Searching for your next great idea for a screenplay? Try taking a movie or TV series you love and throwing it into a completely different genre. That’s precisely what Fallout co-creator Graham Wagner did, resulting in one of the most unique shows of 2024.
“We talked a lot in the beginning about The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,” the showrunner told me on a recent episode of my podcast Script Apart, describing how that show—applauded by critics for its originality—began as an act of imitation.
Blending Genres to Adapt Fallout
When it came to adapting one of the biggest video games of modern times—a game with an established aesthetic and narrative canon, but no real characters to inherit—Wagner and co-creator Geneva Robertson-Dworet ended up applying that Leone archetype to his nuclear-scorched world of Fallout.
The result was three characters battling the dangers of the Wasteland—a desert full of zombies and atomically-altered monsters—for differing amounts of time. Tension and intrigue emerge as we wonder whether the show’s main protagonist, the sweet-natured Lucy (Ella Purnell), will become as corrupted and violent as the other two characters the show focuses on.
In Sergio Leone’s iconic spaghetti western, we meet three characters who are all essentially “versions of the same cowboy,” Wagner argues. “You start out in the desert as Blondie [Clint Eastwood], but give it enough time and you’ll become a bit more hard-boiled, like Angel Eyes [Lee Van Cleef]. Give it even more time, and you’ll become Tuco [Eli Wallach]. The Old West will do that to you.”
There is shared DNA between Fallout and the Westerns that inspired it. “In a way, westerns and post-apocalyptic shows are kinda cousins, because they’re about trying to rebuild civilization on the ash of previous civilization and there’s violence and lawlessness as a result,” Wagner told me.
But you’d never know it from first glance at this show, which used The Good, The Bad and The Ugly as a jumping-off point for a show with its own singular tone and vision.
Give it a try yourself. Which rom-com in your Blu-Ray cabinet might work brilliantly if you took the characters and blasted them into outer space? What would it look like to take elements from your most beloved thriller and insert them into an epic fantasy?
Let us know how you get on, and for more inspiration, listen to the full Script Apart interview with Wagner above.
Read More: Script Apart: ‘Dune’ Screenwriter Eric Roth on Mastering Any Genre
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Al Horner is a London-based journalist, screenwriter and presenter. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Empire Magazine, GQ, BBC, Little White Lies, TIME Magazine and more.
The post Script Apart: How Genre Helped ‘Fallout’ Co-Creator Graham Wagner Adapt the Video Game appeared first on ScreenCraft.
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Author: Al Horner
