- Welcome to "Sony: Creator to Creator."
(Pedro grunts) (all laughing)
And done.
- You gotta do that again. - Amen.
- Take number seven. - Dude, you literally-
- [Neil] He will love it, he will love this.
He loves it.
- Do it again. - Take seven.
(tense music)
(clicker screeching)
(gentle guitar music)
- Was it everything you hoped for?
- Jury's still out.
But man, you can't deny that view.
- Neil, it's exciting because this gave you an opportunity
to direct one of the episodes.
What did you learn from that?
What was different from directing on the game side?
- The actors in the video game are way nicer.
(all laughing)
- I was gonna say, I am never working with actors again.
- The biggest difference is that, you know,
when we we do the cinematic part of a video game,
which is the closest to shooting a TV show or a film,
in the volume, where where we capture the video game stuff,
we have all the coverage, every angle,
because we're capturing 3D data of their face,
of their body, their voice.
We could change their clothing,
we could change the set, we could change the weather.
All those things we could change after the fact.
Not so much in live action.
- Man, that sounds good.
- Amazing.
- Well, it's a double-edged sword,
'cause it's good,
but it's like you have endless possibilities.
On the TV show, that's pretty much what it's gonna be.
And then you say action,
and then you hold your breath,
and you're hoping all the pieces will come together.
And they usually don't on the first,
or the second, or sometimes the seventh.
- He's like, I think it was fine on the first.
(all laughing)
- I was like, we got it on the first one.
- Then when you do get it, it's this high.
Here we go.
Three, two, one, action.
(truck thuds)
- The amount of mental endurance required to shoot a show,
when it's cold on screen, it's cold.
I mean there's this, I just remember you walking.
We were in deep snow, and the only thing
we were missing that day was just a lot of wind.
Out comes the big fan that's sort of blasting him
in the face with this, like wah,
this thing is blowing arctic ice chips into his face,
and he's struggling.
- I mean, I think there was wind, natural wind.
We just added quite a bit of it.
It wasn't a brutal blizzard.
(Pedro laughs)
- But I'm glad for all the suffering.
- [Neil] All of that helped.
- We had these physical locations.
We had the real mountains, the real woods,
the real river, the real snow.
It was just like, very little left to the imagination
in terms of having to fake it.
You dressed entire areas of the downtown-
- [Neil] Yes, we did.
- Calgary, and Edmonton, and-
- Pissed off all the residents.
(people laughing)
- But, they're so polite about it.
- They loved it.
- They were really nice about it.
- They said sorry to us.
- A stretch of highway. - Oh yeah, that was brutal.
- [Bella] That was crazy.
- [Craig] But it was important
to give you guys a real world to be in.
- I will say, it was such a cool feeling,
'cause I'm flying back and forth to Naughty Dog,
and then I come here,
and whenever I show back up in Canada,
Craig's like, you gotta come check this out.
Come check this out.
And he walks me over,
and it's like I'm standing in the game.
I am standing in the game, and it's authentic,
and you could touch it,
and you could walk around it,
and then seeing all the extras.
The crew just loved the material so much.
They poured so much of themselves into it,
and they studied the game,
like every tiny details of the posters from,
the FEDRA posters were exactly like the game.
- It's actually useful to have fans working on your show,
because they're watching like hawks.
One of the things that was actually really encouraging
was that the ones that were really hardcore fans
came to me and said, "Joel and Ellie are perfect."
They were, and I was like okay.
- Light on the reading,
but it's got some interesting photos.
- No, no, no, put that back.
That's not for kids.
- How'd he even walk around with that thing?
- Please get rid of it.
- Oh, why are these all stuck together?
- Uh.
- [Asad] Did you just try to bring,
was there a certain part of yourself
that you brought to these characters
as part of your way into those characters?
'Cause there's something that's very familiar,
but I think there's a nuance that you guys brought to it.
- I think whenever I approach a character, anyway,
I'm not consciously trying to do anything.
As soon as I consciously try and bring
certain parts of myself to the character,
it just feels conceited, and unnatural to me.
So I think it's just a natural merging of two people.
And it helps when like,
I'm quite similar to Ellie, so that was helpful.
- I am exactly like Joel. (all laughing)
It's a no-brainer. - And your knees hurt.
- No-brainer.
- Yeah, exactly.
- My back is twerked.
- In terms of the, twerk? - You said twerk.
- Yeah. - Hold on.
Tell us about the twerk.
- Yeah, tell about the twerking.
- The twerk.
- What you just did was not a twerk.
(Bella laughs)
It looked more like a back spasm.
- It's a twerk, we can go with that.
- I think I just spasmed my back doing the little.
- How old are you again?
- 36.
- Gonna have to wear a diaper soon.
- Who says I don't already?
- Part of what our job is as casting
is to find people that don't have to work very hard
to embody a character.
So, when we were looking for Joel,
we knew we wanted somebody
that projected a certain kind of strength.
That kind of paternal energy,
but also then, underneath it, a pain.
- [Ellie] Your watch is broken.
- And something in the eyes that was sort of undeniable,
and that's an interesting combination
of somebody that can do terrible violence,
and can go into a red mist,
but then also has just such a wellspring
of emotion and humanity, still.
Had you heard of it, or seen any of it?
- I hadn't.
- You got the script.
- I just heard of you.
It was a fascinating 24 hours.
I don't know if you guys recall.
- I do.
- Where we met, talked,
and then decided we would be doing this together.
And, I called my sister within this short window
to tell her about this job that I wanted really badly,
and she was in the car driving my nephews to school,
and I was on speaker,
and I didn't even know that they were in the car,
and I was like, I'm having a conversation
about this amazing job.
It's based on a video game, actually,
and it's called "The La-."
(all laughing)
- And that was it.
- And then, Bruno and Pedro were like, "The Last of Us?"
You have to get this job!
Mommy, pull over!
You know, like.
- Wow, their voices are so deep.
- Yeah, they turned into demons.
(all laughing)
- That's good. - And...
- I also think that's why fans are so protective
of these characters, because they've been those characters.
- Yeah, exactly. - Yes.
- [Bella] They've not just watched them, they've been them.
- [Craig] And the replay factor on those games
is extraordinarily high.
So, they have not just experienced it once or twice,
but many multiple times,
and so, there is an intimacy
that they have with these characters.
It's why, I think, that a lot of fans
were nervous about the game being adapted at all.
- Yeah. - And I understand that.
- Yeah.
- [Craig] I get nervous when I-
- We had the same nervousness.
- Yeah, exactly.
And that's a good nervousness.
It's good to be nervous, it means you care.
- [Soldier] Don't move!
- It's my daughter, I think her leg is broken.
- [Soldier] Stop right there!
- Okay.
Easy now.
- We're not sick.
- PlayStation, over the years,
has given Naughty Dog so much support, and trust.
"The Last of Us" was the first M-rated game
Naughty Dog has ever made.
We weren't known for making these kind of games,
and this kind of story.
And from the initial pitch,
you all were like, yes, let's do this.
We support you 100%.
These are big budget games,
and to get this level of support,
I think allowed us to create something like this
that hopefully resonates with players, and with viewers,
the way it's connected with us.
- Do you remember how we,
actually this would be a good story for you guys to know.
How we announced it?
This is the first time we announced the game to the world,
it was 2011, and if you remember,
you know, knowing Neil, he wanted to announce it
in a different, interesting way
rather than just releasing a trailer.
So we did this really cool sort of,
remember that tease thing we did?
- Oh, I've seen it.
- With the tease- - It's cool.
- [Neil] We had this kind of post-apocalyptic tease
where you just hear Joel
talking about what he's been through,
and then we had another one that just showed the cordyceps
that are growing out of the ant.
- Right. - Whoa.
- [Neil] And then no one knew it was a Naughty Dog game.
- [Asad] Yeah, there was the sound of the clickers.
We just released a soundbite of the clickers,
and then every day, as we got closer
to the launch of the trailer,
the website of PlayStation just got more overgrown.
And it just drove everyone crazy.
- So there was just,
they knew there was a PlayStation game
called "The Last of Us."
They didn't know who was making it,
'cause we had just put out "Uncharted 3,"
so they didn't expect it at all.
- It was so good.
- And then it had this huge impact when that trailer hit.
- But it was great, 'cause it just shows
ever since this game first came out,
we've just been very provocative
with how we promote it, talk about it,
so it's just so reflective of what you guys are doing now.
- [Ellie] This is our routine.
Day and night, all we do is survive.
It never lets up.
(gun fires)
(Joel grunts)
Joel!
- Did you have any idea when you were doing that
that it was going to be a thing
that people would tattoo on their bodies,
and turn into an almost semi-religion?
- No, I actually, throughout the entire production,
I thought I was fumbling the whole thing.
- [Craig] Yeah.
- And they'll never let me do this again.
- [Craig] Right.
- This will be a one and done.
- Huh, sounds really familiar.
(all laughing)
- [Bella] Yeah.
- And I was like, so I wanted to just be like,
'cause I was working on my dream game.
I was like, I want it to be,
I wanted to be satisfied by myself,
but I thought it wouldn't be as big,
and definitely wouldn't be as big as "Uncharted,"
and then we'll just move on to something else.
- I learnt to trust people.
I had to trust that if you said
I did a good job, I did a good job,
and trust that you knew what you were doing
when you cast me, because I had frickin', it was terrifying.
I'm like, why did you?
We had these conversations, right up until the very end.
- I told you, 'cause I'm a genius.
That's why. - Right.
You can't beat yourself up all of those 200 days,
so there has to be an element-
- You tried. - You can.
- You really tried. - I know.
(all laughing)
So I had to learn to trust, 'cause I trust you with my life.
- Apparently.
- Big mistake.
(dramatic music)
(chime dings)