‘They even got a real jetpack in there!’: Todd Howard and Jonathan Nolan on Fallout

The director of the Fallout TV series and the director of the modern Fallout video games sit down together to talk about the audacity of video-game storytelling and hope in a post-apocalyptic wasteland

If you had asked director Jonathan Nolan what his favourite film of the year was in the late 00s, more often than not he would have given you the name of a video game instead. Having grown up with the entire history of the medium - I started playing Pong with my brother Chris many, many years ago - that was when games started to take on this level of audacity in their storytelling, their tone, the things they were doing," he says. That's what I felt with [2008's] Fallout 3: the audacity. Frankly I wasn't feeling that in the film and television business at that time."

Nolan, who has just finished directing the first series of Amazon Prime's Fallout TV show, is sitting next to Todd Howard, the video-game director who led development on Fallout 3 and 4, talking to me a few hours before the premiere of the first two episodes. It is evident within minutes that Nolan understands games almost as well as Todd does. He says he's drawn to games where your options are open, you decide who you want to be and your decisions have an effect on the world around you: in other words, a game like Todd Howard's. The two come across like old friends, easy in each other's company, and enthusiastic about each other's work.