Well before we ever rolled any film,
we gathered together a small army of people
to work on how to get the clickers right.
And getting the clickers right means
that people who have played the game will go...
"That's it."
And people who haven't played the game are gonna go...
(SCREECHES)
"Oh, my god!"
To present the clickers on screen correctly,
my feeling was that we had to make
5000 decisions exactly right.
We brought Barrie Gower in.
Barrie Gower worked on our prosthetics on
He's the best.
When we joined the show, we spoke to both Neil and Craig
about the design for the clickers.
And we started off with a lot of preliminary concept art.
We were using that as a stepping stone.
And even though we were creating
new, refreshed versions on the same brief,
we kept going back to the original designs
that Neil and his team had created for the games.
CRAIG MAZIN:
The first time I got to see the full prosthetics,
I got tears in my eyes.
It looked so good,
and it was so creepy and beautiful at the same time,
and it captured a lot of the things we were trying to do with the game,
but it was there in real life.
We found some terrific actors who were fans of the game,
and understood the movement.
And we're really happy with how it all turned out.
(SCREECHES)
One of the changes that Neil and I felt
we needed to make early on was the way the fungus would spread.
Obviously, we did a lot of research on fungus and cordyceps.
Neil and Naughty Dog,
of course, had gone through a lot of that stuff as well.
We started looking at something called mycelium,
which are these threads that make up fungus.
In the game, it spreads through biting and saliva,
but it also can spread through the air, through spores.
And while that works in a video game environment,
in real life, spores move around everywhere.
And it's just harder to buy into the notion
that spores localize and don't spread.
NEIL DRUCKMANN:
which is just like the way fungus operates,
is sometimes it's like the largest organisms you could have in the forest.
It's a single organism that could just communicate to different parts of it.
It's like, if you touch a tendril here,
a mile away, you could wake up a horde of infected
that will now, like, come after you.
Indeed, there is this thing called the "wood wide web."
Fungus can communicate chemically over insane distances.
They are remarkable organisms,
and unfortunately, in this case, also terrifying.
DRUCKMANN:
from the game to the show.
In the game, it was the military chasing us.
But we felt like, just again, the way it was playing out,
we couldn't sustain that.
And I believe it's actually more dramatic and kind of interesting
than what happens in the game.
Tess was a character that we did quite a bit of expansion on.
She doesn't have any particular emotional connection to the world, as far as we know,
so in that regard, she's kind of a perfect survivor.
Once she understands what Ellie is,
and that Ellie represents some modicum of hope for the world,
you see that there is something in her that was always there,
that is ready to come back out.
DRUCKMANN:
there's immediately a light bulb moment for her that goes off
where she's like, "Redemption."
ANNA TORV:
if they do this one thing that can potentially save everyone,
she can, in some way, be redeemed
for all the shitty things that she's done.
Even in getting bit, and understanding that her life is gonna end,
she is even more committed to hope,
and inspires Joel to move on with Ellie for just a little bit longer.
SPEAKER: Action.
TORV:
to the way that it actually turned out.
I thought it was gonna be much slower,
and I thought it was gonna be like this magnetic kind of pull.
And then when we came to do it,
I don't know, it was just so not what I had thought it was gonna be.
MAZIN:
And it's gorgeous.
♪ (MELANCHOLY MUSIC PLAYING) ♪