One of the things that
we talked about for a while, "How do you start this show?" (tense music playing) Craig Mazin:
It was an enormous
undertaking for everyone. I wouldn't want
to deliver CG pew-pew
(imitates explosion) but to deliver... reality. Director:
Three, two, one, action! Pedro Pascal:
Negative degree temperatures
with the wind machine... going like this. (mimics machine) (chuckles)
Yeah, so that was hard. And fun.
It was so fun. The amount of detail,
it's incredible. The color schemes, the textures,
how things would flourish. (roars) There's everything on this show from big scopes of airplanes to smaller tendrils. ♪ ♪ Nico Parker:
You're immediately
just so immersed in "The Last of Us" world. Jason Nolan:
Shooting in Canada, we're not doing
anything small. It was quite the endeavor. ♪ ♪ ("The Last of Us"
theme music playing) Ashley Johnson:
I remember
when the game came out, there were
so many people saying this needs to be made
into a live-action. I was in conflict
with it at first because I was like,
"We've already done it. "We've shot it,
we've performed it, "we've edited it. Why do we need to go in
and do this again?" Neil said, "At the end
of the day, "there are people out there "that will never
pick up a controller, "and they will never
experience the story. And I think our story
is special enough
to bring it to them." Merle Dandridge:
The HBO series,
uh, I don't remember when I first heard about it,
but when I did, I was like, "Mommy want that,"
(laughs) 'cause I-I knew it was
gonna be spectacular, especially when I heard
that it was a collaboration and that Neil
would also be involved. When you're casting
these iconic characters, these characters are iconic
in a cinematic way already. So, now, it's like we need
to find someone that can elevate it
or make it their own in a really interesting way,
so it doesn't feel like they're just duplicating
this other medium. I learned very quickly the massive fan base
that I was stepping into. I called my sister to tell her about the possibility
of the job, and she was in the car
with my nephews. I didn't even get
the "s" and "t" out from the word "Last"
when I said it. "There's this job. "It's based on a video game. It's called The La--" And they were like,
"The Last of Us"?! And I was like,
"Okay, I definitely
have to do this." Bella Ramsey:
I was actually advised
not to play the game, so that I wouldn't
try and, like, copy Ashley Johnson's
version of Ellie, which is, like, incredible,
but I just watched some of the gameplay, though, secretly, on my own. Johnson: When I met Bella for the first time, I was so excited
because, obviously, I'd seen her
in "Game of Thrones," and seeing her in person, and even just
seeing her on set, and doing scenes,
like, she has the essence of Ellie already in her. Seven, eight. Fuck you. Pascal:
What's incredible about what
they've done with these scripts was to be able to explore
and nourish things that, I think, are very much a part
of the experience of the game. One of those things
is the internal life
of these characters, and to really
get into the flesh of what's happening
inside of them. You wanna know what
the biggest surprise of adapting
"The Last of Us" is? It's that Neil Druckmann, the genius who made
the game in the first place, who created this story, these characters,
the whole world, he was so generous,
and flexible, and smart about how to re-present
"The Last of Us" in a different format
to a whole new audience. ♪ ♪ (speaking Indonesian) The scientific vision that
the show presents to people is based absolutely in reality. That fungus is real. It does those
things to insects. And if it were to be able
to infect humans, it would go like that.
It's terrifying. We want people
to feel the reality
of the science here. (panting) Cordyceps. It's a fungus. And what that fungus does is it attaches
to the brain stem of an ant, takes motor control
of the ant's body, and then attacks the rest
of the ant colony, spreading the disease,
and devouring the other ants. Mazin:
Fungus is a funny word, but there's so much more
of it than we realize. Pretty much
anywhere you see grass, there's fungus
right underneath it. (Infected roaring) They're connected. More than you know. Mazin:
One of the changes
that Neil and I felt we needed
to make early on was the way
the fungus would spread. We loved the idea of biting. We thought that that
was primal and violent. But we started looking
at something called mycelium, which are these threads
that make up fungus, and those threads, if they get
into an insect, for instance, that's what starts
to worm its way towards the insect's brain. Barrie Gower and his team
did this beautiful work to mesh humans
and fungus together. Barrie Gower:
Initially, we'd created
various practical tendrils, which was basically
like a dental plate that we had inside
the infected character's mouth, which had all these little
silicone cords joined to. And as soon as he pulled away, everything started to
(clicking). Practically, it looked great. I think the reality of it was going to be
the reset ability on the day. Having huge, big fungal pieces
all over the heads. As soon as you took
the eyebrows away,
you started veering into zombie territory. Neil Druckmann:
When it has more
of a human side, more of a beautiful side, it makes it even scarier. As a person, you can
relate to it more. Paul Spateri:
From an infected point of view, we had
the first-stage Infected. Very shortly after
they've been bitten, there's a lot of redness,
a lot of tenderness around the skin. Stage two, tiny little things start breaking
through the skin. They're a bit
like the cordyceps you actually see
on ants or spiders when they're
taken over by the fungus. Stage three is a slightly
bigger version of that where you've got
real mushrooms that
you can begin to see until you get to stage five where the head shape
is distorting. Gower:
Just basically breaks
through the cranium and just splits
the skull down the front. And you have these
huge sort of blooms,
these sort of petals. Well, I didn't wanna
look at them. I didn't want that in my head
to go home and sleep. And then,
you have to be kinda-- You're like,
"Hi, how are you?" Uh. And it's not just kind of
what they look like. It's this--
the, the physicality in the way that they move
is what makes them so creepy, but impressive. Not just
the prosthetic, obviously, but the inhabiting of it. Alex Wang:
Coming from visual effects, I think the clicker
performances can be quite challenging
just 'cause they're very specific. He just had this really
amazing performance and movement study to him. Those are the type of things that is quite difficult
to reproduce digitally. (gasping) Gower:
These are a lot of our
very early concepts and busts. We're following real
reference and real nature of real fungus
and real mushrooms, and just down
to the shapes of the petals. Underneath,
you've got all these slits,
which are called gills. And we always
had to make sure
that the orientation was as such that
all the gills were
facing downwards. And occasionally,
you'd have a piece which
looked really, really great, but the mushrooms
around the wrong way, and so it's just like
(whistles) just move that
over a little bit. (clicking, croaking) The sound of the clickers,
we worked so hard to make sure they
sounded just like the game. Why don't we try
some good old-fashioned -clicking in the dark?
-Actor: Yeah. Let me just practice a few,
so we can make-- Mazin: Yeah, sure. (clicking, croaking) Phillip Kovats:
Misty was the originator
of the sound itself. And she did these amazing,
like, throat sounds, which were like,
"That's it! Ah!" And they were like,
"Now we gotta find
somebody who can do it, -too, like a guy."
-Mazin: Right. Kovats:
And then, I was like,
I-I figured it out. Mr. and Mrs. Clicker, the original,
the Adam and Eve of clicking. (singing) -It's also here. Like--
-Yeah. -(clicking)
-Mazin: I think it's that first little bit, right? It's just the initial (croaks), which, I think, isn't bad here, -I just want the real thing.
-Sure. Let's do some clickin'. (clicking, croaking) That was good stuff. -Misty Lee: Thank you.
-I like that. I love sound, but it's like I don't actually
think I've ever had anything like this, where there was somebody who knew how to do this
incredibly specific thing, and I had the incredibly
specific thing people doing the incredible--
Ah, this is so cool. All right,
I think it might be time
to go to the bullpen, and bring in the old lefty. (clicking, croaking) -Yeah, that was a good one.
-Lee: Yeah, that was a good one. -I was back here goin', "Oh!"
-That felt, that felt juicy. (roars) Druckmann:
When we made the game, we don't make
any physical things,
it's all digital. It's all two dimensional
on the screen. The first time I walked on set,
it was Joel's house. There's Sarah's room,
there's their living room, there's the sheets
that are just like the game. And you already got to see
the love this crew had for the original material. And I was, like,
emotionally moved by it. Anna Torv:
The sets have just been
so fucking incredible. I mean, you just don't
even appreciate it until you're in the space
that you can, like, just fucking shoot things in 360 because everything
is, like, magic. Pascal:
In the practical
shooting of it, there was, strangely,
little left to the imagination because of the quality
of its production. The game is
beautifully realized, and has a beautiful
tone and story. "The Last of Us"
is about a journey going across the United States, and so, having
that variety of landscape really helps make it feel
as authentic as possible. John Paino:
Fort Macleod was a good
stand-in for Austin, Texas. We really tried to go
to town there with neon, colors you wouldn't see
once the infection starts. The QZ,
that was a challenge
to make the wall, you know, built it out
of actual concrete, and I could have
people walk on it. I think it really lended a lot
to the realism of things. Edmonton was a key
for the State House. Paul Healy:
The Firefly set was stunning 'cause now we're outside the QZ. It's way more run-down. Torv: When we're
going through the tunnel, like the underground,
and up to the office, and we're standing behind
about to get through the door, and I look down,
and there's, like,
little sesame seeds to look like mouse poo
on the ground. The detail is like
from this to, like-- That you put that there,
I just-- It's, it's, it's just amazing. They created a village, I mean. Nolan:
Bill's town, the way it
was written is very particular, the action involved
and the look of the town
and the feel of the town. And I kinda had it
in the back of my mind
that this location existed after the floods
in High River in 2013. It's on the, kind of
the wrong side of the berm, and they had to tear
all the homes down. And what was left
was all the streets, and the sidewalks,
and the infrastructure. There's a town here, Canmore,
that stood in quite nicely for Jackson Hole, Wyoming. This is a town
that's self-sufficient. My favorite part of that
was building the paddock and the stables and everything in the parking lot
right in the middle of town. I was just like,
"There's a bank! And there's a studio! Lights!"
I was like-- (laughs) It's like everything was like-- I was like,
"They got everything!" Gabriel Luna:
I was really impressed
with our production design and everything was just, uh, so faithful to the game, and so, uh, so detailed
and specific. Healy:
But the mall was, I think,
one of the most amazing sets there is,
you know? And we had to get a carousel. We had to do a Halloween store. We had to do
a Victoria's Secret store. Even though this was
an abandoned mall before, the authenticity
of what the mall looks like, it's really cool. Ramsey:
Plants growin' everywhere. There's algae. It's just a mess. So this location has been
perfect to shoot in because they were gonna
tear down this mall anyway. So, that's given the amazing
art department, like, free rein to completely destroy it
and make it their own, so as soon as we finish this,
like, this mall is gone. -Director: And let's cut.
-(bell ringing) Matt Palmer:
Okotoks, the challenge
was that we needed a cul-de-sac neighborhood to situate
this big action scene. And it's actually a bit freaky
in terms of how perfect it fits within the visuals
within the game. When we scouted,
it was exactly what we wanted. We had extreme winds.
We literally-- You could almost--
You couldn't stand up. When Craig was there,
I mean, he was just like, "This is, this is
what I wrote," and that's the best
compliment you can get. We went to Waterton
because it was known to have a massive
amount of snow. And what happened was,
there was no snow. There was drifts
up against some buildings, but all the roads,
all the grass, everywhere that ya looked,
the snow was gone. You couldn't bring in snow
from outside the park. I had to use whatever
was in the town. So, in three days,
we did 350 dump trucks of snow. Shoveling, brooming,
raking, snow blowers to cover 10 city blocks. That night... it snowed. ♪ ♪ There was a day of shooting,
and we were out in the elements, and there was snow everywhere, and we were
on the side of a mountain, and it was really cold, and, um, there was
a trek through the snow, and there were three or four
house-size wind machines. I loved it. I love it.
I wanna go back. (playing "The Last of Us" theme) (speaking Spanish) -For me.
-Man: Sí, for you. Gustavo Santaolalla,
uh, our composer, has such a different
way of working. The way I worked with Gustavo, starting with the game, and now,
continuing with the show, is pitch him the story. And Gustavo as well is, like,
very much about minimalism. Like, what's the least we need
to do to achieve this moment, which is very much, uh, mine
and Craig's philosophy as well. The whole thing in the music of "The Last of Us"
from what I do, is to preserve this
organic element, and of minimalism
'cause I have to play less. The pipes, the cans, all that has a little bit
to do with the reality of, of a post-disaster world of found objects,
broken things, but it's very organic. It's almost like
a primitive folk instrument, like a modern, primitive folk. The beginning, you know,
was trying to find how to translate the language
from the game to the series, but I think we have found,
now, something that, that
kind of like flows. Druckmann:
He would go off
and he'd come back with an hour or more of, of music. And we just sit here listening, and he's just like,
"Here's, like, this moment that you talked about
has inspired this theme." And that's very much
what it's like working
with Gustavo, is, like, starting with a lot, and then continue
to trim it down, trim it down, and find the right elements
and where-- how they fit. Gustavo Santaolalla:
There's stuff that was
created for the game that you can just
take it and put it, and it works fantastic, which, for me, says a lot
also about what they have done, 'cause it means that
there is a, a connection
between the game and what, what the series is. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Sean Nowlan:
Visual effects is
a big part of this show. Every shot that we shoot
needs to be touched, in some way, by visual effects. There's such an effort
to really push the boundaries on both what is practical
and what is a visual effect. Right from the get-go,
the impetus was to try and do as much
practical as possible. Alex understands
that the dovetail between practical
and visual effects, when you make it seamless...
that's the magic. Gower:
It was very interesting working with Alex
and the VFX team. The visual effects department
is probably the one department
we work probably the closest with on any, uh,
given show or film. They benefit a lot more
from having something there
and on the day, which they could either
manipulate or augment in post, or they've got something
there that needs a touch. There's everything on this show
from airplane crashes... to big environments... to war-torn destruction
in a big city... to smaller tendrils. So, there's a lot
for visual effects to work on. Because there's
a lot of environments, we've, we've actually
used a lot of drone scanning, so that we're able
to recreate it digitally. Blaine Lougheed:
On this show,
we used a combination of drones and Lidar. Lidar scanning
is light imaging,
distance ranging. And it's-- it, basically,
gives you a 3D model of what you're scanning. We knew that there would be a lot of environment work in line with the game. There's a lot of overgrowth, and everything's deteriorated, and we knew that we
would have to pretty much help out
in every episode,
in that respect. So there's a couple
of different types of scanning that we're doing on the show. One of them is cyber scanning. It's a, a circle
of cameras and lights
that flash simultaneously. We scan every
character that's on a show in case we need to build
a digital version of them. (sirens wailing) For all the gamers, I know everyone knows this scene
when they're escaping, and they're in the car
and you can watch everything, what's happening
from Sarah's perspective. Wang: The amazing thing
with that scene is that it's very true to the game. We feel like we're
with Sarah and Joel in Tommy's truck
the entire time. And because
of our desire working 360, it was a big challenge
how should we do that. So, the car was built
with a stunt pod on top. So, the stunt driver
was sitting on the rooftop
driving a car while actors
could do their thing. Tilt up. (laughs) -(shouts) Run!
-Jeremy Webb:
The cul-de-sac sequence was certainly
the toughest sequence that, uh, that we had to do. And the combination
of the effects and the choreography
and the explosions, just the, kind of,
craziness of it all, really. Eben Bolter: And this
used to just be a field. This was nothing but grass. Craig wrote this amazing
sequence where our, our cast, they walk their way onto this seemingly innocent cul-de-sac, - and come under attack.
-(gunshot) And then, behind them, uh,
a whole convoy of rebels
come up behind them. So, at that point,
we actually opened this up into the main road behind, and that gave us
all that extra distance
out there in the real world, and a real road for the convoy to get up to speed,
and start chasing them. These trucks come through.
There's a run truck that just plows through
all these vehicles, knocking them
all over the place. Joel Whist:
Yeah, it was a big deal plowing through all these cars, making it look realistic. We had to reinforce the plow because the first night,
it broke. And then,
it was the driving
into the house... without destroying
the building because the building
was prepped for fire, meaning that, post-crash,
we would pull the truck out and put another truck in there
that would then explode. Special effects did,
uh, an amazing job piping those houses
and vehicles with propane. But we'll go in there
and just add
the finishing touches. Nowlan: In the big
climactic battle scene, most of that
was done practically
with real performers. However, we felt like
we needed to triple that amount, so everything...
in addition was visual effects. When we need to make
these creatures in CG, it's always good
to have a reference from the actual
performers themselves, so an animator doesn't have
to do it frame-by-frame. MoCap is a methodology
of capturing movement of characters. We did a, a MoCap session, try to record as many
different movements from the stuntmen
as we possibly could. We had multiple cameras set up. Wang:
So much of what we do
in post with animation depends on the performances. We shot a library
of their movements, and we selected
the best ones that
we could have. Of course, we tried to do as much,
practically, as possible. The makeup people were awesome. The design work from
Barrie Gower's team
was complete. We took these designs
and we scanned 'em, and this helped create
digital assets for us in post. Gower: With the Infected,
we started exploring all
these other paint schemes. Spateri: Once we knew
what the colors were, then we would
paint a suit to match. We would glue all the mushrooms
and everything onto the suits, and then,
the suits would go over
to Sage and her team, and they would cut the costumes for the mushrooms
to be growing through, and the sort of
dripping stains as they kind of
came through the skin and the flesh broke down. Each clicker is
designed individually, and the costume had
to be durable enough to go through all
of the crazy contortionist, sort of, moves
that the clickers have,
and the fight scenes. Steve Holloway:
Then they run it through
the breakdown department, so it looks like
they've been rotting and molding
for months or years. And so, when you see
the whole thing together with the, the prosthetics, and the sort of
muddy, drippy costume that's coming off them,
just looks so amazing. Cynthia Summers:
You never go into battle
with one costume, but these guys did. So, you know, makeup,
effects, and costumes would be sitting on set,
biting their nails, just hoping that
everything stays together. Gower:
So one thing we did
for a lot of our shots was we actually
had a, a little area
that we could remove from the crown
of the clicker's appliance. We would either have
complete vision for the actors and you'd see
their eyes looking through, which would then
be replaced in post, or we'd be able to do
some more close-up stuff, and put that plug back in. Nowlan:
The amount of work
they had to do just to get the 200
we had in there, it was, it was amazing. (roars) Nowlan:
There are several
creatures that we had to make
the decision fairly early on whether they'd be done
practically with prosthetics and visual effects entirely, or if it might be
a hybrid approach
of the both. In the case
of the Bloater itself, because it's
an enormous creature, it's meant to stand
about seven feet tall, you can get a man and put him in a prosthetic suit,
which they did. At the end of the day,
there's only a certain amount of mobility
in this prosthetic suit. As good as it looked,
he just couldn't do the things that he needed to do
as the Bloater. Very early on,
we kind of planned for doing it,
practically, on set in a prosthetic suit
that Barrie Gower made, but we reserved the option,
and shot a lot of clean plates, which means
we took the Bloater, the physical Bloater
out of the shot, so that we had
a clean background to use in case we wanted
to go the CG route in some or in all the cases. Wang:
Barrie Gower and his team
did a fantastic job creating the Bloater suit
with so much detail. However, we found that what we needed was the Bloater
to be a little bit bigger, and needed to move
a little faster as well. Nowlan:
This CG creature is doing
some very fantastical things, things that a normal
human couldn't do. We ended up just feeling
like it was necessary to create a full,
digital version of the Bloater. -(gunfire)
-(Bloater roars) Nowlan: In the case
of the child clicker, very much like
the Bloater early on, what we did was
we sussed out a person that could play the role,
and in this case, it happened to be a girl
from Toronto called Skye who was also a contortionist, so she could move her body
very, very effectively and do all sorts of clickery,
kinda stuttery motions. What we did was
we shot Skye on set,
like the Bloater. And then, we also decided
to sort of change the design just ever so slightly, uh, in terms
of the prosthetic makeup. We wanted to feel
frightened by her character, but also have a sense
of sympathy for her. We had more
of her face exposed. We could see
her long hair, her pigtails. These were all the aspects
that were important to Craig and Neil. Nowlan: What started out
as just replacing Skye's head as a CG element, we realized we might as well
go a full CG body on it, and then we can get
this child clicker to do exactly what we want it to do. So, you know, she's able
to do that in a much more fantastical way
because we went CG with it. Lougheed: The fight
at the Silver Lake Steakhouse, special effects did,
uh, an excellent job of essentially
piping the entire set. Of course, we can see
some of this piping, which this is where
visual effects will come in and, and remove,
uh, the piping, and also blend in more flames. Whist:
At one point, we were not
gonna do any practical fire because the discussion was
that it was too much money, and we couldn't do it
in the time we had. That's where I come in
and say, "No, we can do it." Basically, I said, you can have,
of this size of set, you can have a quarter
of it on fire. Nowlan:
Joel Whist, our
special effects supervisor, is amazing,
and he designed
that entire set to be fireproof
in the areas that
we needed it to be, and that helped,
immeasurably, for us. ♪ ♪ Palmer:
Shooting with Nabo the giraffe will certainly be one
of my favorite experiences. What I quickly learned
after doing the research
on the game, was just how
critically important
this one moment is to the whole story
of the game. Giraffes are pretty massive. It's like a... spiritual
experience almost being so close to such
a magnificent animal. Yes, you can create
a giraffe in visual effects, but it's just not the same. Paino:
Fortunately, the one thing
Alberta does have is a zoo with giraffes, and we spent quite a while putting things
in the enclosure, so that we could shoot it and getting
the giraffes acclimated. Like, panels with blue screen, so that we could go in there
and just shoot the giraffe, and have Ellie
feed the giraffe. Palmer:
And then, visual effects in all the other pieces
around it. Something that was
so fascinating about
this experience was that the visual effects
and the special effects, and all of the departments
working together, building all of these
practical elements, to be able to actually
see it in front of you
was everything, in terms of the playing
of these characters, and the being
in this fungus apocalypse
20 years in. ♪ ♪ Druckmann:
I don't know how to describe
this feeling of pride, and I can't wait for everybody
at Naughty Dog that worked
so hard on the game and realize that the first time
to see this version, like, does all their work justice. There's something
really beautiful
and moving about that. When people talk
to me about the game, we are same,
we understand each other. We have a shared language. Arts are so important
because it holds a mirror
to our social condition and it helps us
have better understanding for someone who doesn't
look or act like us, who might come
from a different culture. And I think that
we'll be able to jump over some of these
skyscraper high hurdles that we have
in the things that divide us, and that will never end. That right there,
is the crux of "The Last of Us." Pascal:
One of the most exciting
experiences of my life was getting this job. To come back to HBO,
which basically raised me, to meet Craig, to meet Bella,
all of our different actors, there was something of where
I knew this was going to be the hardest and the best
experience of my life. And weirdly,
there was something
that I knew was special and terrifying,
and it all came true. (laughs) On the first day,
I set a fairly reasonable goal to make the best
television show ever. -That was our reasonable goal.
-(crew laughing) I just wanna say... thank you. I love you guys. Thank you. (crew cheering) ("The Last of Us"
theme music playing) And that's the end
of the story. ♪ ♪
