A Champion of Made in Hollywood: ‘Fallout’ Season 2 Delivers Character-Driven Storytelling, Ambitious Cinematic Techniques
The concept of world-building is bandied about a lot in Hollywood, but few television series live up to the phrase as ambitiously and expansively as Prime Video’s “Fallout,” the lavishly produced, soaked-in-rich-detail production of the beloved video game franchise that even with its epic, post-apocalyptic scale remains deeply grounded.
To expand that effective sense of place established in its debut season, Season 2 called in an established Hollywood heavy hitter from a slightly benched status to make the widening universe of “Fallout” even more real: Los Angeles itself.
“That’s one of the things unique about this place people brag about: In fact, in Southern California, you can surf and ski in the same day,” says executive producer Jonathan Nolan. “Well, that’s not terribly useful for people, but for a film crew, it’s incredibly useful. The fact that you have mountains, you have desert, you have the ocean. All right here, all right next to each other. It’s this extraordinary palette from which we get to paint. It’s an amazing place.”
While the first season shot primarily in New Jersey, New York and Namibia’s shipwreck-dotted Skeleton Coast, Season 2 moved the bulk of production to Los Angeles, closer to where the legions of artisans who labor to give the show its compelling tangibility call home, and tapped an even deeper talent pool to add to it.
“Honestly, shooting in L.A. is such a privilege,” says Nolan. “It shouldn’t be a privilege, but it’s become one. It means you get to work with the most talented people in our business, which is just extraordinary. So whatever challenges you run into are more than made up for by that fact.”
One of the challenges was moving the big Vault set onto, “I think it was 77 trucks and shipping it out here, and reassembling it in Santa Clarita,” he chuckles. But after that, the real work was in cutting through the obstacles that have made shooting in L.A. seem prohibitively expensive.
“Challenges are primarily financial, and that’s the problem,” Nolan explains. “And that’s why California has been working on their tax incentive, because they’ve been outgunned by all these other territories around the world, including New York, Georgia and in the U.K. … [But] even if it remains a little more expensive here, we maintain that you shoot faster and you get better stuff here when you shoot in California. So whatever you lose, you make up for it on the other end.”
The writing and production teams immediately reaped massive benefits, creatively and practically, from the relocation. “L.A. has the most incredible artists and craftsmen anywhere for filmmaking, and so we were just lucky to work with them this season,” says executive producer Geneva Robertson-Dworet.
“We are a Western, and we had a tremendously talented crew Season 1 that we’re incredibly grateful to out in New York, but making a Western in New York is difficult, to put it mildly,” she explains. “I think we shot on every sand dune in the New York area. So getting to actually go out and shoot in the actual environment that you’re trying to represent, or something that approximates it, is really helpful for all of the actors and the verisimilitude.”
Even though she was deeply proud of the accomplishment of the East Coast team, Robertson-Dworet marvels at what the production was able to achieve in the L.A. area in terms of scope, scale and efficiency. “We were shooting out by Lancaster in the incredibly photogenic desert out there, and just the number of scenes we could bang out in one day, and all of them turned out spectacular, is something you can only do in the L.A. area,” she says.
It also enabled the production to get even more obsessive in the level of game-inspired detail that it could bring to the on-screen environments. In Season 1, audiences saw Lucy (Ella Purnell) learning the truth about her dad (Kyle MacLachlan)’s involvement in the nuclear holocaust. In Season 2, she sets off toward New Vegas with the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) at her side determined to bring her father to justice. Elsewhere, Maximus (Aaron Moten), despite being newly knighted by the Brotherhood of Steel, is increasingly disillusioned by the military cult’s mission.
“Our production designer, Howard Cummings, is profoundly detail-oriented,” says Robertson-Dworet. “He is more invested in getting this mythology right than maybe anyone involved in the team, and thank God for it. He even goes to sleep listening to ‘Fallout’ podcasts every night to make sure that he is learning every possible detail he can about this lore.”
“We were walking into locations that were more familiar to the gamers because a lot of them had been featured in a more recent game, which is ‘Fallout: New Vegas.’ We knew that we had to try to get as much as we humanly could right,” she continues. “And always the interesting balance for us as a show is that another show might say, ‘Hey, well, in order to be 100% faithful to the games, let’s just do it all with VFX. Let’s just do it all digitally.’ But we build as much as we can, which puts this tremendous pressure on our props department and all of our production design department.”
One of the season’s crowning achievements was its depiction of the game’s iconic Las Vegas Strip, with a size and scale unparalleled by anything else on television. “Howard built the Las Vegas Strip out of an abandoned entire shopping center,” Robertson-Dworet says. “It was a scale that I don’t think we achieved anything like in New York.”
Some of the compelling second season environs were also achieved on the massive LED screen Volume sets. “What we like is to use what we sort of consider ‘maximalist production’ — we try to use every tool at our disposal,” says Nolan.
The commitment to immersive detail went beyond sets and locations, including the game’s signature creatures. “One of the fun things about the ‘Fallout’ universe is the sheer pandemonium of it,” he says. “You get a lot of different creatures, lots of different factions, and so every season, we ration it out a little bit: Which creature can we get to this year? And Season 2 was the Deathclaw, which was an awful lot of fun. We always try to start from that perspective.”
Nolan adds, “If you can make it real, it’s always going to have more impact for the actors, for the audience. We set out to make the Deathclaw a real thing — as real as possible.”
The team used a hybrid approach to build a practical puppet operated by five people on set. “In the case of the Deathclaw, it’s the fearsome mug of the thing, but also its eponymous claws,” Nolan says. “It meant that we got an awful lot of reality on our set and had an awful lot of fun.”
Robertson-Dworet credits Kilter Films, the production company founded by Nolan and his wife and producing partner, Lisa Joy, for using its creative reputation and clout to facilitate the shift back to Hollywood. “Kilter did more than probably any production company that I was aware of in terms of bringing production back to L.A. and to California, and our production became one where politicians came to our sets to see how many people, how many hundreds and hundreds of people are working at any given moment by our cameras,” she says.
“It was profoundly persuasive,” Robertson-Dworet continues. “I’m really proud of how our show became part of the movement to bring the changes legally and tax incentives to bring production back to California.”
For the moment, it’s back to the realm of imagination, as the producers focus their creative energies on where the story might lead them for the third season — though Nolan’s already solving the production challenges percolating in the back of his brain.
“[The writers] teased where we were going at the end of Season 2 — a particularly challenging production element that they tease right at the very end,” he says. “Just when I thought, ‘Oh, we might be able to survive Season 3,’ they threw in a doozy, which we’re currently figuring out. … Can you do a 40-foot-tall robot for real? We’re going to find out.”
To expand that effective sense of place established in its debut season, Season 2 called in an established Hollywood heavy hitter from a slightly benched status to make the widening universe of “Fallout” even more real: Los Angeles itself.
“That’s one of the things unique about this place people brag about: In fact, in Southern California, you can surf and ski in the same day,” says executive producer Jonathan Nolan. “Well, that’s not terribly useful for people, but for a film crew, it’s incredibly useful. The fact that you have mountains, you have desert, you have the ocean. All right here, all right next to each other. It’s this extraordinary palette from which we get to paint. It’s an amazing place.”
While the first season shot primarily in New Jersey, New York and Namibia’s shipwreck-dotted Skeleton Coast, Season 2 moved the bulk of production to Los Angeles, closer to where the legions of artisans who labor to give the show its compelling tangibility call home, and tapped an even deeper talent pool to add to it.
“Honestly, shooting in L.A. is such a privilege,” says Nolan. “It shouldn’t be a privilege, but it’s become one. It means you get to work with the most talented people in our business, which is just extraordinary. So whatever challenges you run into are more than made up for by that fact.”
One of the challenges was moving the big Vault set onto, “I think it was 77 trucks and shipping it out here, and reassembling it in Santa Clarita,” he chuckles. But after that, the real work was in cutting through the obstacles that have made shooting in L.A. seem prohibitively expensive.
“Challenges are primarily financial, and that’s the problem,” Nolan explains. “And that’s why California has been working on their tax incentive, because they’ve been outgunned by all these other territories around the world, including New York, Georgia and in the U.K. … [But] even if it remains a little more expensive here, we maintain that you shoot faster and you get better stuff here when you shoot in California. So whatever you lose, you make up for it on the other end.”
The writing and production teams immediately reaped massive benefits, creatively and practically, from the relocation. “L.A. has the most incredible artists and craftsmen anywhere for filmmaking, and so we were just lucky to work with them this season,” says executive producer Geneva Robertson-Dworet.
“We are a Western, and we had a tremendously talented crew Season 1 that we’re incredibly grateful to out in New York, but making a Western in New York is difficult, to put it mildly,” she explains. “I think we shot on every sand dune in the New York area. So getting to actually go out and shoot in the actual environment that you’re trying to represent, or something that approximates it, is really helpful for all of the actors and the verisimilitude.”
Even though she was deeply proud of the accomplishment of the East Coast team, Robertson-Dworet marvels at what the production was able to achieve in the L.A. area in terms of scope, scale and efficiency. “We were shooting out by Lancaster in the incredibly photogenic desert out there, and just the number of scenes we could bang out in one day, and all of them turned out spectacular, is something you can only do in the L.A. area,” she says.
It also enabled the production to get even more obsessive in the level of game-inspired detail that it could bring to the on-screen environments. In Season 1, audiences saw Lucy (Ella Purnell) learning the truth about her dad (Kyle MacLachlan)’s involvement in the nuclear holocaust. In Season 2, she sets off toward New Vegas with the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) at her side determined to bring her father to justice. Elsewhere, Maximus (Aaron Moten), despite being newly knighted by the Brotherhood of Steel, is increasingly disillusioned by the military cult’s mission.
“Our production designer, Howard Cummings, is profoundly detail-oriented,” says Robertson-Dworet. “He is more invested in getting this mythology right than maybe anyone involved in the team, and thank God for it. He even goes to sleep listening to ‘Fallout’ podcasts every night to make sure that he is learning every possible detail he can about this lore.”
“We were walking into locations that were more familiar to the gamers because a lot of them had been featured in a more recent game, which is ‘Fallout: New Vegas.’ We knew that we had to try to get as much as we humanly could right,” she continues. “And always the interesting balance for us as a show is that another show might say, ‘Hey, well, in order to be 100% faithful to the games, let’s just do it all with VFX. Let’s just do it all digitally.’ But we build as much as we can, which puts this tremendous pressure on our props department and all of our production design department.”
One of the season’s crowning achievements was its depiction of the game’s iconic Las Vegas Strip, with a size and scale unparalleled by anything else on television. “Howard built the Las Vegas Strip out of an abandoned entire shopping center,” Robertson-Dworet says. “It was a scale that I don’t think we achieved anything like in New York.”
Some of the compelling second season environs were also achieved on the massive LED screen Volume sets. “What we like is to use what we sort of consider ‘maximalist production’ — we try to use every tool at our disposal,” says Nolan.
The commitment to immersive detail went beyond sets and locations, including the game’s signature creatures. “One of the fun things about the ‘Fallout’ universe is the sheer pandemonium of it,” he says. “You get a lot of different creatures, lots of different factions, and so every season, we ration it out a little bit: Which creature can we get to this year? And Season 2 was the Deathclaw, which was an awful lot of fun. We always try to start from that perspective.”
Nolan adds, “If you can make it real, it’s always going to have more impact for the actors, for the audience. We set out to make the Deathclaw a real thing — as real as possible.”
The team used a hybrid approach to build a practical puppet operated by five people on set. “In the case of the Deathclaw, it’s the fearsome mug of the thing, but also its eponymous claws,” Nolan says. “It meant that we got an awful lot of reality on our set and had an awful lot of fun.”
Robertson-Dworet credits Kilter Films, the production company founded by Nolan and his wife and producing partner, Lisa Joy, for using its creative reputation and clout to facilitate the shift back to Hollywood. “Kilter did more than probably any production company that I was aware of in terms of bringing production back to L.A. and to California, and our production became one where politicians came to our sets to see how many people, how many hundreds and hundreds of people are working at any given moment by our cameras,” she says.
“It was profoundly persuasive,” Robertson-Dworet continues. “I’m really proud of how our show became part of the movement to bring the changes legally and tax incentives to bring production back to California.”
For the moment, it’s back to the realm of imagination, as the producers focus their creative energies on where the story might lead them for the third season — though Nolan’s already solving the production challenges percolating in the back of his brain.
“[The writers] teased where we were going at the end of Season 2 — a particularly challenging production element that they tease right at the very end,” he says. “Just when I thought, ‘Oh, we might be able to survive Season 3,’ they threw in a doozy, which we’re currently figuring out. … Can you do a 40-foot-tall robot for real? We’re going to find out.”