One of the things that we talked about for a while...
"How do you start this show?"
It was an enormous undertaking for everyone.
I wouldn't want it to deliver CG pew-pew,
but to deliver... reality.
Two, one, action!
Negative degree temperatures,
with the wind machine going like this...
Yeah, so that was hard.
And fun. It was so fun.
The amount of detail is incredible.
The color schemes, the textures, how things would flourish.
There's everything on this show.
From big scopes of airplanes to smaller tendrils.
You're immediately just so immersed in
The Last of Us world.
Shooting in Canada, we're not doing anything small.
It was quite the endeavor.
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 this story.
And I think our story is special enough to bring it to them."
The HBO series,
uh, I don't remember when I first heard about it,
but when I did, I was like, "Mommy want that."
'Cause 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 fanbase 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.
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 incredible.
But I just watched some of the gameplay though,
secretly, on my own.
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,
she has the essence of Ellie already in her.
Seven, eight, fuck... you.
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 want to know what the biggest surprise
of adapting The Last of Us is?
It's the 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.
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.
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.
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.
They're connected.
More than you know.
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.
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 silicon cords joined to.
As soon as you pulled away,
everything started to...
Practically, it looked great.
I think the reality of it
was going to be the resettability on the day.
Having huge, big fungal pieces all over the head,
as soon as you took the eyebrows away,
you started veering into zombie territory.
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.
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've 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.
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.
No, I didn't want to look at them.
I didn't want that in my head to go home and sleep,
and then you have to be kind of,
you're like, "Hi! How are you?"
And it's not just kind of what they look like,
it's the physicality and the way that they move
is what makes them so creepy. But impressive.
Not just the prosthetic, obviously,
but the inhabiting of it.
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.
These are a lot of our very early concept 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 mushroom's around the wrong way,
so it's just like...
Just move that over a little bit.
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?
Yeah.
Let me just practice a few so we can make sure...
Yeah, sure.
Misty was the originator of the sound itself,
and she did these amazing like throat sounds,
which were like, "That's it!"
And they were like, "Now we gotta find somebody who can do it too, like a guy."
- Right. - And then I was like, "I figured it out."
Mr. and Mrs. Clicker. The original.
The Adam and Eve of clicking.
- Yeah. - It's also here, like...
I think it's that first little bit, right?
It's just the initial...
Which I think isn't bad here, I just want the real thing.
- Sure. - Let's do some clicking.
- That was good stuff. I like that. - Thank you.
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 have the incredibly specific thing people
doing the incredi... Oh, this is so cool.
All right, I think it might be time
to go to the bullpen and bring in the ol' lefty.
Oh, that was a good one.
Yeah, that was a good one!
- I was back here going, "Oh!" - That felt juicy.
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.
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.
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.
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 statehouse.
The Fireflies' set was stunning.
'Cause now we're outside the QZ, it's way more run down.
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...
Bill's town, the way it was written was very particular.
The action involved and the look of the town
and the feel of the town.
And I kind of had 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 the bank! There's a zoo! Lights!"
I was like... I was like... Everything was...
I was like, "They got everything!"
I was really impressed with our production design.
Everything was just so faithful to the game,
and so detailed and specific.
But the mall was, I think, one of the most amazing sets there is.
You know, 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.
Plants growing everywhere, there's algae.
It's just a mess.
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 reign to completely destroy it
and make it their own.
So, as soon as we finish this, like, this mall is gone.
And let's cut.
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 where literally,
you could almost... you couldn't stand up.
When Craig was there, I mean, it was just like, "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 you 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 ten 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 there was a trek through the snow.
And there were three or four house-sized wind machines.
I loved it. I love it. I wanna go back.
How do you want it?
- For me. - Sí, for you.
Gustavo Santaolalla, 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.
I think Gustavo as well is very much about minimalism.
Like what's the least we need to do
to achieve this moment?
Which is very much 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.
Kind of minimalism because I have to play less.
The pipes, the cans, all that has a little bit to do with
the reality of a post-disaster world
of found objects, broken things.
But it's very organic.
It's almost like in primitive folk instrument.
Like a modern primitive folk.
The beginning, you know, was trying to find
how do we translate the language from the game to the series,
but I think we have found now something that kind of flows.
He would go off,
and he's come back with an hour or more of music.
And we'd just sit here listening.
And he's just like, "Here's this moment that you talked about
that has inspired this theme.
And that's very much what it's like working with Gustavo.
It's like starting with a lot
and then continuing to trim it down, trim it down,
and find the right elements and how they fit.
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 connection
between the game and what the series is.
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.
It is 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 given show or film.
They benefit a lot more from having something there on the day,
which they can 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 actually used a lot of drone scanning,
so that we're able to recreate it digitally.
On this show, we used a combination of drones and LiDAR.
LiDAR scanning is light imaging distance ranging.
And 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 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.
For all the gamers,
I know everyone knows the scene when they're escaping.
And they're in the car,
and you can watch everything,
what's happening from Sarah's perspective.
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 drivers were sitting on the rooftop driving a car
while actors could do their thing.
Tilt up.
Run!
The cul-de-sac sequence was certainly
the toughest sequence that we had to do.
The combination of VFX, the choreography,
and the explosions.
Just the kind of craziness of it all, really.
And this used to just be a field.
This was nothing but grass.
Craig wrote this amazing sequence
where our cast,
they walk their way onto this seemingly innocent cul-de-sac
and come under attack.
And then behind them, 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, on 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.
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 an amazing job
piping those houses and vehicles with propane,
but we'll go in there and just add the finishing touches.
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 mocap session,
tried to record as many different movements
from the stuntmen as we possibly could.
We had multiple cameras set up.
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 try 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 them,
and this helped create visual assets for us in post.
With the infected,
we started exploring all these other paint schemes.
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 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 in the fight scenes.
Then they run 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 prosthetics
and the sort of muddy, drippy costume that's coming off them,
it just looks so amazing.
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.
So, one thing we did for a lot of our shots
was we actually had 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.
The amount of work they had to do
just to get the 200 we had in there,
it was amazing.
There are several creatures
that we had to make the decision fairly early on
whether they'd be done practically with prosthetics,
in 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 cases.
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 it needed to move a little faster, as well.
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.
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 clicker-y, kind of stutter-y 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, 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.
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, now she's able to do that in a much more fantastical way
because we went CG with it.
The fight at the Silver Lake Steakhouse,
special effects did 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 remove the piping and also blend in more flames.
At one point, we were not going to 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 to say, "No, we can do it."
Basically, I said, "You can have...
Of this size set, you can have a quarter of it on fire."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
does all their work justice.
There's something really beautiful and moving about that.
When people talk to me about the game,
we are the 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.
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.
On the first day, I set a fairly reasonable goal
to make the best television show ever.
That was our reasonable goal.
I just want to say thank you. I love you guys. Thank you.
And that's the end of this story.