‘The Last Of Us’: How A Video Game Was Made Into An HBO Hit & Why Writers Made That Romantic Pivot In Episode 3 – Deadline FYC House + HBO Max
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Please note: the screening and panel took place on April 28, before the start of the WGA Strike.
Once he saw Chernobyl, Neil Druckmann decided it was time to have lunch with the writer behind the hit HBO limited series. Druckmann had no ulterior motive in wanting to meet Craig Mazin other than to “gush” about the 2019 historical drama — that is, until they began to chat about The Last of Us action-adventure game, which Druckmann wrote in 2014.
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“He was a big fan of The Last of Us,” Druckmann recalled at April’s The Last of Us hosted by Deadline FYC House + HBO Max. “So then we started charting about it and in the conversation, I saw the love he had for the material in a way that I never felt with another person outside of Naughty Dog.”
Within weeks, Mazin arranged for the two of them to meet with veteran producer Carolyn Strauss before pitching the adaptation to HBO.
“She bought into the show and did this thing that now everybody does, which is like, ‘I’m not a gamer, don’t be offended,'” remembered Mazin. “I’m like, it’s okay. You don’t have to be a gamer to enjoy this story.”
And with that, The Last of Us was in production — and during a global pandemic, no less. Fortunately, there was no concern about dramatizing a post-apocalyptic story during an already depressing time in our world’s history.
“We were already in too deep by then,” Strauss remembered. “We just had to keep going. I guess it was an unhappy accident.”
“Honestly, the show has a lot of depressing things in it, to be fair,” continued Mazin. “It has something for everyone really. So our feeling was, ‘eh, what’s one more horrible thing?”
The result was an adaptation that remains mostly faithful to the game — that is, until episode 3, when Mazin and Druckmann introduces a survivalist named Bill (Nick Offerman) who falls hard for a man (Murray Bartlett) who stumbles onto his land. Bill and Frank exist in The Last of Us game, but their romance is more implied than actually depicted. In fact, you never see Frank in the game and their relationship ends badly.
In the adaptation, however, the two live a peaceful life in Bill’s bucolic little neighborhood, until tragedy brings their storybook romance to an end. The now memorable episode was directed by Peter Hoar.
“It was something that Neil and I talked about as we were going through, before we wrote any scripts,” recalled Mazin. “We just broke the whole story of the game apart into episodes and talked about how we wanted to adapt it. And one of the things that’s amazing about Neil, and I think this makes him unique among people who create source material, is that he understands an adaptation is not just something you do just because it’s essential. The adaptation in the correct way is important. And there are times where you want to just kind of go in a different way. One of the things that Neil would say all the time is that there was this very freeing aspect of storytelling in this medium, because we could shift perspective in the game. You are Joel, or later on in the game, you’re Ellie, but you’re either one and you’re never anybody else.”
“So to that extent, Bill had to be somebody that you meet as Joel and you experience as Joel, who serves the story of Joel and Ellie,” continued Mazin. “We didn’t have that. We had an interest in showing how time had passed from the beginning of the outbreak to where we were in the show. But I didn’t really want to do some random, kind of here’s the way the world went. I always like to look inside of relationships, and there was an opportunity to take a kernel of a story that was in the game and just expand it and turn it on its ear and make it the centerpiece that is sort of like a donut hole. It was just a wonderful time making that episode.”
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