‘Fallout’ Producer Jonathan Nolan on AI: ‘We’re in Such a Frothy Moment’
Jonathan Nolan saw it comes. As a screenwriter, he worked on several films by his brother Christopher Nolan, Interstellar At Dark Knight movies. In partnership with his wife Lisa Joy, he created the HBO series Western world and executive producer of Amazon Prime To fall. But before that, he cut his teeth on television by creating Person of interesta CBS procedural about a reclusive tech billionaire who creates surveillance software aimed at stopping crime before it happens. It was fiction, but it’s hard not to feel the prescience of it.
With To fallnow in its second season, Nolan also has his sights set on the future. Based on the video game series of the same name, it is about a post-apocalyptic America where everyone must survive by any means possible. It’s also terribly funny and full of 1950s retrofuturism.
So what does Nolan see in the decades to come? A lot. On the one hand, he doesn’t think AI will replace human filmmakers. In fact, he thinks it might help aspiring directors get their foot in the door. (Though, he says, he would never use it in his own writing.) He would also like to see the demise of (most) social media, but understands that may never happen.
For this week’s episode of The Big Interview podcast, I asked Nolan about all of these things and more. Below are his thoughts on writing the Batman films, classic cars, and what he would actually bring to his own apocalyptic bunker.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Jonathan Nolan, welcome to The Big Interview.
JONATHAN NOLAN: Thank you for having me.
I am delighted to welcome you here in person in New York. It’s very cold. I’m from Canada so my barometer is a little off, but…
I’m from Chicago. I tend to think of New York as a cold and stupid city.
No, no, it’s real. The older I get, the weaker and more fragile I am. So I can’t tolerate [it].
I have lived in Los Angeles for 25 years. Completely useless.
So we are both totally useless. This is going to be a great conversation. We always like to start these discussions with a little warm-up. In fact, it might help today more than ever. But this is just a warm-up for your brain, a few very quick questions. Are you ready?
The reason I became a writer was because I wasn’t good at answering quick questions. So I’m going to miss this.
Oh good. This will last a whole hour.
That’s it.
What is the most overused science fiction trope?
Ooh! Travel faster than light.
For what?
Because it’s kind of a convenience for the story, and I guess we used it in Interstellarbut we use it in a slightly roundabout way, which is a wormhole. Which doesn’t really sound the same, but it’s actually the same thing. It’s just a way to avoid boring moments.
What is the book you come back to again and again?
Lately I’ve been coming back to all of Iain Banks’ books on culture. Years ago, I was looking for positive depictions of AI in science fiction.
Ah, interesting. We’re going to talk about it.
It was almost nothing, really nothing. There’s sort of James Cameron on one side, and no one on the other side and Iain Banks, who wrote these books for 20 years, from the late 80s, I think, until his death in the early 2010s. Way too young. But they are the most complete and brilliant representation of a hybrid civilization where there are people and AI and they kind of figured it out.
