our own characters. We got to spend 2019 and 2020 developing the outline of the pilot and figuring out what story within this world we felt was most pressing for us to tell.

Awards Daily: You mentioned New Vegas, and that appears to be where Hank is headed, an area known to many of the gamers. How do you plan on dealing with the well-known areas and factions within that place?

Geneva Robertson-Dworet: Hard to answer without spoilers, but needless to say there is plenty we want to explore. It is a really brilliant game, very funny in places which we are very drawn to.

Graham Wagner: It is one of the darker ones in my view as well. What we can say is time has gone by since the events of New Vegas. That is the closest we can get without getting into spoilers. Remember Fallout 1 was an isometric game with just this top view of what’s going on within the graphics of 1997, which is very different from being able to run around the world in first person. With New Vegas there are people who can navigate the map blindfolded so we have a very specific rendered game to adapt this time, which is presenting some challenges and opportunities. It is more complex than season 1.

Geneva Robertson-Dworet: Another thing we can say is location is a very central idea to our show. That we are made by the world we come from. Lucy doesn’t spend that much time on the surface in season 1 and she has been transformed by the little time she’s been up there. But she’s going to get further and further from home in this next season and I think that raises all sorts of interesting questions for her about if she can remain the person she was when she was home in that culture, or will she be transformed by the Wasteland.

Awards Daily: One of the things I really liked with this first season is that the big mysteries like the secret of Vault 31 and Moldaver’s goals were revealed. So we have closure there, but we do have new mysteries being set up for the next season? How did you decide to plot out the first season that way, and are you planning on doing something similar to that going forward?

Geneva Robertson-Dworet: I think as a viewer I’m always drawn to shows that don’t just keep me waiting forever. I find it very annoying when there are too many seasons that I’m waiting around for the same question to be answered. I remember being a viewer of Breaking Bad, just being blown away by how they burned through the story. I often thought maybe this will happen at the end of the season or maybe even part of the next season. They would just get there two episodes later! It would blow my mind the way they are telling the story. So I personally like to reward the audience because I like to be rewarded as an audience member to make sure we answer enough questions. While at the same time adding new questions, because this is an ever-expanding world. Fallout, we are so lucky, is this massive sandbox so it doesn’t feel like we have run out of things to explore just because we answer some of the viewers’ questions about some of the things that we’ve seen.

Awards Daily: With the game having so much lore and just being in a post-apocalyptic Wasteland, there’s just so many opportunities for stories and characters. Is there a concept from the game or an overall idea that you guys are itching to get to at some point?

Graham Wagner: An element of season 1 that we touch on that we definitely want to build on in season 2 is the factionalism and tribalism that a fractured America falls into. Which has become increasingly relevant to the world we are living in as well. In season 1 there was a bit of a debate on the timeline, and in the real world we can’t even agree about the last election! So the idea that in a world that is broken down and has no communication with each other, getting consensus is going to be a really tough thing. We are really going to expand on those divides a great deal in season 2.

Awards Daily: There was a quote played over the teaser for the upcoming season that later we hear in the final episode from the Ghoul “You look out at this Wasteland and it looks like chaos, but there’s always someone behind the wheel. ” Is it a sense that the corporation Vault-Tec, while their vaults have been failing, that they still have a major influence in other ways?

Graham Wagner: That could get into spoilers but I’ll just you’re onto something there. How about that? If we go any further with it we might be out of a show. But we are interested in that too.

Geneva Robertson-Dworet: I think it also goes into that factionalism that Graham was talking about that we hope to dive into more in season 2. Obviously with Lucy as our POV character being new to the Wasteland, she has not experienced that many factions in the first season. But the unifying instinct of all factions, both in the real world and the world of Fallout, is that they want to bring the world under their own control. Essentially, write the future. Vault 31’s ad, Bud’s Buds, and Vault-Tec are more explicit about it than anyone else is: that fundamentally what every faction wants is to control the Wasteland.

Graham Wagner: Less nefariously, they want to help in ways they think are helping. Everyone has an internal logic and thinks they are the right faction. Some of the worst people in human history have had that mindset, and it’s horrifying to see what they will do to accomplish their goal of what they think is helping.

Awards Daily: You gave an origin story for the famous Vault Boys thumbs up. What made you guys decide you wanted to do that?

Graham Wagner: You can adapt a universe but you can also expand on it. So part of the fun is not slavishly adhering to what we are adapting, but to fill it out a bit more. There was an X-Men movie where they haphazardly mentioned that JFK was a mutant. That made me so happy, and I just want to do things like that as much as we can in the show. I remember being in the theater when they said that, and everyone made this kind of ohhhhhh happy sound. If you can make people make that sound, you are doing good.

Awards Daily: Will we get more of Matt Berry as a robot?

Geneva Robertson-Dworet: We do not want to do any spoilers, but we are major Matt Berry fans.

Awards Daily: I found that a very pleasant surprise watching the show.

Geneva Robertson-Dworet: Good!

Graham Wagner: We found it a pleasant surprise he said yes. We were happy we got to borrow him from Geneva’s friend on What We Do In the Shadows.

Geneva Robertson-Dworet: Yes, the showrunner Paul Simms was kind enough to make the schedules work so we could get Matt Berry. We almost didn’t get him, so that was very nice of another showrunner to bail us out that way.

Awards Daily: With all the complexity of these characters and the lore, what was the biggest challenge in making this show?

Geneva Robertson-Dworet: For me as someone less familiar with the games, unlike Graham, who had been playing them since 1998. The thing that worried me the most (and what I’ve been really gratified by the reaction to) is that non-gamers would find the world so expensive, so detailed, that they would be lost in it. So me and Graham did a great deal of outlining the season and pilot to try and find a way to hold the hand of audience members who were non-gamers so they weren’t, like, what the f*** is a Yao Guai? Why do I care? I am out, get me out of here. So that first time viewers of the Fallout world are enjoying the show means a lot to me

Graham Wagner: The flip side of that is not hand holding so much that it’s vexing for the millions of people who have played the game. The only people who are guaranteed to watch the show. So it was an interesting exercise to make a show that works and is followable for both groups.

Geneva Robertson-Dworet: I think that’s something that’s really unique about our collaboration. We did join forces on this project because of the unique tone and feeling like it needed both an action writer and a comedy writer. But also, the blessing of us collaborating has been that there are two POVs on the world of the game. I’m a little bit more of an outsider, where Graham is a gamer for 25 years following this universe. So hopefully that has led us to a show that can appeal to a broader audience as well as the core gamers.

Graham Wagner: For me the big question mark of the show is this strange venn diagram of Jonathan Nolan, Geneva and me, and what, if anything, do our three voices have in common? I think the discovery was that if Geneva likes it, Jonathan likes it, and I like it, a lot of other people will like it too. That numerically has been proven and it has been a happy surprise. It is harder knowing that not every one of your ideas is going to fit with everyone else’s. But it forces you to expand a bit and gets all three of us to try things outside of our comfort zone.

Fallout streams exclusively on Amazon Prime.