- [Ellie] If you don’t think there's hope for the world,
why bother going on?
- [Joel] You haven't seen the world.
So you don't know.
You keep going for family.
- I'm not family?
- No.
You’re cargo.
Joel's a regular guy.
Single father.
- Contractor.
- Contractor, exactly. The contractor.
A regular single dad looking after a very small family of his.
And he, along with the rest of the world, sort of loses everything within
an instant on outbreak day and becomes a kind of
calcification of that loss 20 years later.
Well into the apocalypse, only to be de-caclified. Is that a word?
- I didn't-- even calcified is great.
I’m still thinking how smart you are.
Who’s Ellie?
- You know.
Ellie, I know Ellie.
She is--
- You’re Ellie.
- I'm Ellie.
She's a very smart teenager.
She's fourteen when we meet her.
She has grown up in the Boston quarantine zone.
Completelly sheltered from the world, has never really been outside of the zone.
She doesn't really have a family.
The only family she sort of has any sort of awareness
is Marlene.
That’s the closest thing that she has to a family.
She's funny.
She has a good sense of humor.
- If she so much is twitches.
- (Fake twitches)
- Don’t.
- From a philosophical point of view,
I think I'm a pretty good representative of the fans of the game.
I played it when it came out.
I played every iteration of it,
so I love it.
And when Neil and I would kind of we talk about, okay,
how are we going to go this part, like this part of the story?
What do we do?
We just kind of followed our hearts.
We just knew it, like in our guts,
like we got to have this and we got to have that.
But we can do this but slightly differently.
And we would talk everything through.
And I had the benefit of Neil, like he was never going
to let me do something that was just totally wrong.
- Very, very early on when I was wrapping up production on The Last of Us Part Two,
Craig would come over to Naughty Dog and we would talk about the game
and themes of the game and the characters and who they are and what's important
about their relationships.
And we also talked a lot about what's important for gameplay
for this interactive medium
that wouldn't necessarily work in a passive medium like an HBO show.
So the things we wanted to hang on were like those fundamental
pillars of what this game is about, who these characters are.
Again, the core, the essence of those relationships were more important
than any superficial thing.
Here in the show,
we're like, “Okay, what's a downbeat moment?”
Again, wouldn't afford any gameplay,
but we get to see Joel and Ellie sitting by a campfire
just talking about their experience or where they're at
or what they're struggling with, or what they're afraid of.
- [Gabriel] We were shooting in 2021.
We shot for a full year, 218 shoot days.
We were living it.
We were wearing our masks, getting tested three times a week.
I think that, you know, the concern might be are people fatigued with this?
But what I feel, especially being there, I feel very much that it's
going to help them have an entry point to what this experience is.
And especially in that first episode when you kind of hear the whispers
and the rumblings coming from across the world, various news outlets,
of something's happening, right? We all experienced that.
We all know what that was.
So I think that it's going to work to our advantage in that
our audience has a ramp on to what we're experiencing.
One truth that I think is beautifully reflected is that it
all really comes down to relationships
and that survival is really based
on the survival of others and not just yourself.
In my experience of the last couple of years,
I know that deep relationships only deepened further
and we kind of cling on to these human relationships
essentially as best as we can to
to get through it.