The creative process is a mystery to be sure, inspiration can come from anywhere, and sometimes things that usually wouldn’t have a correlation can come together. Some of Jonathan Nolan’s inspiration came from an unlikely place, but it does make sense. In fact, the producer spoke out about how The Dark Knight Rises was actually influenced by Fallout, the longtime video game that has seen a secondary surge in popularity thanks to a TV show.
Nolan's been out and about doing press for the 2024 Emmy-nominated TV series, and his inspiration and his thought process in writing and directing his episodes, which fans can watch with an Amazon Prime subscription. While the interview itself was about Season 1, it does get me excited for Fallout Season 2's release in 2025, and it did give me this interesting Dark Knight Rises tidbit.
In fact, he's worked on a handful of science fiction projects, working on the screenplays for a few movies such as The Dark Knight Rises, one 2000's best movies. When asked about his experience with the Fallout franchise, and if he has played the games before taking on the show, Nolan stated his reasoning for joining the Amazon Prime project was because of his love for Fallout 3.
In an interview with Looper, he addressed a previous joke he made about his love of the game. Prior, he'd joked The Dark Knight Rises was delayed a bit literally because of Fallout 3. This led to the topic on whether or not the Fallout franchise led to any inspiration for his work on The Dark Knight. He noted:
Yeah, to some degree, probably impossible that it didn't on some level because I was playing that game and thinking about where we would go with that franchise. I think one of the things that I thought was so ... And actually it's funny, it's true. I remember having a conversation, not necessarily especially about ‘Fallout,’ but one of the experiences that you have playing ‘Fallout’ is it just goes there.
This isn't the first time that Jonathan Nolan has connected The Dark Knight Rises to Fallout, as he previously talked about both projects and how they gave him a feeling they'd "built this thing." Now the show is heading into Season 2, they want to see "how far it can go." He touches on that again in this interview when he talks about the "pond" getting "bigger and bigger."
Fallout is the experience of the pond that you're playing in just getting bigger and bigger until it's an ocean. The experience of playing those games is one in which the grandeur of it, the ambition of it, it just goes there and it goes there in terms of the world being over and trying to figure out, okay, what happens after that? And I think to some degree, yeah, I think that one of the things that we talked about with ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ that may have been kicking around in my head, in part because the experience of playing these games was that desire. In all the Batman movies, there's this moment where it's, ‘Batman's going to save the city!’ And the question was, well, what if he didn't? What if we went there? What if we went into a version of Gotham in which he loses, they lose? And you have to consider what happens after the world is over.
Likewise, with some minor spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises, the last part of the Batman movie does include a Gotham that can be compared to the bleak wasteland of Fallout, all the way down to a nuclear bomb being dangled over the heads of its citizens. Going back to rewatch the second half of the movie with this perspective, as a watcher you can see small ways that the wasteland melds into Gotham. It isn’t entirely in just the backdrop and the staging, but more in the bleak hopeless feeling some of its citizens have despite the fact that this is supposed to be a time of freedom. Fallout in some ways almost feels like the aftermath: "What if" Batman doesn't save the city?
It’s a new turning point in media, especially superhero movies, where we start addressing the ideas of what the world would look like without the heroes that were relied upon. It’s not a totally new way of looking at things, but as a fan of both Fallout and Batman myself, I personally like to see the more out there points of inspiration from other forms of media, like video games.
It’s refreshing to peek behind the curtain of the creative process, and see connections that wouldn’t otherwise be made. And I personally am very excited to see what Nolan and the other writers cook up for Fallout Season 2 when it hits the 2025 TV schedule.
