Jonathan Nolan saw this coming. As a screenwriter, he’s worked on several of his brother Christopher Nolan’s films, from Interstellar to the Dark Knight movies. Partnered with his wife Lisa Joy, he created HBO’s Westworld and executive produced Amazon Prime’s Fallout. But before that, he cut his TV teeth creating Person of Interest, a CBS procedural about a solitary tech billionaire who creates a piece of surveillance software aimed at stopping crime before it happens. It was fiction, but it’s hard not to feel its prescience.
With Fallout, now in its second season, Nolan also has his sights on the future. Based on the video game series of the same name, it’s about a postapocalyptic America where everyone must survive in any way they can. It’s also wickedly funny and full of 1950s-era retrofuturism.
So, what does Nolan see happening in the coming decades? A lot. For one, he doesn’t think AI is going to replace human filmmakers. In fact, he thinks it could help aspiring directors get a foot in the door. (Though, he says, he will never use it in his own writing.) He’d 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 those things and more. Below you’ll find his thoughts on writing Batman movies, classic cars, and what he’d actually bring to his own doomsday 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’m delighted to have 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 wimpy cold.
No, no, this is real. The older I get the weaker and more frail. So I can’t tolerate [it].
I’ve been in LA for 25 years. Completely useless.
So we’re both totally useless. It’s going to be a great conversation. We always like to start these discussions with a little warmup. Actually, this might help today of all days. But this is just a warmup for your brain, some very fast questions. Are you ready?
The reason I became a writer is because I was no good at answering fast questions. So I’m going to flub this.
Oh good. This will be the whole hour.
That’s it.
What is the most overused sci-fi trope?
Ooh! Faster-than-light travel.
Why?
Because it’s a sort of story convenience, and I guess we used it in Interstellar, but we use it in a slightly backhanded way, which is a wormhole. Which doesn’t quite feel the same, but effectively it’s the same thing. It’s just a way to skip the boring bits.
What’s a book you go back to over and over?
Of late, I go back to all of the Iain Banks Culture books. Years ago, I was looking for positive portrayals of AI in science fiction.
Oh, interesting. We’re going to talk about this.
It was almost nothing, really nothing. It’s kind of James Cameron on one side, and no one on the other side of the roster and Iain Banks, who wrote those books over the course of 20 years, starting in the late ’80s, I think, until his death in the early 2010s. Far too young. But they are the most fully realized and brilliant depiction of a hybrid civilization where you’ve got people and you’ve got AI and they have sort of figured it out.