Craig Mazin
Appearances
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Well, I'll tell you one thing that I love is that she opens that box, sees the watch, and immediately moves it aside. The watch meant so much to Joel. That watch is a memory of his daughter. That watch is a memory of his past and the way his life got stuck. Doesn't mean anything to Ellie. What matters to Ellie is the gun because her relationship with Joel is
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
was cemented in a kind of, no, in an actual violence. He saved her with violence. She saved him with violence. She is going to avenge him with violence.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
There's some interesting moments of mystery in this that I enjoy. Well, for starters, it's pretty clear once she walks in that house that she's not okay. Even when she walked out of the hospital room and down the hallway and her face just darkens, we understand, oh – There's murder on her mind. And she gets to this house and she wanders through. There's a kind of tentative nature.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
It feels like somebody who's entering kind of a sacred space, but she's not emotional. She's just a bit numb. And then she enters Joel's room and that moment from the game, the jacket was just burned in my brain. And even I felt it on another level because... I can't tell you the journey to deciding that that would be Joel's jacket in season one.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And then just seeing Pedro every day in that jacket. It became part of it. We were all looking at that jacket feeling like, oh, my God, we have to let go of this thing that is so connected to us. And then, once again, what Bella does there is so extraordinary because now you see the truth. She is broken. Absolutely broken.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And when she hears Dina's voice downstairs, the very first thing she does is panic and then wipe away the tears. because no one gets to see what's inside the smallest community of all, which is her and Joel.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
But the clue chain couldn't come too soon. Because if Ellie knows on her second day in the hospital who the people are, where she has to go, then the second she gets out, she should be packing and going. Or talking to people about it. Everyone should know about it. But Dina... is absolutely correct. Her choices were smart.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
There was nothing Ellie could do in those three months when she was physically healing to avenge Joel, but she would have tried. Dina knows Ellie well enough to know that Ellie would have crawled out of there. She would have done something stupid. Nothing can stop her when her mind is set to something. And so Dina waits for the day she gets out. Not one moment later. As soon as Ellie is out,
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Dina does the correct thing, which is to say, now this is information I have.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
This was an important thing that Neil brought up when we were working on the story here. And I took this and just put it right in there. I loved him too, you know. And Isabella Merced is delivering this other way. Throughout this episode, and it's brilliant.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Well, I felt every single thing that you just said. We knew that Joel's death was going to impact the audience in a profound way. It certainly impacted us in a profound way. And it seemed to us that these first moments needed to show a kind of respect for the character. and needed to acknowledge what had happened here.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
I think she just does a brilliant job of showing how you can be hurt and you can grieve, you can be heartbroken, but still engage your frontal lobe.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And think and plan and be smart about it. I think what Dina is going to correctly do is say, now that you're out, you and I should follow the right channels. Go to Tommy. Tell them what we know, and let's get a posse together, and let's go kill this woman. That is the smart plan.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
I don't think Dina is even considering that it would just be her and Ellie yet. I think Dina thinks it's going to be me and you and 12 other people. And we're going out with horses and guns and overwhelming force to track them down and kill them. That is the smart thing to do. That should be plan A. And it is plan A.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
We wanted to be true to the story we had created inside of Jackson. So in the game, in the first game, you never get inside of Jackson. But in our first season, we did. And part of getting inside of Jackson was understanding its mechanics. There is a council. It is democratically elected. They make decisions as a community. There is law. Maria was a district attorney.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And we wanted to begin with family because all the way back in the beginning, before Boston QZ and the world ending and Ellie, there was Joel and Tommy and Sarah. And now it's down to Tommy. Joel and Sarah are gone. And starting with family there was incredibly important. And we wanted to get a sense that this town was going to need to heal.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
So law and democracy and order are how Jackson functions. And it was incredibly important to say, hey, even though we were attacked, what are we doing? We're repairing the fence. We're making it stronger. And we are recommitting to our ideals that we talk about these things together as a community. And that means Ellie has a chance. to make her case, which is very perilous for Ellie.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Because as Jesse understands, her case is going to be, what is wrong with all of you? Why aren't we already on horses going? That's her impulse. And what's fascinating here, and I love watching Bella's reaction, is that Seth, who has a dark side, clearly, who when drunk, lets out some pretty ugly stuff,
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Sober is articulating exactly how Ellie feels, which is a very uncomfortable thing for her because she doesn't like him. And this happens sometimes in life where somebody who we think is the opposite of us suddenly becomes a mirror of us It makes us question those instincts.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Yeah, I completely agree. I think he's being a good friend to her there. And she does her best. This was a very difficult writing challenge and a very difficult acting challenge for me and for Bella. Write a speech that is pretty good, but not honest, not true to yourself. So there's something synthetic about it.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And then perform it in a way where you're trying to convince people it's honest, but it's a little off.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
There's this beautiful moment where we see Gail all the way up there on the balcony level listening to this. Everyone is listening so respectfully. And she's like, oh, please. She knows exactly that this is... a kind of calculation on Ellie's part to try and get people to do the thing that she wants to do out of pure anger. And it doesn't work.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Not only does it not work, but the vote isn't really close, which is important. It wasn't like, okay, I can go back and just convince one person. It's not happening. They're not going for it. And if you were running Jackson, you'd probably vote no too.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
He's part of rebuilding it. He's there hammering stakes in the ground. And he does articulate Joel's point of view, which is that vengeance is second place. But he also says to Ellie, I got you. I'll back you. Of course I've got you. Because I'm theoretically the only family you have left.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
This is sort of the question of the entire thing. What does it mean to be saved? And can it happen at all in this world? Is someone doomed to go down a path that we would call wrong? Is there a redemption that is possible? And Gail's point here is arguable. I don't know if she's right. She is presenting the fatalistic point of view, which is Ellie's broken. She started broken.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
She got more broken. Now she is really broken. So stop blaming yourself for worrying about being responsible for her, fixing her. You can't. She's busted. She might be right. But so much of me wishes that she's not. And that is the question for everything that comes from this point forward.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure. I mean, Gale's not wrong about a whole bunch of things. Gale says she's a liar. There's a difference between lying and being a liar. Oh, I know. And that one? Liar. Correct. We have seen Ellie lying from the beginning. She didn't even tell the Fireflies her real name. She lies all the time. Right. It's part of her survival mechanism. She says, nurture can only do this much.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
The rest is nature. You are who you are. And it sure seems like that's the case, too, because when we meet Ellie before she ever met Joel, when she's just a kid in federal school, she's punching people in the face. She's a problem. She was born in blood. And there is that nature in her. And in fact, her relationship with Joel seems like a combination of two people that had very similar natures.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
So Gail says they were walking side by side from the very start. I think that's true. And the question is, what are the subtle differences between their natures? And Tommy's going to articulate one very carefully. And that was something that Neil really zeroed in on. It's so important. But he does it with... with Ellie, he says, Joel wouldn't go after people to punish them for what they did.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Joel would try and save people and he would blame himself if he failed, which we know is true, but he wouldn't pursue vengeance. That wasn't what motivated him. And therein is a difference between their natures. And maybe Gail is zeroing in on that, that Joel is had a secret, something that he did that he was ashamed of and yet needed to do. Ellie has an anger that is dangerous and goes outward.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And where she goes from here, hard to say. But yes, in my mind, Gail has written her off. No question.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Ellie is not good at planning. Ellie is amazing at doing things. And Ellie is incredible when it comes to persistence, dedication, and single-mindedness. And Dina, once Dina sees the outcome of the vote, I think she spends the rest of the day planning because she knows exactly what Ellie is going to do. And sure enough, when she gets there... Ellie's plan is not a plan at all.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Her plan is go to Seattle, kill Abby. That's it.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Exactly. We make sure people understand how formidable Dina is and how smart she is and how, in fact, Ellie will need her to survive. But we also can see this interesting thread beginning here that started in episode one. Where Ellie has more than a little bit of a crush on Dina, even saying, we'll share a horse, you can see Ellie's heart skip a beat or two.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
There is something exciting about the thought of her being able to do this specifically with Dina.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
There's, to me, a fascinating moment where he puts out his hand. To shake. And she doesn't like him. Even after his defense of Joel and the town meeting, she's not going to forgive this guy. But then he's done this thing to help them. He puts his hand out and there is a pause. And then she puts her hand out and they shake their hands in this kind of classic masculine, you know, concession.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And I think of it as concession. And this is interesting because... Ellie is an us or them, black and white, good and bad, me and you sort of person. And Seth has screwed that up. And I think she's very conflicted here. It is that weird thing of thinking you are them and then suddenly, but you look a whole lot like us. So what does this say about me?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
I think they picked that spot because it was beautiful. They live in an unpopulated Wyoming, which, by the way, currently is barely populated. Wyoming is the least populated state in our nation. It's got the most, I think other than Alaska, it's got the most space per person. So there's a lot of land there. And they can choose.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And I think that they don't want to have a graveyard inside their fences. I think they want to use that space carefully. And I think so many people die in this world so often that the inside of your town will slowly become all cemetery. So you don't want to ride over this every time you go out on patrol. You want to pick someplace that feels safe. sun-kissed and warm and beloved by God above.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
This is a chance for all of us to say goodbye. I think as viewers, we are pretty much where Ellie is. I think people have been hopefully looking forward to this episode, but it's been a rough week since what happened. And when it begins, we're all in that space of just ripped up. And by this point, my hope is that everybody can kind of be where Ellie is, which is to say heartbroken,
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
but quietly and calmly saying goodbye on our way to avenging him. And I love the idea of coffee beans because she doesn't like coffee. She thinks it tastes like burnt shit. And she never got it. This was for him. This was a him thing. And the smile that Bella does there that turns into this It's different. It's not screaming. It's not crying anymore.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
There's tears in her eyes, but they're not rolling anymore. This is the next level of grief. This is the long pain, the long ache, not the acute misery. And she does still put her hand on that dirt because I think it's so beautiful. And then we all get to say goodbye to him. And I thought it was important to honor him. You know, we love Joel. And it hurt all of us.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Sometimes stories go this way where you create heartache on the journey of narrative to arrive somewhere that is hopefully better or healed or meaningful.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Dina is engaging in behavior that I would describe as tricky and a little manipulative. Dina says, who are you taking to the dance? You should take Kat. You know what? You don't want to take Kat? Come with me. It'll be fine. We'll have fun as friends. Then she's at the dance, high as a kite, and essentially seduces Ellie and kisses her in front of everyone.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And when we see them together in this tent, sleeping together, although, you know, side by side for the first time, there's this additional level of teasing and trickiness. And the question is, why is Dina doing this? Why is she asking, rate my kiss? Why is she saying, well, I'm not gay, you are. And then why does she say at the end, I wasn't that high? All of this Weird mindfuck behavior.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Am I allowed to say mindfuck on this? You just did. It's great. This mindfuck behavior should be, I think, frustrating for everyone to watch. It's definitely frustrating for Ellie. Where do I stand with her and what is her deal? For people who have played the game, the relationship changes in a different way and much earlier. So there may be right now some consternation.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Well, we care about Joel. And Joel died. And Tommy is taking care of Joel. But look at all these other people. Do they count? What do their families do? What do their brothers and children do? Do they seek justice for what's happened? Do they go out there and find more infected and punish them? Everybody is grieving.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And it's well-learned consternation because it's funny. Sometimes you write these things and you think, I don't like what you just did. I don't think I like what Dina is doing here. But my hope is that there will be some sort of explanation and perhaps some additional level of honesty yet to come.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Well... What I find interesting, and this conversation was drawn from the game, I loved how two 19-year-olds having a chat. 19-year-olds now, tell me the first time you kissed somebody. What was your first kiss? They get to say, who's the first person you killed? Not, have you killed a person? And they're not talking about infected. This is sort of something that everybody grows up with.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And so Ellie, yeah, casually tells her about the second one. I think because she's kind of proud of it, it's messed up. What happened is messed up, but she saved Joel's life there. That's what kind of matters. But the other thing that I find so interesting, Ellie doesn't ask Dina about the first person she killed.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And I feel like if someone goes, all right, let's talk about the first person you killed, the natural next question is— No, your turn. Yeah, exactly. And so perhaps that turn will come.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
But there are certain kinds of grievances and certain kinds of people that when they are consistent with each other, then this kind of potential violence emerges. And that is something that's going to come up over and over, which is to say— Why do you get the right to seek and deliver justice while the rest of us do not?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
This is our first view of Seattle, or at least Seattle adjacent. And we meet these people who seem quite kind and quite peaceful. They're refugees. They are leaving a war. They're fleeing a war zone to try and find peace. And they are led by a father and a little girl, which seems very, very familiar. And the way they talk to each other has that kind of true lived-in father-daughter thing.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
I mean, Neil always talked about Cormac McCarthy's The Road and how influential that was on The Last of Us. And I remember reading The Road and thinking if there's one thing that Cormac McCarthy got right, and there's about a billion things he got right in that – It's that children never stop asking goddamn questions. It goes on and on and on. Question, question, question, question.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And this little girl has that curiosity, and he's doing his best. And I love them. When she gets that hammer, that look of joy, and then in a very fatherly way, the little lesson he gives her, which is, guess what? Hammer's not going to work. Distance. We got to get away from the bad people. And then there is that warning, and he hides with her, and she says, Demons? And he says, Wolves.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Which is almost worse, but what are the demons? And what's going to happen to them? I mean, I don't know about you, but when I meet them, I'm on their side.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
I mean, that is a moment from the game that has changed somewhat. I think in the game, you encounter a dead horse and some dead infected possibly, and that smell does it, and here it's this. But it's the same thing, and it is a bit confusing for Dina and for Ellie.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
It almost seems simple. Seattle seems maybe like there are good guys and bad guys. You know, let's see.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
who is in the hospital, which is obviously overrun with people that need medical attention because of the attack that just happened, but she's in really bad shape. And this is something that Neil and I talked about quite a bit, which was how to give Ellie time to create narratively the ability for her to have to sit there in her grief and her despair and her anger
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
and take away her ability to do anything about it for a long time so that we understand that when she finally is released, now she is ready. She has thought it through at least as best as Ellie can to do what she thinks needs to happen, but she is forced to live with this.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And at least initially here, when she wakes up, we understand that while her body may be healing from what is almost certainly a cracked rib and pneumothorax, Her mind is right there in that room watching Joel die over and over. And that trauma is not something that is going to heal as easily as a punctured lung. No question.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And just to give credit to Bella Ramsey, which we do frequently because it's well-deserved, she's come out of this episode two where we asked her as a performer to do this kind of impossible moment of shock and grief and terror and then rage. And here we are at the beginning of the very next episode, and we're asking her to do it again, but in this way that is so...
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
gut-wrenching uh her ability to portray an honest horror true horror is just remarkable it makes me cry every time i see it because i believe it so much she's really i don't know she's one of a kind
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And there is a powerlessness that is expressed here, which is also very important to just take Ellie, who's such an active character, who's always impulsive and ready to, I'm going into the supermarket. Let's go fight a clicker. Let's go do this. And we take it all away. She can't even move.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And now what happens when your method of control in the world is taken away and now you are passive and you have to watch this over and over, you can imagine how over the course of three months, this is going to ferment in her brain into something that is very dangerous and very angry.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Peter and I, Peter Hoare directed the episode. Peter and I talked a lot about this scene as a fight, like an action fight, like a fist fight. But take away all the violence and use your words and your wiles and your craft, both of them. And it is such a joy to watch Catherine O'Hara and Bella Ramsey duel like this. And it's very simple...
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Gail wants to get to the bottom of what was really going on there because she's worried about Ellie. And Ellie needs to convince her that nothing happened. And inside of that, we start to wonder if Ellie isn't just lying to Gail, but also lying to us. She says, yep, last thing I saw him on the porch, I should have talked to him and I didn't. I don't believe her, but maybe I do. It's hard to tell.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
Well, she's a therapist, and I think her concern is that somebody has been psychologically damaged. I assume she's seen dozens of situations where children were hurt by their parents physically, emotionally, sexually. There's all sorts of abuse that occurs, and it can ruin people. And she knows that Joel did something because he admitted it. He admitted that he did something to her.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
He said, I didn't hurt her. Well, what did you do? I saved her. What does that mean? And all Gail knows is that whatever Joel did, it's wrecking him inside. And Gail also knows that Joel and Ellie are not on good terms.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
I mean, just the fact what he did with her husband, which we still don't have the full picture of. Something's really dark there. And Gail's primary concern, and it's the reason why she has to sign off before Ellie can walk out, is... Are you okay? And part of okay is not just how are you doing now that your father figure passed away three months ago. Part of okay is what did he do?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
And Ellie, it's hard to tell based on her response. Does she know what he did? Does she not know what he did? Does she care? We don't yet know. And it's pretty clear to Gail that if Ellie knows, she's not saying a damn thing.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
There is one possibility that while she is saying her last moments with Joel don't define their relationship— Maybe it is. Not because it should, but because that's how it is in her heart. That maybe that last moment – and her last moment wasn't seeing him on a porch. Because they sort of glide by that. Her last moment was seeing him on a floor in a ski lodge being murdered.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 3 - “The Path”
That's the last moment. That's the one that maybe – is going to define her memory of Joel. What does she do now if she's locked inside of that? She was locked inside of it when we saw her in the hospital bed. Is she still locked inside of it? She's not screaming anymore, but that doesn't mean she's not still there.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Yeah. That's the hardest moment, is when she's begging him to get up, and he tries.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
That is heartbreaking to me. Heartbreaking. Because that's where you see how pure a parent's love is for a child. And this is something that children don't know. It's not their fault. They just don't know because they haven't experienced it. People say, oh, you know, when you have a kid, you experience this new stuff. And a lot of people are like, I think I can extrapolate. You can't.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
You just can't. I couldn't. I didn't know until I knew. And that is pure parental desperate love. He's trying to pick himself up for her, even though he can't even move. And what Bella does here, I mean... It's the full range of things, and it is all brutally heartfelt, in part because I think she and Pedro, too, are very close and are so intertwined, you know, in their own lives.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Pedro said this beautiful thing to Bella when we were wrapping season one. He said, you know, it's so strange how this life-changing thing came along so late for me and so early for you. But they share it. So a lot of this is overlapped, I think, with who they are as people, too. I remember we walked over, Marc Mylad and I walked over. We're sitting on the floor with Bella.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And we said, listen, there's this moment where you're going to have to shift from the most brutal grief to savagery. We want you to terrify us with the resolve that you have to murder these people. Because Ellie has this catalytic change from fear and grief to anger that is so rapid and so frightening. And she does it.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Yeah, HBO, the place that made Game of Thrones when Ned Stark gets his head lopped off. I'm still reeling from that. I mean, first of all, let's just all take a big deep breath because that was a lot. The episode is a lot. There is... this massive attack on Jackson, people's lives are in danger. It is absolute mayhem.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And when she says, you're all going to fucking die, it is terrifying. I mean, I think they probably should have killed her at that point, but they didn't believe her.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Well, it's a bit of a mystery, because... The night before, she told him she didn't need his help. She rejected him. She came home. She saw him on the porch. She walked right by him. Didn't say a word. Cold as ice. It's the next morning. And what she says to Jesse is, no offense, I think I'm just going to go on patrol with a Joel. She wants to go on patrol with Joel. What has happened?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And when Jesse pushes on her, she kind of explodes.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
collects herself back up because she has probably been told, hey, it's not great when you explode at people. So what happens is you get that explosion, then they kind of try and pull it back.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And also, there is this brutal moment that ends with Bella both terrifying you and breaking your heart at the same time. And I think it's fair to say that a lot of people, having seen the episode, are a bit shaken, and reasonably so. It is a big thing we've asked the audience to swallow. It is going to upset a lot of people, and that's okay.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And it is this interesting moment of clarity about her relationship with Joel that doesn't quite add up. So that mystery will hang in the air for a little bit. But... When she gets to him, we know it isn't just, oh, I didn't talk to you last night when you were on the porch. There's more. We just don't know what it is yet.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Well, we began by asking questions, because I'm the pesky question guy. How do they defend themselves? What do they have other than a wall? What could they have other than a wall? What would their method be? Surely they've sat there and thought, okay, if raiders come, we do this. If a horde comes, we do this. So they have a plan. But what is it? And how can it be something that is...
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
a bit surprising to us, but also once we get over the surprise, we think, oh yeah, of course, that's smart. That's a good idea. And in that way, we created the plan. And the plan almost works until a bloater shows up, which is sort of the way life is, right? Everything's going fine until a bloater shows up. And then the madness begins.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
The town remains at the end. We understand, as Maria and Tommy are embracing and sort of emotionally collapsing, that the battle is over, but at great cost. there needs to be a reckoning, like Neil is saying, with the reality of the world. In season one, let's just talk practically for a second, we were figuring out how to do it all while we were doing it.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
A little bit like building a plane in the air. This season, we knew more, and we understood a little bit better about how to do it. Mark did a kind of amazing job working with Alex Wong, our visual effects supervisor, to create pre-vis for the entire battle. I mean, the whole thing was mapped out very, very carefully and then budgeted very, very carefully.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
It was prepped and shot like its own movie. I can't remember the total number of days, but movie-length days. Movie length in terms of schedule at the prep was very long. It's fascinating to see how these things work. You build them with large swaths of blue out there that you know will be a thing.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And they may be angry about it, and they may be confused about it, and they may be miserable about it, but I'm hoping that for the majority of them, they are going to reconnect now with who's left behind and what happens now. Because what happens now is one unstoppable force meeting another.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And then even now as we speak, because we recorded this quite a bit before the show airs, we are still working with Weta and D-Nag. Weta does all the creature stuff. So Weta is creating... We've mixed stunt people in with CG people. And as I review, a lot of times... Can't tell. Is that one of yours or one of ours?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Because that guy's running weird. And it turns out I was one of ours. It's real. So we can't change it. But that's what Weta is doing. And now, suddenly, it's there. The dream happens... rather late in the process. So you just, you have faith that it's all going to work. It's hard work.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
in the end, we always try and capture some, not just a relationship inside of these moments, but a change. Because there's something that Tommy does here with Maria that he never had a chance to do. She's shooting at this bloater who looks up at her, goes, ah, someone's shooting me from there. I'm going to go find you. And he says, no, chase after me. Chase after me. And that is new information.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
That is something Maria didn't know would happen. She may have hoped.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
They tuck tail. I'm out of here. That would happen.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
We don't chase stakes. You know, at some point, I know in movies, you eventually have to protect the entire galaxy. It's not enough to, you know, save your town. But for us, the stakes are the people and the relationships, and if we feel those, and if those are threatened.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
You can have an entire town under attack by waves of infected, but if you don't have Maria and Tommy looking at each other, and Tommy trying to save her, and her saving him. And, you know, it's just a fight.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And let's stop for a moment and talk about the monsters as heroes of their story, because they're the most selfless. They're the most about community. They sacrifice each other willy-nilly. to protect the people behind them, the way that ants work. They are more cohesive, more collected, and more unified than people are. And that's, to me, its own fascinating thing.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
There's a reason cordyceps took over the world. They're better at it than we are. So we've created this little enclave to hide. Well, they're gonna try and get in anyway. But when you have a battle that is this big, with this many people,
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
You do crave a moment where it focuses down to two of them, where everything shrinks down to one act of desperation and one moment where a person faces death in the eye in a personal way. So there's that moment in Saving Private Ryan where one soldier is being slowly stabbed to death by another. And it is this moment.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
very personal, intimate act of violence that is so lonely and quiet as compared to the noise and chaos of war. And I thought it was important to see Tommy face death that way.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Both of you gestured to me. I gestured to Neil because it comes from the game. I mean, there's this great moment in the game. We really just expanded on this small moment. You're playing as Abby and you come across frozen bodies. And it's scary. In part because you're not sure, why are all these bodies here?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And we expanded on this and had set up a little bit of a discussion, even all the way back in, all the way back one episode prior, Maria's got a hunch. She's got a feeling. And... They've already heard, as we hear from Jesse in the beginning of the episode, people have found infected that are now alive, hibernating or keeping warm underneath a layer of frozen infected covered by snow.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
So they're not sure how many of them are out there. Could be 30, could be 1,000 is what Jesse says. And of course, Ali's like, 1,000, right, sure. Well, Abby finds them. And her arrival triggers some movement under the snow, and then out they come.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Yes, and I love working on those shots with Weta because one of the things they're really good at, and I always ask for this, is the first instinct is they pour out and they run down the hill. And my first instinct is they pour out and start falling. They run into each other. They lose their footing. There's no careful planning or thought. These are not stalkers.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And so there's a messiness to it and a brutality. And again, a total lack of concern for each other. It's all about getting that one. And it leads to a sequence that we really looked for fidelity to the game. And that is when Abby gets into this mining plant and that fence goes in.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Well, the easy part was the source material was correct. I remember playing it and experiencing it and feeling horrible. But there is that difference between experiencing something and feeling horrible because you loved somebody and you're grieving for the loss of that person. And you're shocked that the story would be so dangerous as to kill that person.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Yeah, there's something wrong with us.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Yeah, that was like, that's an easy one, right? Like, part of the fun of this for me is that as many questions as I ask and as many levers as I, you know, play around with, and I'll say, Neil, what if we do this? Or what if we do this? Or here's a crazy idea. There are some things where it's just full clarity. Oh, we're doing that. And we don't need to screw that. I mean, that's, it's gorgeous.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And the way she's rescued and discovered by Joel, it's just, you know... Keep it. It works. It's great.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Yeah, so Dina is with Joel now, and she's in this mine. That's an actual mining facility in Wyoming. And Dina's at this lower level, and she shouts for Joel. And Caitlin does this incredible thing where she's like, I just got saved. I'm freaking out. My gun is gone. That's the guy I'm looking for. He just saved my life. What do I do now? And the gears spinning in her head are fascinating to watch.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Caitlin talks to Joel in a very intimate way before she begins to hurt him. And in that discussion, there's this moment where she turns and looks and sees this bag of old golf clubs across the room. And then she looks back at Joel and a tear just comes out. There is a pain there that you can't help but connect with. And that's why this story is so fascinating to me.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
It is screwing with the fundamental physics of narrative. It is forcing your brain to get out of its comfort zone with narrative because you are struggling in that moment. I almost feel like Schrodinger's audience in that moment. I am rooting for her and I'm rooting for him. It's both.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
The cognitive dissonance there, the emotional dissonance, is glorious to me because it's complicated and I think it mirrors how we feel a lot in our own lives.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And a different response, which is a critical, I don't think that was a good choice. I thought it was a brilliant choice. I thought it was incredibly brave. And I thought it was really smart. Because in the end, you have to take plot armor away at some point.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
I remember seeing that little, I guess you'd call it a teaser, as a fan of the game, Losing My Shit. And the moment before it begins... is sort of why the song happens at all. Because Ellie makes this slow, painful crawl across the floor to Joel's body. She has been kicked in the ribs and clearly injured badly. She might not make it at all. I think she thinks she's going to die here.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And she just wants to be with him. And it is so heartbreaking to hear her little breaths as she just settles in with the only person in her life that she truly loved. And then we wanted, I remember talking about this with Mark too, we wanted to drift away into a dreamy view of what happens now. Because you can't keep doing reality after that. That is the peak of it. And what that means is a song.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And if you're going to tell a story about consequences, and if you're going to tell a story about a man who does a terrible, terrible thing for the best possible reason there is... then you need the world to provide feedback. And the feedback here is brutality. That's how the world works. So there was never a question that we were going to do this. The real question was when.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And Ashley isn't just Ellie in the game, she's also now in our show, Ellie's mother. And there is this ghostly sound of the other person who loved Ellie as much as Joel did. And what she is singing about is not good news. In the end, even though Jackson is saved, even though Ellie survives, someone's soul might be damned. And that is rough.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
But I will say, and I'll be intentional about this, that we do know that for the viewer, there are some mysteries here. There's some gaps about Ellie and Joel's relationship. And I don't think it's a spoiler based on the fact that there's a trailer out there with lots of shots in it. This is not the last we will see of Joel.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And we talked about this a lot. And it felt to us like episode one really taught us a lot about where Joel was and what his relationship was like with Ellie. And it doesn't end well. And here we get to episode two and this happens and you feel this double destruction because as far as we know, her relationship with Joel was broken and now she's forced to watch him die.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And it's like a double wound to the heart.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And I remember being... I like that, like he was setting you up for like a more interesting second part of that sentence. Clearly this happened.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Abby is torn apart by grief. And grief is a very specific thing. Grief is not justice. Grief is not vengeance. Grief is the pain that is left when something that is entwined with you is ripped away. And what's happening here is a cycle where she is trying to keep herself from seeing this thing that is going to make this so much more grievous to her. And she can't.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And you get the feeling that this is not the first time she's tried to tell herself, don't walk in that room. But what she sees in there is is horrible. When Joel shoots this man in the head, it is not a fun moment to watch. It is not a rooting moment as far as I'm concerned.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
In season one, when he does that, that is when we feel he's really just disconnected himself from any kind of sense of belonging to society or civilization. He is solely about getting Ellie out of there. He doesn't care what he does or who he hurts.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And now this 19-year-old girl is wandering in there, who at that point is the same age that Ellie is right now, and sees him on the floor and sees that wound. There is a reason in season one we showed him on the floor. We could have easily just stayed with Joel after he shoots him in the head, but that's the last thing in the room that we see because that's what Abby's going to see.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And that tearing away can't be undone, no matter how much she tries while she sleeps to do it.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Very graphic. And one thing that we were able to do is have Abby be very explicit in her confrontation with Joel about what she saw, to confront him with what he did.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And there's this moment between the two of them that I love and must give credit to Mark Mylot, our director, whose people may know him from Succession. And here he is doing this brilliant job with these actors in these little moments where Abby says, we have a code and the code is not to hurt people who can't defend themselves.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And that's you right now, but I am gonna kill you because everyone agrees. that some things are just wrong. And Joel gives the slightest nod because he is acknowledging that what he did was capital W wrong, but also we understand he didn't care and he still doesn't care. It doesn't matter. So yes, does he deserve to die by the rules of the universe? Sure.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Even when he shoots that guy in the head? Yeah. Even when he shoots the guy.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Yeah, there's a lot of people talking about the trolley problem, the famous moral conundrum. And what I find interesting about these characters, at least when I'm sitting down at the keyboard and working on a scene, is that they don't have the trolley problem. It's not a problem for them at all. Nobody seems to be wrestling with what to do. Joel's a very clear goal.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Oh, the trolley can either hit all those people or your kid. Not a problem. Send them to all the people. Abby has dragged this group of friends all the way from Seattle back here, putting them all in terrible danger, putting herself in terrible danger to do this. Not a trolley problem for her at all.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
So there is a moral clarity here where people are making their own systems of values and sticking to them in extremely hard ways. And the challenge that everyone is going to have is the challenge that Joel faces right here as someone is hitting him in his wounded knee with a golf club. And that is, does it work? In the end, does this method of pursuing my own value system actually work?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Would it not be better if I could have somehow figured out how to grow old and be Ellie's grandfatherly figure? Could I not see her become a 50-year-old person? I don't get that because of what I've done. They're all going to pay a price. So the question that we've seeded in here is, How do you win?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
And you know, it's a great point. If she just shoots him and they leave... Ellie gets there too late. She never knows who did it.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 2 - “Through the Valley”
Well, they've been one step ahead in that they understood it was going to happen. I don't think that anyone knew exactly when it would happen.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
It's fascinating to see how Ellie finds her purpose in fighting. That's where she feels effective. That's where she feels like she's her own person. And I think a lot of this is about separation. And when you separate from the adult that has taken care of you and raised you, you want to figure out how you're an adult. And adults are effective at things. Ellie is not like Joel. Joel builds.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Ellie doesn't build stuff. She doesn't do construction. But Ellie can do violence. And she does it right here. And then in the next scene we see her, she's blowing the head off a clicker, as Tommy teaches her. And her reaction when that head explodes is, oh! It's a delight. Because those things are dangerous animals. They're free to kill.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
We talk a lot about community. That word is going to come up more than a few times because that is what Jackson is. It is the only community that I can think of that we've... shown, certainly is, that's functional. It may be the only functional community at all in the world. We don't know because beyond the borders of where we've traveled is a bit invisible to us. But Jackson is functioning.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
There was something about the amount of attention and the size of the discussion and the size of the audience, which was way beyond what we expected. There's a general ballpark that you get from HBO. We'd love to hit this number and we... shot way past that number.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
It is taking in refugees. Joel and Tommy are working on renovating some of the houses that weren't livable so that they can house more people, so they can grow. This is what humans do in success. This is what was going on back in the hunter-gatherer days they began. A little small thing becomes London one day. And that's what's happening here. There is a power to that. There is a security to that.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
There is also a danger that you become a little complacent. You think you've figured it out. It's been five years. You are bringing the best of what we are back, arts and joy and peace and safety and harmony. But don't overestimate your place in this world.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
It was important... I think to get across that Joel was struggling with why. It's easy for anyone to go, oh, I'll tell you why, because look at how she ended season one. You swore and she said, okay, and she doesn't seem like she believes him. It was important to see that Joel hasn't kind of gotten there yet. And that, in fact, this is relatively new. This is a new development.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Now, we're five years later. That means things must have been going okay for a while. And now they're not. And he's struggling with that. It is also important in this scene to introduce Dina because she is an incredibly important character to this story and what happens and what goes forward. And she is so different from Ellie and Joel. I think she represents a much more positive, healthy,
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
way to be she seems at least healthier and more positive she seems like a force for good she's wild she loves life yeah she's outgoing she's confident there was something that i didn't realize was missing in ellie until i saw it in dina and that's that spark that spunk that pluckiness that well i'll go take on anything dina loves people ellie and joel loved each other
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And that was the size of their community. And you feel like Dina is this ray of sunshine. And Isabella Merced... Well, we asked her to do so many different things in this season, and we will watch as that happens. But one of the things that I love about how she portrays Dina here in this first episode is that you can feel the warmth radiating off of her.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
You want to be her friend because she's so funny and on top of stuff. She's charming. She's charming. She's really, really charming. You know what I love? Just a side note. Yeah. Again, Dina. Isabella is so, every time she's on screen, I just start smiling automatically. And when she comes to pick up Ellie to do the patrol, she's like trying to get them back together, you know?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
It's sort of sweet and lovely and doesn't work. And she just sort of goes, okay, well, tried it. I love watching those two together.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
of shooting was the scene where she comes to pick her up to go on patrol. And I was, you know, five seconds into take one, and I went, we're gonna be fine. We're gonna be okay. We're gonna be more than fine. These two, like, amazing.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
I am a big believer in the Vince Gilligan theory that comic actors make the best dramatic actors. So, when Vince makes Breaking Bad, he casts Bryan Cranston. Sitcom dad, guess what? Incredible actor. There is a depth of humanity to funny people that is often discounted or overlooked. And Catherine O'Hara has done dramatic roles before, not too many.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Mostly comedic roles because she's so brilliantly funny. And she's pretty funny in this one too. But there is a depth and soul to her that is so obvious, to me at least, and informs why she's funny. She is iconic and always comes across as knowing.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
This was a scene that actually has its roots in season one. I wrote a version of this for the first episode where we see Joel talking to a therapist. And it didn't fit in perfectly. It also felt a little bit off track from getting to Ellie. It was just delaying getting to Ellie, which was really important to us. But it was good, actually.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
It was a good thing that we didn't do it in season one because there's more subtext now to discuss. And I love characters that lie. I think that is one of the basic human actions. We don't give it enough credit because we do it all the time.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
The idea of lying or obscuring or holding back or concealing, even in a session with a therapist, a job that would be extraordinarily useful in a barter system in the post-apocalypse where everyone has suffered, everyone has been traumatized. And Gail is not just a therapist. She's good. She's really smart.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And she's also brave because she's doing something in the scene that is scary, in part because she needs to, because she herself has been traumatized, and in part because she needs to demonstrate by example.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Joel's emotions are connected to Ellie. What he is struggling with is the fact that she's pulling away from him. And he doesn't, or at least he claims to not know why. And we can see this. I mean, part of this episode is a little bit of a mystery. What is going on with the two of them? Right. Exactly. Because it's bad. And he's struggling with it, he's asking Dina, he's asking his therapist.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Yeah. We care about the audience. We want them to love it. But the specific criticisms or praise, ultimately you have to put a shield up or else you'll drown in it.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
What he's terrified of is that the rift is because she knows or has figured out what he did. But when you see him stand up and say, I saved her, what's clear is he has no regrets about what he did.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Pedro... has these almost invisible changes and choices that because they're almost invisible, they're extraordinarily visible. The way he goes from guilt to resolution in a moment. The way he goes from, I'm trapped and I'm like a little child who has to face up to what I've done to... I am indomitable and I'm leaving is remarkable.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And sometimes when I'm directing and I have a situation like that, where I've just got two great actors facing off, it's like an action scene as far as I'm concerned. Emotional action scene. An emotional action scene, I always say it's like driving a Ferrari. I mean...
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
I come in there and I mostly just clarify some subtext things that might, you know, not popped out and then I get the hell out of the way.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Things have happened between Joel and Ellie walking down the mountain towards Jackson at the end of season one and where we are now. A lot of things have happened. There are ghosts of mistakes in history past that we are going to unfold and we are going to discover. But where we are here... is heartbreaking because that guitar clearly means something.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And the way it's on the floor, I can't tell you how much time I spent adjusting the clothing and the angle of the guitar and where the guitar would be and how it would be lying there and how much dust would be on it. It's a carelessness. It is a discarding of something that sticks in Joel's chest like a knife. And he does his very best to not explode or do anything.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
He just walks over, shoves all of his feelings down into a little ball, tells her she'll get it back the next day, he's gonna put some new strings on it, pretends that he's just caring for the guitar. She knows, she knows. The second he sees it there, she knows. that she's blown it and also seemingly doesn't care. That's the depth of what's going on here.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And how we got there and how it gets resolved is yet to come.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
The community. But there's Ellie alone. Alone. And that is, you know, that's a shot. There are shots where, as I'm playing the game, it's not that I take notes, it's just emotionally, they thumbprint on you. Like, this is where, in making a television show, a shot like that lasts about two seconds or so.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
the number of meetings and the amount of work put in and the set design and how those lights would be strung and how we would shoot it. And then Ksenia Sarada, our brilliant cinematographer, one of my favorite moments of her work was that the shot was sort of set up to be on this little crane, which we had wheeled into the doorway of this church. And it just wasn't quite perfect like the game.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
I just wanted to... And she was very patient. And then she was like, in her very gustenny way, take the camera off the crane, please. And then she put it on her shoulders and she just did it herself by hand. And it was flawless. It's so beautiful. And that's one of those things where...
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
When the game and the show overlap like that, it's glorious, and I think it also helps enhance where the game and the show separate. Because you know it's going to come back. We don't wander away and never come back. We're always tied to that experience, which I think is great.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
For me, the most important thing was to establish a new reality for Joel and Ellie. It's been five years. She is older. She is different. She is more independent. And Joel is older, too, and has settled into this interesting kind of mentorship life. He's become a pillar of this community that he, you know, initially was sort of at odds with.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Our love extends beyond the visual here. We're also listening to music that is being played by a band named Crooked Still, which is the music that plays in the game.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Who's playing along with them as part of the band. Yeah. Britney and the Jug Boys is the name in the show. I think it's a fantastic name. But they were, it was wonderful to work with them and it just made the whole thing just so much, I don't know, truer.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Seth. Good old Seth. I'll say this. We're gonna get a little deeper into Seth. Seth had a moment in the game that was important. And in our world, which stopped at 2003 in terms of its social progress and development, There was simply not the acceptance of gay people or lesbian people or anybody on that flag. And Seth comes from that world, clearly.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
We'll find out who he was and where he came from. But it was important to not pretend that the people in this world would necessarily be in a 2024 mindset about, say, queer people.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Yes. And it is something that we want people to feel our characters carrying with them. Ellie carries this with her. She knows how people feel. Who she is and even how Joel understands it and how he comes to understand it is yet to be understood. And then there's the question of Dina. What is Dina doing? And I remember getting to that moment and loving it and also being like, is this real?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
She says, I'm high. I smoked a lot. Well, is it real?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And the two of them are operating in a world of safety and security and confidence. Jackson is safe. The way that they're interacting with infected is different. They feel more like hunters now than victims or people who are quarry. So that and introducing the new realities for Tommy and Maria and their child, who is in Maria's belly in season one, and here he is running around as a five-year-old,
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Do you know what breaks my heart, and this is right from the game, is that he does this and then turns to Ellie, and with all sincerity, as if he thinks she would be thrilled, He says, are you okay? Expecting her to hug him the way she did maybe outside that burning steakhouse. I saved you again. He can't help but try to keep saving her. And what she says is, I don't need your fucking help.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And the anger on her face tells me that there is way more going on than I'm angry that you pushed a guy in a dance. And what that is, we will come to understand.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Ellie has killed a clicker with a knife to the neck in Kansas City, and she's getting real good at killing clickers with a knife to the neck here. So is Dina. They are not afraid. But this is where Ellie wants to make a choice. When Dina questions it, Ellie says, if you'd rather let the men handle it. And it's not even about gender. It's about adults, really.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
What she's saying is you want the grownups to handle it. Are we just kids?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
We talked a lot about how to create a world where our characters felt actually rather safe with the infected. Because when you go from season one to season two, if your fear reaction to infected is the same, then you kind of haven't learned anything in five years. You haven't gotten better. You haven't practiced. Humans are very good at solving problems over time.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And these humans have gotten pretty good at solving the infected problem. They're feeling good about themselves to the point where Ellie and Dina are fine to walk in a supermarket and go one-on-one. But this one is different.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And the Stalker, of course, is an evolution character in the game. And we kind of wanted to spotlight the fact that they think, which is a huge problem. It is terrifying. Even the way they sound, that sadness, there's a humanity in there still. There is more brain left in them. But they're also like, how they sound is they're quiet.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Exactly. Like she says, they plan, they stalk. And it's also very important to note here that It wins in the sense that it bites Ellie and would infect her if she were anyone else on the planet. It's that good. So this kid slash young woman who goes into a supermarket, cocky as hell, just got bit by this other thing that she did not see coming.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
The introduction of that is probably never gonna pay off. I'm sure we will never see stalkers again.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Yeah. What we liked about this was that it was the progress that caused the problem, that these pipes underground that had been there dormant for five years, that cordyceps had gotten into, nobody's touching them. Nobody knows it's there. But when you are humans and you want to expand, you cannot expand without an expense that nature has to pay. And now we see it.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
If you don't fix those houses, if you don't break those pipes, if you don't pull out the weeds, no problem. But they have, and they don't realize it yet. And there is- Actions have consequences. Actions have consequences.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And meeting new people that are incredibly important to the story, Dina and Jesse. And of course, there is that moment with this absolutely new character named Abby and all the people she's with.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
All those things are important to get across here because as anybody that watches The Last of Us knows, whatever reality and whatever certainty we create, we're probably going to kick it around a bit before you know it.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Yeah. So let's just go ahead and rip the scab off on what I think is going to be a lot of commentary. Future Days, that song didn't exist in 2003 when the world ended. And Neil and I... had, you know, a solid conversation and arrived at the following conclusion. We didn't give a shit. Because it is an important song to the story. And thematically, it's incredibly important.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Because Joel is trying to figure out what his future is with Ellie. And Ellie is trying to figure out what her future is as herself, not as someone's kid. And where they're heading into the future, which we accelerate them into five years later, they have arrived at future days. It is, in fact, the past that is the anchor that is still holding them back.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And the bait on the hook for me was Joel's reaction, which was new, because we never got to see it in the game. And when she says okay like that, what is he supposed to take from that? And I think it's a fantastic choice that Pedro makes there, which is... I'm pretty sure that's bad. I'm gonna choose to take it at face value anyway, because that's what's best for me. And it's fantastic.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
But I think, you know, Neil is absolutely right. Just that finality of ending with Ellie's okay, especially the way Bella delivered that is just incredible. But then we had a chance to come back and remind people of this moment, the key moment that generates everything from this point forward. And then to give them that little bit more to see what Joel chooses to do there.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And you can already see in that choice the problem. The problem is he's going to pretend for as long as he can that she doesn't know, no matter what he gets back from her. So let's talk about Abby for a little bit.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Well, the character is pretty much who the character is in the game. She is, as we find out, a firefly. She lives in Salt Lake City. We know that because we see the giraffes. They're burying people. And we don't know who this one cross is that she walks over to and drapes a firefly pendant over, but it's clearly somebody that mattered deeply to her.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
We know from this scene that she has a different relationship with Owen than with the others. We know that she is angry and she doesn't care about circumstances. She doesn't want to hear what you can't do or why you can't do it. She is already fixated on one thing, no matter what. She wants to kill Joel for what he's done. And we know what he's done. We saw it.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And you can feel from the very beginning that even the person that she's closest with here, Owen, they're not like her. They've all been through this, but there's something different about her. She is operating in a place that is much more intense than them.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Abby and how we introduce her and the context we put her in, in this season, right off the bat, it's the first new scene really that we see after Joel and Ellie walk towards Jackson, is something that we talked about a lot. And part of it was the way she's introduced in the game is through you playing her.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And that experience is why the way I think you guys structured the information release worked so well. Because you are somebody, and it's a mystery, but who am I? Why am I here? What do I want? And why do I want it? But you're occupying her. We don't do that on the show. And so it felt like, okay,
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Maybe the information delivery system should be different here because we don't have that opportunity to be a person.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Well, we didn't feel like we were obliged to fully represent the same body shape that Abby has. There is a power that Abby gives you in the game as you're playing her. And as Neil said something that was so interesting to me as a game designer that I didn't really think about much as a player. I just experienced it.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Just that when you're playing somebody and you then shift over and play somebody else, they need to have different... methods of... Different physicality. Different physicality, different ways to attack, different ways. So when you're Joel, you feel one way. When you're Ellie, you feel different.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And you play differently, you're more scared because you're smaller and you don't quite have the Joel-ness about you. And it was smart to make Abby different in that play style than, say, Ellie. But again, we don't have gameplay. So to me, the key was to find a certain ferocity and a relentlessness.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And I think you'll see some of that as the season goes on and certainly as we go forward with the show.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
Well, I mean, I will say season one, I'm just going to be fully transparent. I don't do well with a lot of attention. I think the rough thing for me is that if something fails, I feel really, really bad. And if something succeeds the way the first season did, I just feel really, really scared. I don't know why.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
The look on Ellie's face where all that kind of fun, I'm one of these guys doing this stuff, just gone. I'm not Joel's girl. And it was important for us to show this fight because we wanted to explore how somebody who is Bella's size fights. Because Bella has aged, but she's not getting taller. And the world is full of people that are bigger than her.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
And so we did a lot of research and looking around, and it seemed like jujitsu was the way to go. And I watched videos of small people taking down big people, and it's kind of incredible, and they do it the way she did it there. And that's what they're training her to do. And I think it's amazing the idea that Ellie is like, I know my size. Teach me how to do violence.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 1 - “Future Days”
two people that are bigger than me because I want to be effective in this world on my own. I don't want somebody coming to save me every time. I want to be able to take these people down. And we also get a hint that she's not necessarily fully in control of it because when she's in that moment and she's got his arm and he's tapping out, she's somewhere else.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
That is a theater in Vancouver. that we found that is so close to the one in the game. A ton of credit to Alex Wong and our VFX team and all of our vendors for very subtly aging it. There's some subtle aging going on because we couldn't mess their carpets up. We couldn't mess their seats up or their walls. But we also wanted to imply that this was fairly well preserved.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
This was kind of a tomb that had been left untouched. a safe haven for Dina and Ellie.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
So Don McCauley and our art department did make everything else in the theater. So the rooftop that they run onto, the lobby that they walk into, the balcony that they sit on where Dina's explaining how triangulation works.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Oh yeah, no, we don't screw around. Like that's one area where for me, my feeling is if we're going to make a set and we're going to put carpet in here, then we're putting the carpet in from the game. Like, why wouldn't we? That doesn't make any sense. There's no reason to fix the carpet. It's perfect. And that's what I want because I'm a fan. It matters.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
You know, if you play the game, there's a certain sense memory. And if you haven't, well, now you have the experience that we all had.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
This tableau is inspired by a movie that I have gone back to over and over and over again. It was something that I studied lengthily with Johan Reink when we made Chernobyl. It is Come and See, which is a Russian war film. Oh, I can see from your face you have not seen it, Troy. Never seen it. It is the greatest war movie that has ever been made.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
It's an incredible piece of work and... There is a moment that this is very forwardly quoting from the way that these bodies are arranged against that wall. But one thing that I thought was important was to show that response that this is like, great, you want to tag the wall? We'll tag the wall. We'll tag the wall with your bodies and then we'll write this. They're leaving each other messages.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
The Seraphites come to the TV station, hang and disembowel wolves and leave a message on the wall. And then the wolves come here, execute a bunch of these people, leave their bodies, leave a message on the wall. This is the worst kind of communication possible.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And in that moment, I think Ellie understands she is taking Dina into a place that is so horrible, so ruthless and violent and dehumanizing that she's putting Dina and what she now thinks of as their baby At risk. And she doesn't say, let's go home. She says, I'll take you home. Like, we'll go back. I'll take you home. Then I'll return and handle this myself.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Very small, but very fierce. So a little bit like Ben Oller's character from last week, the rookie who's went from a federal soldier to this WLF soldier character. we see that Hanrahan, that's the character's name, went from a citizen who was a revolutionary to a high-ranking officer in a militarized organization. And there is a mystery here.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
But you shouldn't be here in your condition, essentially, is what she's implying.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And in the game, when you travel with Dina, you do get some of the story about her life and her background. And we did hint at it a little bit back in the third episode when Ellie and Dina are on horse and Dina asks who was the first person you killed. But as Dina points out, Ellie never asked who the first person was that Dina killed. And here this story comes out.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
It's a little different than the story in the game, but it is a very moving performance from Isabella Merced. And as it turns out, when she said to me later that she had been practicing and rehearsing and memorizing that speech for like two months.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And then the next word, I think, is, and if. And if the guy that killed my mother and my sister had gotten away... I would have gone after him and never given up. That if is a big if because we'd like to think that we can do things in circumstances. We like to think we would have certain feelings. We like to think that.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
But then circumstances have a way of crashing in and making things actually quite difficult. Moral questions as hypotheses are safe to ponder. When you have the information... And the information tells you there is no moral victory here. None. But a choice must be made. That's where the hard stuff happens. So Dina has a kind of privileged position.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
She gets to imagine the way she would have behaved had she not shot that guy if he had gotten away. But Ellie doesn't have that privilege. Ellie only has fact. Now, when Dina gets all the facts, if she gets all the facts, remains to be seen. We'll see if that if changes for her.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
She clearly outranks all these guys, but it's not like they're backing away from her here when she shows up. They're sort of looking at her defiantly as if to say, yeah, we did the thing that you are upset about. There is a stairwell door that has been welded shut, not just by a little, by a lot. And they don't back away from her. They don't back down.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
yeah the worst kind so little production background that plant is an abandoned i guess no longer used dairy plant in british columbia and i wandered in there with our locations he was like well i mean it smells very bad in here and we're also shooting in here for sure um
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
What was kind of funny is every day we would walk through this kind of section that we weren't going to use because it was just sort of a bit bland and warehouse-y looking. And in those bland, warehouse-y looking rooms were dozens and dozens of enormous crates full of... saved props, costumes, and stage design stuff from Shogun. What? Yeah, because Shogun had, they got to store stuff.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
You know, I think they probably knew like, hey, this show's pretty good. I mean, I bet we get another season of this. We should save some of these boats and swords. But this space was fantastic because we could use its size and its silence.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
The dynamic has been from the start and really clearly back when Dina shows up at Ellie's garage and says, here's how we're getting to Seattle. You don't know what you're doing. I do. I'm smart. I plan. Follow me. She's doing it again.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
But very quickly, when they realize what's going on, and when we realize what's going on, which is, okay, we dealt with one stalker in the supermarket in episode one. One. And Ellie lost.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Right? If she's not the one immune person in the world, she's dead. Or rather, she's infected. Now there's 11 of them? The dynamic here... Changes completely. Planning doesn't matter anymore. Planning's done. Thinking is done. Dina, you take a backseat. Ellie, you drive. And when Ellie drives, the plan is all Joel. This is a full Joel moment as far as I'm concerned for Ellie.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
We see how, like, what did Gail say to Tommy? I think if they were walking the same path, they've been walking side by side from the very start.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
This is just what Joel would have done. You get in there. You hide. I die for you. Go. And the confidence and the conviction there is so undeniable that Dina just does it. She says, I can take bites.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
She's just trying to get, because now it's a different parent-child thing, right? Dina has been the parent. Now Ellie's the parent. And when parents need their kids to do something very quickly, they will lie to them. Now, obviously, it's true. Ellie can get bit a lot and Dina can't. But really what Ellie knows is she's going to get ripped apart.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
She turns around and she heads into a room to have a one-on-one conversation with someone else.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
She just needs Dina to somehow survive in that cage and not get ripped apart.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
We worked really hard on those. There are versions, you know, you get these sort of things back because it's a visual effect that we do, obviously. And there are versions where it's like, oh, look, they're ghosts.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
They've got these shiny... You know, you just keep pulling it back, pulling it back, pulling it back and trying to make it as realistic as possible the way that dogs or sheep or other animals like this at night... their retinas will reflect back white. And something has happened inside these, the stalkers to do something similar to their eyes. And so it's the barest thing.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
You don't want them to look like Jawas from Star Wars, you know? So like we really fine tune that stuff to make sure it's just barely there.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Here comes Han Solo. And for a moment, and I love the way Steven and Ksenia shot this, Because then you use something called a lens baby, which is basically it's a device that slightly tilts or distorts the lens as you're shooting to create a blurry, weird kind of sense of being dazed. And so it's this bare hint of lens baby.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And then this man shows up with his boots and his stride and his jeans and everything. You can see on Ellie's face. Now she's a child again because she's so traumatized by what's going on and so stunned and confused. Is it him? She almost for a second thinks it's him.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Was that... Oh, yeah. It was really just about being in Ellie's mind there. So it was very intentional. It's in the script that she thinks, wait, and we all do. Wait, is that... But we know Joel's dead. So it's clearly not him, right? There is no possibility, but it's that weird moment of, is the man who has kept me safe, the one person that makes me feel not afraid, is he back?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
What I love about that is that Jesse is exactly the kind of person that would come save you. And he is worth looking up to and he is very strong. And he has this, I guess you'd call it positive paternalism. But boy, he's angry.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Jesse has been very patient with Ellie. He's been patient with her while he was training her to fight. He was patient with her about the town council meeting. He's patient with her about her weird stuff with Joel and not wanting to go on a patrol with him. But here, it's an interesting thing to rescue somebody And so clearly be angry with them.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And this touches on a very big difference between the show and the game. In the game, Tommy goes out on his own. To avenge Joel on behalf of Ellie, basically.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
He's trying to keep her safe. He knows she would go. He decides to go first. to take care of it, to keep her out of trouble. Here, he doesn't get to make that choice because of the way we structured things and how much time has gone by.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And also a very important thing, I think we talked about it when we were discussing our third episode, that Neil made a great point about Tommy and Joel and that Tommy understood that Joel wouldn't want to go do this. That was not in Joel's nature. And Tommy, in his own way, was kind of trying to honor that. But here...
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Tommy and Jesse have to sneak out of Jackson and Tommy has a wife and a little boy to go save them. Now, we don't know what Tommy's state of mind is, but we do know what Jesse's state of mind is. And what Jesse's state of mind is, what is wrong with the two of you? What is wrong with you? This is in violation of our community. We had a meeting. We had a vote. This is not the right thing to do.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And Ellie, oh boy, does she push back. We were doing fine until, until what? And you see her kind of crumble there.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And I wasn't enough to keep Dina alive. There's this moment where Ellie's not so much worried that she's going to die, but when she looks over and sees the stalkers ripping that cage open, she knows she failed. And this is something that we talked about a lot in season one, that Joel would fail actually all the time. And Ellie is reliving Joel's experience.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Ellie is understanding now, viscerally, what Joel felt. She doesn't maybe know that this is what Joel felt, but we know it is. That... You have one purpose, as Bill said, to keep this person alive and God help any motherfucker who stands in your way. And Joel kept failing. And Ellie is failing. And it is a very small feeling to know that you weren't enough.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
I remember, and I draw on these feelings all the time, the feeling of being in the game and wandering into this fully overgrown jungle-like park in Seattle and hearing that whistle.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Now, in full disclosure to people that do speak Seraphite Whistle, there are some times where I think we probably... Erred on the side of sonic impact in a moment as opposed to the verbal clarity.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Right. But we wanted them to be exact. And the idea that there's a call and answer to those things is important. So again, it's why that scene with the father and the daughter is so important in the third episode. Because we hear some whistles and then he turns to me and says, okay. And she says, got it. Let me translate. We understand the whistles do have specific meanings.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And I remember creeping up and watching them lynching that soldier and disemboweling him.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
It's one of those moments where I feel like, generally speaking, Neil and I aren't about grossing people out. We know that some of the things we show will be horrifying and disgusting, but we're not there to do it because it's fun for us. You do it because it's going to impact the audience and the characters usually in a very deep way. We're trying to stress how serious something is.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And we're not shying away from it. And every time I watch that scene, I think, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. I mean, when somebody is that helpless and somebody's just walking to them that slowly with a sickle, you just think, well, something will make this stop. We just saw a scene where something made something stop. Jesse showed up, saved Ellie and Dino.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
But nothing makes this stop. It just happens. And that's when you know these Seraphites are not just... not victims. They are extraordinarily scary. And should any of our characters end up on the wrong side of a rope with these guys, it's going to be very, very bad.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
They're in the middle of this situation where you've got a young man who is saying Scar got what he deserved. Fucking animal. And they don't even call them by their names. They make up a new name for them, Scars. And here, the Seraphites... are acting like they're doing this guy a favor.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
He's nested with sin. Free him that he may know her love. And then they disembowel him. And in this very kind of matter of fact, well, I guess that's over. The priest says, now he is free. And they mean it. And they believe it. That's their belief. They believe they've done him a favor.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
It's going to take us some time as a television show to fully explore who the Seraphites are, we still don't know who this prophet is or how this all began.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
But this moment where Dina gets shot, it's also a change from the game. In the game, Dina has to back away because her morning sickness is really bad. She's just laid out. She can't go anywhere. She has to stay back at the theater. And it's Ellie who gets shot in the leg. Now, because of our more hyper-realistic medium, Veli gets shot in the leg. She's not going anywhere. Right.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
So we thought this was an interesting way to achieve the same thing, which was to separate Dina from Ellie. And to put Dina back in the background for a bit to expose Ellie to be on her own and also to make Ellie's decision to move forward to the hospital a dangerous one in terms of what we know she knows. She's supposed to go back to that theater.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
She's supposed to just get out of there and meet up with them. That's what she says she's going to do. Bring her back. I'll draw them away. Just you go and I'll meet you back.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And she sees the hospital and she turns her back on Dina and turns her back on Jesse who just came to rescue her and turns her back on Tommy who's somewhere out there looking for her and pursues Nora because she can't help herself.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
It's one of my favorite scenes. So Tati Gabriello plays Nora. We've just gotten, you know, little bits of her. We got a little tiny bit in the first episode. We get a little tiny bit of her part as this person in this larger group. But obviously in the second episode, so much of that is about Abby. Yeah. And here we have this beautiful moment and it is, I would say, probably 85% from the game.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And then there's this little extra 15% around where you think she's connecting with Ellie. And then we go right back to what she says in the game. Little bitch got what he deserved. And so you see here in Nora something that... I think if you are watching carefully, you suspect isn't even true for Abby. And that is a moral certainty. For Nora, this is clean. What they did there was clean.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And what's interesting about people that are on the same side is they all push towards one goal, but they don't always agree about how righteous their cause is. Nora is somebody that clearly agrees. But Nora also knows something. In the back of her head, it was Nora all the way back in episode one, very first scene, who said...
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
heard rumors about a girl so Nora works in medicine we don't know if she's a doctor or a medic it doesn't matter we can imagine that she had connection to the doctors and the nurses who were working in the hospital in Salt Lake City and we can imagine that she heard a rumor that there was an immune girl And that's just this added bit of anger that could be there, you know, underneath.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Yeah, and she says, shoot her. The thing about moral certainty is it blinds you. So much about what the second game meant for me was not just the higher moral value of empathy but how essential it is. If we don't have it, if we cannot figure out how to be invested in the other person winning, then we are all going to lose. And Nora is missing empathy here. And you're absolutely right.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
She's missing it. And in her attempt to escape, this is an interesting thing. She looks at the elevator and it's slightly ajar. And there's a look on her face. I suspect that this elevator will come back perhaps in another season. But she ends up on the dreaded B2. To repeat, we do not know what is on B3. And Ellie follows her down into what I think is one of the best sequences we've put on TV.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
This is the cruelest thing, but it is a very animal thing. We exploit other animals to sustain ourselves. We don't think about it that way, but that's what we do.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And here is the saddest thing because we understand now the full scope of Park's sacrifice. Officer we met in the beginning who talked about sending Leon down there to be too. because she didn't sacrifice her son to death. She doesn't know this, but what she sacrificed him to was this kind of endless torment. And there is this beauty to it, which is undeniable.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
It's very important to us that the cordyceps be beautiful, even as it is horrifying, because that is the glory and terror of nature. But Ellie can move through this and does and turns the red light on.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
It says something to Bella's face that we were obsessed with. Her eyes turn black. And this scene is largely as it is in the game with one major exception. because of the way we address the timeline of things and what we learn and when, there is a mystery that is mostly answered here. And the mystery has been there since the first episode. What does Ellie know? What does she know?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And we don't know. Joel doesn't know. Joel's terrified that Ellie's figured it out. And here, I just love the way Tati looks at her when she realizes you're the immune girl. You're real. I remember Steven and I sitting there with her and saying, this is sort of like if you were raised Christian and you mostly believed but sort of believed in a certain way. And then you saw Jesus for real.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
You saw an angel for real. You saw the face of God. You realize this thing that could save all of us is real. And then tells Ellie the truth. Don't you know what he did?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Now, if people feel deeply uncomfortable with that, they should. And of course, if people feel deeply uncomfortable with what Ellie does next, they definitely should.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
The challenge for us was to figure out where the spores would make sense. And then also, what could we do to make them even more dangerous, actually? Not just a little, but a lot, or at least more menacing and threatening. And what we struck on was the idea of the basement. And we have a hospital with three basement levels, B1, B2, and B3. And we have learned that there was nothing on B1.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
I mean, Ellie isn't aware of this, but I'm aware of it. That when Abby, in our show, the execution of Joel goes a bit differently than it does in the game, just a bit. And one of the differences is Abby uses the golf club to hit Joel on the leg where she shot him. Not in the head, not to kill him, to hurt him. So the first blow that Abby delivers is to the leg.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And here, Ellie picks up a pipe and the first blow she delivers is to the leg. And once again, you can't help but wonder how it is that these two people who are almost identical are on this horrible path, this horrible collision path. And what is so horrifying and gorgeous in this moment is the way Bella says that final, where is she? It is so savage and so disconnected from being a human.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And we cut away from this brutality. to something that is perhaps the most shocking thing to show in contrast to what we're looking at, because we've forgotten. We've all forgotten that just a few years earlier, Ellie was a little girl, and Ellie wakes up in her bed in Jackson, safe and sound, looks up, sees the person she loves more than anything in the world,
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And perfectly performed by Bella Ramsey says, hi, it is the most innocent, sweet thing. And you can't help but feel heartbreak that something has gone so wrong that that little kid is in that red hallway doing what she's doing.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
What is the story that went down in those five years between swear to me And Joel's death. I guess we'll have to wait a week and find out. But hey, Pedro Pascal's back, everybody.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And we now learn from this conversation that that there are spores on B2. This woman sent her son down. And she had a choice to make because her son says, it's in the air, seal us in. Now that choice is not dissimilar from the choice Joel has. Do I sacrifice my child to save everybody else Or do I put my child first on the off chance that maybe he'll be okay and put everybody else at risk?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And here we see a mother making a very different decision. She doesn't hesitate. She sacrifices her child for everyone else.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Thanks. Well, I mean, there are so many ways to do these things. And it's not that we're trying to be intentionally cruel to people. But emotionally, maybe a little bit. I mean, maybe a little. Because we're being cruel to the characters too. Sure. In the end, what we're trying to do is invite the audience to feel, at least in small part, what this woman must have felt.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And part of the way is to shock them. Because in my mind, when I watch that sequence, I think, oh, she might be talking about her husband. That's what I feel. That's my instinct. She's talking about her husband, but I would never presume to think she was talking about her son. And that circles back to this notion of motherhood and how a mother made this choice. It's very mythological.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Every culture's mythology somewhere in there has a story of sacrifice and usually the sacrifice of a child, which is the most brutal kind. And to see that there are people who would make that other choice. And we don't condemn her. Quite far from it. If you understand what spores are. No, she made the most selfless of sacrifices. There's also an introduction here of a concept.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And the concept is that there is depth under this building. And we now know that there are horrors on B2 if we have not yet seen them. We understand that they're there. But note, nobody knows what's on B3. Just leaving that out there. I think some people who play the game might know.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
I wasn't conscious of it. I think probably it's one of those cases where it's just that I'm the same guy. But the concept of the basement levels is taken, of course, directly from you, from the game. What I do love to talk about, I guess, are the practical. So maybe the most Chernobyl-y part of that is... The blueprints.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
So one of the things that I like to think about is, okay, if someone's going to say, we can't afford to lose this hospital, you're telling me there's airborne infection. We have to really believe that it's down there and it's okay and it's safe. And so they go through it in a sort of scientific way. No one else has gotten hurt.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
We know it wasn't in the vents or else we would have been sick weeks ago. It is contained because I sacrificed my son, because we sealed it in. And then a very human thing, and I guess a very Chernobyl-ish thing, Hanrahan says, we'll tell only those who need to know. This is how humans go about these things. And it is incredibly arrogant. But what can you do?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
I mean, the bottom line is, once you know it's there, what can you do? It's not like leaving the building is going to help you. If it gets out, it gets out. It's in the air.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
Are you kidding me? It's funny you ask about these like asking questions. That's all I do in the, I ask. So as we go into our exploration of what's going to come next in season three. Neil, brace yourself. The questioning is about to begin again. I ask so many questions. Not only, okay, well, what does that mean? But why did you do this? Why did you do that? What was the thinking there?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
What else did you consider? Was there stuff that went in between that you weren't able to fit in? And it's part of the way you get to something exciting, I think, is just, as a fan, is getting as much under the hood as you can get. And I'm lucky because... I've got the guy.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
What we wanted to feel was... Ellie aching for Joel there. That she had had this night before where her heart explodes into romance and she has this beautiful morning with Dina. And as she walks away from Dina, even before the scene, Dina's like, Ellie, and just grins at her and she grins back. It's love. And then, first of all, credit to Neil because there were a lot of different options here.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And I was sort of going down a different path of what... Ellie would play. But Neil made a great argument that shorter is better because we've already seen Ellie play a full song and it's not like she's playing to anyone here. And that this phrase would have a deeper meaning. And of course, we will see how that develops. And that was absolutely the right call on both sides of it.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
But as the camera's moving around and we're looking for A way to imply that the darkness inside of Ellie is reemerging, that need to punish. This very strange thing happened in the editing room. So I'm watching this with Tim Good, our editor. And as the camera moves around, there's this low bass rumble that begins. And then it finishes as the camera moves.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And I said, Tim, that bass rumble that you put in is genius. And he turned to me and he said, I didn't put a bass rumble in. What are you talking about? That came from two doors down where Emily Mendez was working on editing the seventh episode and happened to have this very bassy thing happen that went through the walls. I kid you not. Shut your mouth. I kid you not. And I was like, what?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
So we went down the hallway, got the sound, went back, put it in. And then when we went to the mixing stage, we were like, guys, you hear this sound? This. This is what we're putting in there. It's one of those moments I love being able to not... The only credit I can take is going... Identify the happy accident as happy. Other than that, it was the happiest accident.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
You dream of moments like that where some little bit of serendipity drops a gift in your hands. Because serendipity... Unhappy serendipity occurs all the time, all the time. You need to shoot outside, it's raining. This was one of those moments where I was just like, oh my God.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”
And it's crucial because we need to understand that Ellie is turning here, not into zombie turning, turning into dark Avenger Ellie. It's not all happiness and light. She remembers, she took a break. She enjoyed herself. She saw something positive and beautiful. Break is over.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Coming Soon: The Last of Us Season 2 Podcast
Don't you know what he did?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
That was so, I remember just thinking how both beautiful and sad that was.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And I think it's even more drawn forward in the show because the world ends a bit sooner in the show. It ends in 2003, not 2013. Even more progress was stopped dead in its tracks. And, of course, then the moment where Ellie plays the guitar for Dina, that's about as close to the source material as you can get.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
I mean, of course, Della and Isabella are delivering performances that are, you know, fresh and complete to them. But... From a writing point of view, my challenge for the script was, how do I get the stuff that I love from this section from the game and put it in here in a way that feels like it belongs and it's seamless and it's natural? Because there's so much.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
I mean, what Neil and Hallie did there. is awesome. And so it's a little bit like a duck press, you know, like I got to get so much stuff into a small amount of time without it feeling episodic or perfunctory.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And if you're going to stop a television show to have somebody sing most of a song. One of the important things is there needs to be something happening inside of it. It cannot simply be a performance. There must be, you know, what Neil and I talk a lot about is how in our action sequences, the action is there to either reveal information about a relationship or to change a relationship.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And that had to happen here too, because it's not optional for the viewer. So something has to be occurring here. By the point this happens in the game, Ellie and Dina have already become romantic partners. That's not true here yet. Dina is still—she's not ready. And maybe she's unsure. And then Ellie sings for her and you can watch Isabella perform Dina falling in love.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And I say perform, it's not adequate to describe really what you're seeing Isabella falling in love. It's a pretty remarkable moment. And I remember Kate and I were talking to Bella and saying, you know, there's this thing that happens when you play guitar and You can either serenade somebody to seduce them, or you can be shy and exposed and vulnerable and don't make eye contact.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
If you do, briefly, and then go right back to your song. You just do your song. And then while you're doing that, this other person is going to feel everything. And the two of them did such a gorgeous job. I was so proud of that moment. Because of course, on the beginning of a day like that, my heart is racing. I can't screw that up. I cannot screw that scene up.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
It means too much to too many people. And... I love that we presented a version of it that is both true to the game and its own thing because of its slightly different context. There's some interesting development that occurs there. And the change in their relationship that happens in this moment is pretty profound. It leads up to everything. Everything is led up to that moment.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And if that moment doesn't happen, then maybe the way the episode ends doesn't happen either.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
Of course you didn't. You're thoughtless. That entire sequence was inspired by a moment you have where you're wandering around in the game. Neil, you put all these little moments inside the game, these little stories that are optional. People can find them or not. And one of them are these notes that are left behind by some FEDRA officers who are long dead.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
She knifes a guy in the neck and kills him as if he were a clicker. And Dina shoots a man in the back of the head. Why? Well, Ellie is fighting for them both to escape. Dina I think maybe if she weren't pregnant, if she weren't falling in love with Ellie, if she hadn't heard that song, maybe Dina is scared to pull that trigger.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
Maybe Dina is, but no, here, now, Dina is doing this for them, you know, like out of love.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
But you understood that in Seattle, there was a moment where FEDRA officers started turning on FEDRA because it was not working well and that there was, in fact, a kind of internecine warfare. And you also do find a FEDRA truck at one point that you can climb into. And so, like, all those things were bopping around my head.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
Like I'm a stealth guy. I love stealth. Me too. But stealth is also a kind of gameplay that is, I think, easier to adapt to television. Running in and shooting can turn a little bit into – I used to work with David Zucker who made Airplane and I worked with him on the scary movies and he taught me everything I know about comedy.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And he had a great term for when things on screen were just a lot of noise and action without purpose. He would call it manic dumb show. And if you just start running around and shooting people willy-nilly, it becomes manic dumb show. Everybody has seen that a million times. It's just cops and robbers and – And stealth is suspenseful. Yeah. Stealth is exciting.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And it was a chance, especially for me. I mean, I said to Don, hey, the TV station, let me show you how it was in the game. And let me explain why we need to make it like the game. You see where these stairs are? You see where these crates are? There's going to be a stealth thing because that's what I did. I stealthed my way up those stairs. That's what I did. And that's what we're going to do.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
But before we can get to that, there is this horrifying moment where – Ellie and Dina realize that the people that they thought were victims, and maybe the people that I think the audience members who have not played the game might think of as victims, are not just victims. They're another side of a war, and they are brutal.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
They are so brutal that not only do they hang people and disembowel them, but they then took the studio lights and arranged them so that when their fellow soldiers find them, they will be horrified by this terrible pastiche. And then to make it worse, they take some of their blood and they paint these words on the wall. And that is terrifying to me.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
That symbol that suddenly was like, what is this symbol? I've never seen before. You just think maybe these are peaceful people and this is their peaceful symbol. It is now painted in blood on the wall. And Dina says, and I believe this is straight from the game unless you tell me otherwise, Neil.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
Yeah. And a lot of fuck Seattle too. But what the fuck is wrong with Seattle is such a great bit of dialogue. You know, I love mining those things because that's when they realize they are in something that is beyond anything they've been before.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
There's something that the little girl says in episode three when she's hiding with her dad and she knows there's trouble coming. And she says, demons? And he says, wolves. Well, who are the demons? Oh, there's an infected problem in Seattle. Of course there is. Of course there is. In fact, we've now introduced the third army because there are three factions in Seattle all fighting for dominance.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And our poor characters are once again caught between a battle like that and what was a fun way for Dina and Ellie to interact with the minimal infected that they thought were in Jackson. The way that they'd become so casually confident in their abilities. You just count one, two, one-on-one. We can handle that. Well, the counting begins here again.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And very quickly, Dina comes to understand there's no point in counting. It's a horde. And now the question is, how do you get through this? And... As always, why are we doing this? How does it change the relationship?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
Thinking up was fun. Executing was so hard. Let's start with Don McCauley, our production designer, who finds, along with Nicole Chartrand, our location manager, finds this unused former, I think it was a paper mill of some sort. And it had railroad tracks because they would bring big freight train cars in, load them up with this stuff, and then send them back out.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
So we have train tracks, we have this big open facility, and then Don goes and transforms it with his team into a metro tunnel and gets actual train cars to put in, derail, connect, redress, and then we all go in there for what seemed like nine years. Nine years of smelling the flare smoke and God knows how many extras and God knows how many prosthetics.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And Joel Wist, our special effects wizard, had rigged the trains with his guys to rock back and forth with these little hydraulic levers. And we filled the train cars with skeletons. So it was an enormous undertaking to do. And it's one of those sequences where you begin it and you say to everybody, here we go. This is very exciting. Look how great the set is.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And then when you finally leave it, you are... Torch it. Hollow. You are broken and hollow. Yeah.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
Yeah, it is, like I said, a duck press. It takes so much time. People ask, why do these shows take so much time between seasons? Well, because we don't have the luxury of a workplace with a standing set. And... mostly talking and walking around. We are making movies.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
No, no. I mean, listen. And everybody that has worked with me on the show, if they heard me just say what I said, they would start laughing because nobody complains more about meetings than I do. Nobody. I don't enjoy a meeting. But that meeting and the 4,000 other meetings is why no one gets hurt. Because we're doing a lot of dangerous work out there.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And so then in my weird head, I start thinking, well, how did that happen? What was that like? And then there's this notion of whence Isaac. So Isaac is the leader of the WLF. He's the leader of the WLF when you meet him in the game, but there isn't necessarily a sense of where he came from. And so this was one of those mornings where I call Neil and I say, I've got a crazy idea.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
Just the shot of Ellie and Dina running along the top of the train. When we're following them, we've got our cameraman suspended in a chair that's hanging by wires that is connected to rigging that the gaffers have put over all of this. So that he can sort of... It's like a ski lift behind them. I don't know how they do these things. I really don't.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
But this all gets figured out and it's all done safely. And it takes all those meetings to make sure that when we get there, we're at least 94% of where I would like it to be. And then my job is to be annoying to get the rest of the 6%.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
Yeah, that's right from the game. That choice that Ellie makes, that moment, it takes place in a slightly different context because in the game, they're in spores. Right, they're wearing gas masks. They're wearing gas masks, and Dina's mask breaks, and Ellie takes hers off and gives it to Dina.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And in that moment, Dina discovers right away that Ellie is immune because there's no other way Ellie could be breathing this. And we have a slightly different circumstance. And I think anybody who's listened to Neil and I talking about the season and who carefully watch a trailer know that spores are coming, but not yet. And what's interesting about this moment is there's a chance for delay.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
There's a chance for Ellie to escape with Dina, not even realize in the moment, like, oh, yeah, in the heat of the moment, I forgot she doesn't know. Right. And then to turn around and see Dina holding a gun on her. And for Ellie to have to figure out how to convince somebody to not shoot her. That scene was so much fun to do because it was one of those classic acting exercises.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
You don't want to kill her, but you must, right? You have to convince her to not kill you even though there's no reason for her to believe you. Go. And to see how Isabella got right to this incredibly emotional place. She's already mourning the loss of Ellie even before she pulls the trigger. And to see Bella engaging in a panic exercise in rationality to talk her down. And she has to talk fast.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And what Ellie goes to is what she remembers. And what she remembers is how Joel and Tess treated her when they found out. They made her sit across the room and they kept their guns on her all night. And that's what she reverts back to. It's not the only time she's going to revert back to that old memory in the season. But this, I think, is the first time it happens.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And this is, to me, a very fun way to open an episode. It's very contained. It also... allows us to begin to tell a separate story, which is the story of this rookie, this kid who's played by Ben Ahlers. And it's clearly his, what, I don't know, first week on the job.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
is this kind of explosive thing from Dina. Dina is emotionally kind of explosive in the way that is opposite from Ellie. Ellie explodes in anger and rage. And Dina explodes in positivity and light. And she has been sitting there this whole night
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
praying that Ellie will be okay and she is and she gets close enough to make sure and in that moment she decides I'm going to give you not a little bit I'm going to give you everything everything everything I'm going to tell you that I'm pregnant and then I'm going to give myself to you in every way and reveal who I am and reveal how I feel about you and be as intimate with you as two people can be all in a kind of explosive moment which she explains after is because she thought she'd lost her
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
There's this moment after. In some ways, it's the morning scene and the conversation they have that is... You asked earlier, you know, what's more fun, the setup or the reveal? Well, this is the reveal. This is the part where because you did all that work, you get to play the song. And the music here is... Dina explaining.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And one of the things we talked about was how different the world is now than it was in 2003. And if you don't have any of that progress, it's a lot easier to imagine how somebody who isn't just plain old straight is going to feel how they're going to be scared. And we saw what Seth said in the town, he can hardly be the only one.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
His helmet doesn't fit very well, and he doesn't quite understand this brutal nature that these guys have, this us versus them, you know, the people are beneath us. And perhaps that is why Isaac chooses to give him a choice as opposed to just fragging him like he does the rest of these guys.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
So that fear, not that people aren't afraid now, I mean, they are too, but it is different now. I see that with my kids' generation. They never get there, right? So this is a scary thing for Dina.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And there's also this, oh my gosh, so Emily Mendez, our editor, is just like really masterful at cutting these scenes together and figuring out where to go and when and finding the moments that are so true. And one of the moments I love is when Dina says,
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
Ellie is so confident in who she is. So confident. Ellie couldn't possibly be closeted. She doesn't have time for that. She's just not, that's not possible for her. Her closeting is about other things. Her closeting is about her rage. Her closeting is about her immune status. Watching the two of them have that conversation in this very real beautiful way
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And here we see how Isabella and Bella's chemistry is, as far as I'm concerned, it's kind of unparalleled in my experience. Working with actors who need to be in love, that's a hard thing, you know? They're just so good at it, and it's so natural to them. I'm very grateful for that.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
Ellie's decision is, do I go on by myself? Because you're pregnant. And now we're in love. I finally got you, you know? I mean, Ellie's been pining for Dina for a long time. Well, she has her now and she's pregnant. She's not going to take her into that war zone. And Dina's argument is, no, no, we are together. So we are doing it together.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And I would stare at these I'm always thinking about how almost everyone in the apocalypse that we meet is doing something extraordinary. If they're not, we probably won't meet them. But they didn't start extraordinary. So even when we think about David in season one, the leader of the cannibal cult, he lets Ellie know that he used to be a teacher. It was an incredibly mundane thing.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
He was a teacher. Everybody was kind of okay. And then the world collapses. And... There is something that is both revealing about Isaac here. It's a little bit of his story of before all this. We don't necessarily know what he did for a living, but we understand, you know, he liked to date. This is how he would attract women, you know, he would cook for them.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
But it becomes pretty clear that this is not the first time he's told this story. And that there's a purpose behind it. And the purpose is to intimidate, is to intimidate somebody because Isaac gets to relax and tell a story while somebody else is in chains bleeding.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
Yeah, and then Isaac understands it's pointless to continue any further. This one is just way too devoted to the cause. There's another piece of information we get from Isaac that is interesting, I think, here. Because when we first met the Seraphites in our third episode, we meet them through a father and a daughter. They seem peaceful. The daughter asks, why can't she keep us safe, the prophet?
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
She says, Ezra says the prophet is eternal and moves through the sky. Whoever Ezra is her friend. And her dad's like, no, prophets are just people. Well, here, Isaac says something to this kid. He says, you know, some of you know that she's not some magic fairy in the sky. Some of you know she was just a person.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And this beaten young man, who has every reason to not argue, argues and says, heretics. So we understand not only is there the WLF, and the Seraphites, there's a schism inside the Seraphites themselves. There are some of these people who are perhaps a bit more secular and then some who are really, really fanatical.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And what we have not yet seen is any evidence that the Seraphites are anything but victims. That, of course, will change.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
There is something that is inside Ellie that almost feels like Joel is a prophet. And we see this in drama all the time, going all the way back to the Greeks, where you'd have the chorus that was kind of hanging out behind you. And George Lucas has, you know, Obi-Wan Kenobi showing up as a force ghost. What does he say? He says, if you strike me down, I'll be more powerful than ever.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
So Joel has been struck down, and yet he does hover over Ellie like a force ghost, like a prophet, like somebody that needs to be followed and pursued and then justified through her actions. And this young man is pursuing this other ghost out there and the prophet. And the question is, what is Isaac pursuing? And these questions about this war... may not be fully answered this season.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
That's the thing. We just didn't know if we were getting canceled, guys. We will absolutely find out exactly what they're about, exactly what he wants, which is the most important thing to understand about characters. But there will be some mystery to sit with for a while.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
This was a kid who theoretically was nice and not on any side and wasn't with these brutal guys. And now here he is as a soldier fully dehumanizing them. So the idea of community is something that calcifies and turns us against each other is in full effect here. And it's also... A quiet condemnation of whatever has happened to Isaac over these years.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
Because even though we meet him committing violence, we kind of get it. I mean, these guys are brutal. They're literally making fun of brutalizing people. And now here he is and the people that follow him seem pretty brutal and he's torturing people.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
So there will be a time, I can't promise it will be this season, but there will be a time where we will get to find out just how all of this came to be.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
That was impossible with this season. No, no. No, no, no. You got to write with confidence. I mean, if you write defensively, just in case we get canceled, you're going to mess your season up. I can't imagine the guys who are in the Severance writing room going, just in case we get canceled, we should probably explain what the hell is going on here.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
So, I mean, you get some answers and then there are a whole bunch of mysteries that get left. That's the way it ought to be.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
Yes. Well, I mean, I do love the unraveling. I love a reveal. I mean, every magician should love... the moment where you do take that card that they picked and reveal that it was in their back pocket. You know, somehow you forced it there. But the only way to get to the reveal is through very careful setup. So setup is math. Setup is science. And reveal is music.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
And so, of course, I look forward to the music part. That's always the most fun.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
Yeah. This section, in my mind, is one of the most true to the game sections. All of this stuff is pulled from the source material. All of it. The fact that we had The Last of Us Part II game available when we made the first season is why we put... Ellie talking about Sally Ride and going to the moon in the first season because we understood that this was some place to go.
HBO's The Last of Us Podcast
Episode 4 - “Day One”
So it's a little bit like what Neil was saying. You kind of go back. You realize where you want to go. You run backwards to set it up and to feel inevitable. So the tank and the skeletons, the fact that these two young women... one of whom is openly gay, are walking through a gay neighborhood and they do not know what these rainbows mean. That's right from the game.