‘The Last Of Us': Neil Druckmann On Directing Pivotal Joel & Ellie Flashbacks That Pinpoint 'Where The Relationship Explodes'

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19-05-2025

The Last Of Us
Sunday night's episode of The Last of Us Season 2 hit pause on Ellie's (Bella Ramsey) increasingly dangerous mission to find Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) to help explain how she really got to this point in the first place.
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The episode, directed by Neil Druckmann, features a collection of flashbacks to multiple of Ellie's birthdays and other significant moments throughout the five years since the events of Season 1, highlighting the deterioration of Ellie and Joel's (Pedro Pascal) relationship as Ellie's suspicions that Joel lied to her about the hospital weigh her down.
While it begins with some joyful memories, including a trip where Joel surprises Ellie for her birthday by taking her to a museum to see dinosaurs and a spacecraft, things get heavier as the episode progresses. Ellie grows more resentful of Joel and lashes out frequently, culminating with two pivotal scenes that explain why they are barely speaking by the time we see them in Episode 201. The first is a patrol where Joel and Ellie find Gail's husband Eugene has been bit by an Infected. He begs them to bring him back to Jackson so he can say goodbye to jail and, after some convincing from Ellie, Joel seems to oblige. But, while Ellie goes to get their horses, Joel shoots Eugene in the head. Ellie is so angry with Joel that, when they return to Jackson, she calls out Joel for trying to lie to Gail to spare her the true, gruesome details of what happened to her husband.
The episode then flashes to a few months later at the New Year's Eve party, when Joel attacks Seth for harassing Ellie and Dina. We see the same scene play out from Joel's perspective, and then Joel is once again sitting on his porch when Ellie returns from the party. Previously, it had been implied that Ellie went straight to bed that night and woke up the next morning to go on patrol with Jesse the day that Joel dies. But now, it's revealed that Ellie actually confronted Joel about whether he'd lied at the hospital, and he finally tells her the truth. She tells him she doesn't know if she can forgive him, but she wants to try.
Things come to an end with a quick shot of Ellie approaching the theater in Seattle, where Jesse and Dina are waiting for her.
In the interview below, Druckmann spoke with Deadline about directing this episode and how it sets the stage for all that's to come by re-examining the past.NEIL DRUCKMANN: There were a few reasons. I knew it was between 6 and 7. This time, I wanted an episode that I was a co-writer on, as opposed to the second episode from Season 1 that Craig wrote. got intrigued with the idea of doing an episode that was all drama and no quote-unquote 'action,' which was kind of the opposite of the episode I directed last time that had quite a bit of tension and action. It was the introduction of the Clickers. Really, the deciding factor was just the content. This was our last bite of the apple with Joel and Ellie. It got to the core of the themes of the story, and especially in that porch scene, both going backwards in time from everything from Episode 1 and everything [about] where the show is going to go in the future can come all back to this conversation. So I like the high stakes of it. I thought it would be a good stretch to do this one.DRUCKMANN: When people ask us about changes [from the game to the show], often, the answer is, it's the difference in medium. In the game, when you are experiencing one of those flashbacks that are spread out throughout much more, they're not all consolidated like this — for example, the museum one, whereas in the show it's a few minutes long, in the game, it could be close to an hour if you're exploring every different nook and cranny. You are Ellie, and you're there with Joel, and they have lots of conversations that you could get into that headspace. You get in the flow state, and you're experiencing this thing with the two of them. I think if we were to take, let's say, the scenes that we wrote for this episode, and spread them out over the season, a few things would happen that I think would have a negative effect. There's one, I don't know if they would land, because they're relatively short. And two, you might not be missing Joel enough if we started spreading them throughout the episodes. We felt like for the show, we would get a lot more impact if we brought them all together and you could see them side by side and feel the deterioration of that relationship. I also had concerns that the episodes would turn into a bit of a template. It'd be like, 'Okay, what's the Joel flashback this week?' So, it was nice that the characters and the viewers could really miss this character, and then we get in the whole bunch for one last time.DRUCKMANN: We had quite a bit of conversation around [the idea that] so much of this show, this story, is about parents and children. Even now that Joel is dead in the show, you still feel his presence, partially through Dina, but mostly through Ellie, who's trying to be like him. Sometimes she succeeds, sometimes she's in over her head. So there's this idea of like, a lot of our programming comes from our parents. Obviously, there's a lot of other factors, but parents play a crucial part. Then it became interesting to say, well, what if we went backwards in time to see where does Joel get his programming? Where does he get his savior complex? Or how he feels he needs to use violence to protect the people close to him? Those were the early thoughts for that conversation with the dad. We wanted to not only have this idea of generational trauma that can stay with people going forward, but also this idea of generational repair and hope, and this idea that you do your the best to raise your kids with the tools that are in front of you, and then you hope that they will pick it up from there and grow even further and become better people than you were with their kids and so on and so forth. Then, coming back to that porch scene of what Joel imparts to Ellie is this hope that she would do better. And the question is, is she doing better, or is she heading to a much worse place?DRUCKMANN: These birthdays almost became a mini story. So in pre production, it was a lot of thinking about, okay, where are they emotionally throughout this story? Where are they starting? Where are they ending? And then, how do we hint at this greater conflict, this idea of this lie that's weighing on them? So even as they're dealing with what they think is the problem of Ellie has a girlfriend, or Ellie's getting a tattoo, or she's smoking weed, or she wants to go on patrol, or she burned her hand. These are not the problems, right? You could see Joel is trying really hard to bend over backwards and give Ellie what she wants. He helps her move into this garage. He comes back after they have this fight. He looks at her tattoo. But the real issue, and you get to see it when Ellie's sitting alone in her room repeating those questions, she wants to get past this lie and she can't. Over the years, the weight of that lie is just weighing more and more on her. We knew the breaking point would be the Eugene sequence, and maybe she would have gone there anyways, but that short circuits whatever journey she was on, because he lies to her again, and he lies to her in the same way he lied at the end of Season 1, and that confirms all of her suspicions. That's where the relationship explodes.DRUCKMANN: It was a full day that we had just on that scene. I went in front of Pedro and Bella, and I just told them that I'm a bit nervous because of just how much this scene means to me and to a bunch of other people, but that I have complete faith in them, and today we're here to explore and just find it together. It was really just making sure that the set felt quiet and safe, and just giving them the space to just lay it all out there. It was really beautiful to watch how vulnerable they both felt. We've seen Ellie hide so much of her anger and frustration throughout the season, and here's this part where she's so raw. There's two parts of season where we see her at her rawest. One when Joel gets killed by Abby in front of her, and now this other moment where she could finally speak the truth to Joel.DRUCKMANN: Well, that moment is tied to so many things. That moment is tied to her deepest feelings about what happened at that hospital, her feelings for Joel, and just this unconditional love she felt for him, but also the fact that there was justification what Abby and her crew did, that Joel not only harmed some other people, his actions have harmed people in Jackson. We saw in 202, there's this shot towards the end where you see someone is bitten and they hand someone else a pistol to shoot them. Now, what would happen if Joel had made a different decision? Ellie understands, again, the weight of this action, and it's maybe the worst she could be betrayed, because she wanted so much meaning in the death of Riley, in the death of Tess and the death of Henry and Sam. Had a cure had come out of that, even if she died, it would have somehow made all those deaths worthwhile. Joel took that away, and she means it when she says it on that porch, 'I don't know if I could ever forgive you, but I would like to try.' She really wants to move towards this idea of forgiveness, because she understands that this guy is maybe the person that will care more about her than anybody else in this world, and she doesn't get to do that because she's robbed of that. I think she just struggles with that internally, and that makes it hard to share it with anybody else, because sharing that is the most vulnerable she might ever be.
DEADLINE: It seems like Ellie's downward spiral is a bit different in the show than in the game. She's not quite so immediately made ruthless and hardened after Joel's death. Can you tell me more about her current headspace and where she's going from here?
DRUCKMANN: There's a few decisions we made early on that has separated this Ellie's journey from game Ellie's journey a little bit. In the game, it was important to me for Ellie to get into this really dark headspace and be unable to kind of get out of it for a while, because…you have to commit a lot more violence than you do in the show. Whereas in the game, by the time she gets to Nora, she would have already killed a bunch of people, including some of the people responsible for Joel's death, really, in the show, the first one is Nora. So, she's on this journey, and I don't know if she really understands what this journey means, until this point now, when she gets to Nora and this is a moment where she's trying to be like Joel. She's trying to commit this like, 'I will do whatever it takes to go forward on this journey and find out where Abby is.' Now we see the darkness that's been brewing underneath that. She's been doing a good job of hiding different than game Ellie, not necessarily better or worse. They're just slightly different on their journeys, even if the destination is the same. But now that she's committed this act, the question we want to explore is, can you come back from something so horrific?DRUCKMANN: What I love about my job and anything I do, I always try to challenge myself so I could just learn something new and learn something different. I was talking to Craig about this today. No one has really done an adaptation like this, because if you think about other adaptations, let's say from a novel, we all have a different idea of what the characters are, what they sound like, or what they look like, or how they move, or we definitely have no concept of what the score should be, or anything like that. But the game was already so cinematic, and I think that's why people have very specific expectations of what it should be when it's adapted. But by its very nature of adapting it, it shifts and evolves. So that process has just been fascinating to me. I love actually reading online both people that are praising what we've done and people that are highly critical of what we've done. I love this idea that games are now standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a prestige HBO show. We could talk about them side-by-side and say, 'In this instance, I like the game better. In this instance, I like the show better.' Again, there's no hard feelings on my part. I just find it fascinating. I love the fact that games are now in the conversation around some of the best storytelling that's out there.
I'm not just talking about just our show, even when you look at Fallout or Arcane or even Sonic, other adaptations that are out there that are really doing a great job of treating the source material with respect. When I was directing the episode specifically, on the one hand, I tried to not think too much about the game, because I wanted this to stand on its own. The game is grafted into my mind at this point, because I was with it for so long. So I can't help, for example, when I'm looking at the porch scene, I purposely did not review the porch scene right beforehand. But as soon as I saw Pedro go and lean, kind of standing up against the railing, I remembered how Troy did it, where he leaned on his elbows. I had to fight certain instincts to try to replicate that. I'm like, 'No, no, it's really important that this is Pedro's version. It's really important that this is Bella's version. Let me be here to support their version.' At the same time, though, I can't help but think about all the people that have helped me make those games and have worked tirelessly to make those games, and I really wanted to do a good job to make them proud to say you might not be part of this now, but you will forever be part of it at the same time. The two people that are at the forefront of my mind when I was doing especially that scene were Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, the original actors for Joel and Ellie, because they helped me create those characters. The reason Ellie goes to space and [Joel] gives her that gift is because Ashley Johnson wanted to be an astronaut. The reason Joel sings is because Troy Baker started out as a singer and as a musician and loves that stuff. That's why I wrote those things into those characters. So I hope I've made all those people proud in this process.
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