‘The Last of Us' Creator Neil Druckmann on Directing Pedro Pascal's Last Episode, That Pearl Jam Song and Catherine O'Hara's ‘Beautiful' Improvisation

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SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments from Season 2, Episode 6 of 'The Last of Us,' airing on HBO and streaming on Max (soon to be HBO Max again), as well as the video game 'The Last of Us Part II,' available on Playstation 4, Playstation 5 and PC.
'The Last of Us' co-creator and executive producer Neil Druckmann wasn't sure which episode of the show's second season that he wanted to direct. For Season 1, he helmed the action-packed Episode 2, which was written by co-creator Craig Mazin, so he at least knew that this time, it should be an episode he had a part in writing. That limited Druckmann either to the season finale or the penultimate episode, both of which he co-wrote with Mazin and Halley Gross, his co-writer on Naughty Dog's 2020 video game 'The Last of Us Part II.' Each episode had strong selling points. The finale is, well, the finale, while Episode 6 is a flashback that covers how Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) became so estranged from each other between the events of Season 1 and Season 2.
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Ultimately, it was Pascal who kind of made the decision for Druckmann. Since Episode 6 constitutes his final full episode of the series, the actor requested that Druckmann direct it. 'It just made sense,' Druckmann says. 'I'm excited about doing an episode that had no action, which is almost the inverse of what I did last time. So I just felt like, this will be a good challenge.' More crucially for Druckmann, he realized that Episode 6 'is what the story is all about.'
Taking place on Ellie's birthday over successive years, the episode depicts how she and Joel, now fully a part of the tight-knit community of Jackson, Wyoming, have fallen into a new, uneasy rhythm as adoptive father and daughter. For her 15th birthday, Joel makes Ellie a cake and builds her a new guitar, only to have his plans turned upside down after Ellie deliberately burns her arm where she'd been bitten by an infected, so she could finally wear short sleeve shirts again. For her 16th birthday, Joel takes her to a long forgotten natural history museum that still has many of its exhibits more-or-less intact, including the space capsule from the Apollo 15 moon landing — almost exactly like the fan-favorite scene from the video game.
Things between them begin to sour, however, on Ellie's 17th birthday, when Joel walks in on her smoking weed while getting a tattoo from another girl, Kat (Noah Lamanna), over the burn scarring on her arm. Joel is furious.
'So all the teenage shit all at once,' he says. 'Drugs and tattoos and sex and experimenting — with girls?'
'It wasn't sex,' Ellie retorts, equally incensed. 'And it wasn't a fucking experiment.'
Joel is incredulous, which only fuels Ellie's anger further. She demands to move into the garage, and eventually he relents and tries to make amends.
Two years later, on her 19th birthday, Ellie tries to psych herself up to confront Joel about what really happened five years earlier at the end of Season 1, when Joel murdered almost all of the Fireflies in a Salt Lake City hospital to keep them from killing Ellie to find the cure for the cordyceps infection — and then lied to Ellie about all of it. Before Ellie can say anything, however, Joel arrives and takes Ellie on her first patrol, where they encounter Eugene (Joe Pantoliano), the weed-growing husband of Jackson's resident therapist, Gail (Catherine O'Hara). Eugene has been bitten by an infected, and the rules dictate that Joel must kill him on the spot, but Eugene pleads that he has enough time to make it back to town so he and Gail can say a proper goodbye to each other. Ellie forces Joel to agree to Eugene's request, and when she leaves to get their horses, he promises her that he won't kill Eugene before they get back.
Once again, Joel's lied. He knew there was little chance Eugene was going to make it back in time, so to protect Ellie, Gail, and the rest of Jackson, he leads Eugene to a beautiful lake and kills him.
When they bring Eugene's body back to Gail, Joel lies to her as well. 'He wished he could say goodbye to you in person,' he says. 'He wasn't scared — he was brave, and he ended it himself.'
Ellie, seething, can't take it anymore. 'That's not what happened,' she announces, and tells the truth to a devastated Gail, who slaps Joel and begs him to leave.
Joel looks at Ellie, shocked by what she's done. She stares daggers at him: 'You swore.'
Nine months later, the show returns to Joel's porch on the night before he died, after Ellie kisses Dina (Isabela Merced) at Jackson's New Year's Eve party and, to Ellie's dismay, Joel defends them from the town's resident homophobe, as seen in the season premiere. In this episode, after Ellie arrives home from the party, the two finally have it out about what really happened at that hospital in Salt Lake City.
'I'm going to give you once last chance,' Ellie says. 'If you lie to me again, we're done.' Joel can barely speak at first, but he confesses his crimes.
'Making a cure would have killed you,' he says in tears.
'Then I was supposed to die!' Ellie says, crying too. 'That was my purpose! My life would have fucking mattered, but you took that from me!'
Joel, sobbing now, is resigned to the consequences of his choices, but he doesn't regret them. 'If somehow I had a second chance at that moment, I would do it all over again,' he says. 'Because I love you. In a way you can't understand.'
There's a long silence. 'I don't think I can forgive you for this,' Ellie says. 'But I would like to try.'
For anyone who has played 'The Last of Us Part II,' the timing of this breathtaking scene between Joel and Ellie is shocking, since it comes at the very end of the game, after far more has transpired for all of the characters. Druckmann explained to Variety why he, Mazin and Gross chose to move that scene so far up for the show. He also discussed what guided their thinking about the new scenes between Joel and Ellie on her birthdays, his emotional reaction to seeing locations from the game created in real life — and what happened when O'Hara disagreed with his direction for the scene in which Gail slaps Joel.
We wanted this episode for Ellie to find out definitively that Joel lied. In the game, we did in a very different way, where she traveled all the way back to the hospital and found documentation. It felt like we would be stretching the reality of the world and how dangerous it is on the show compared to the game. But also, looking at documents and exploring that space, I don't know if that makes as compelling of a drama for a TV show. The engine for the show is a little different than the engine for an interactive experience. So that ultimately led to the whole Eugene sequence.
Because we were spending more time in Jackson than we were in the game, we came up with way more ideas than what ended up in the show. But each one of those was vetted through this lens of the arc we wanted, where they start out in this much better place. They know there's a lie, but they're trying to move past it, and then this thing just weighs on them and their relationship. Each step you feel like it's pushing them apart. That was the most important thing that we needed out every sequence, to drill that home.
It started with conversation in the game, which was, Joel is oblivious, and mistakes Ellie's friendship with Jesse for something more. I believe that's something Halley wrote — it's so long ago now, I forget. We really wanted to keep that here, and then take it a step further. He finds out [Ellie is gay] in the game when she kisses Dina on the dance floor. Here, it felt like there's an opportunity to show more of Ellie's evolution of becoming a teenager in Jackson, and for that misunderstanding to create more of a rift between them. But also show evolution, forgiveness, movement — you could feel how much Joel is trying.
He gets things wrong. It's the first time he's [parenting] a teenager at this age, but he's trying to accommodate all the things that Ellie wants. She wants to move to the garage, and even though he doesn't want her to, he gives it to her. She gets this tattoo, and she does drugs, and it infuriates him. And then he's looking at her tattoo, and he says, This looks better than the one I've done on the guitar. He's trying. She wants to go on patrols, and eventually he yields on that. Almost everything she wants, he gives it to her, and it's never enough, because ultimately their friction is not about any one of those things.
Well, I'm not sure when it was written. You'd have to ask Eddie Vedder that. However, it did come out to the public in 2013, and it is anachronistic in that it should not exist in our timeline. Initially, when we were making this episode, there would have been a different song. As we were exploring it, just felt like we were prioritizing the wrong thing, this timeline of events and when things would be available. Clearly, we're not in the same timeline as our universe, so we have some leeway. And that song felt so important. Because it was in the game, because it has so much association, not only for fans, but even for myself, we changed course. The thing that we thought we cared about, we ultimately didn't care about, and the emotional truth of the song was more important than the timeline truth of the world that we live in.
No. When we were making the game, I knew that scene should exist. I didn't know where it goes. That was true for all the flashbacks. Even pretty late in production of the game, we were moving those flashbacks around. In talking about it with Craig, it's the first time I really thought about the time between seasons. So much of writing is set ups and payoffs, and we would have set certain things up that get paid off years later. That felt too long, especially because this season focuses so much on Ellie's journey and this emotional truth of what did she know? What didn't she know? To wait additional years until Season 3 will come out — or maybe even Season 4, it depends where all the events land and how many seasons we have — I was easily convinced by Craig that that would be too long.
It was a day's worth of conversation of us wrestling with it. The way I work is, when a suggestion like that is made, I say, 'Let's play it through.' I just assume that it's correct, and then we play it through and not only talk about this season, but talk about the future seasons, and then say, does it make sense? If the answer is yes, we go with it. If the answer is no, we either keep wrestling with it until we find another solution, or we just go back to how it was in the game.
[Long pause] That's right.
We knew we had this Eugene mystery, and we had so many iterations on it of just what that sequence should be about. There were versions that had all this action and fighting and shooting infected, and much smaller versions. It went from me to Hallie to Craig, from me to Hallie to Craig. It just didn't feel right for a long time, until we landed on him lying to her about killing Eugene. and then everything just fell into place, as far as, like, Oh, this is how she'll know. It felt like such a dramatic way for her to figure things out.
As far as shooting that scene, if no one knew the lie, what I like about that scene is he's being very considerate. Would you want to tell Gail that he wanted to see her, almost in this pitiful way, and I still had to put him down, because those are the rules, and that's the way to keep you safe? Sometimes you could buy the argument that the lie is better than the truth, right? But for Ellie, it wasn't, because of everything else that has come before, because she saw that he betrayed her trust. That meant more than just this moment, it meant that everything that Ellie was worried about, the survival guilt that she's felt all the way back to Season 1 of needing to justify Riley's death and Tessa's death and Henry and Sam and all these people who died along the way so that something good can come of it at the end. It's almost in that moment she realizes nothing good came out of it. That's not entirely true, but that's how she feels about it. So it was just important that all the actors knew the truth they're going into it, and for it to be genuinely shocking.
If I may, I just want to sing Catherine O'Hara's praises.
It was one of my favorite directing moments. In the scene, she slaps Joel, and then in his shame, he's supposed to take a few steps back. We were struggling with it. It just felt artificial. It felt rehearsed. Initially, there were no lines of dialogue for that little moment. I went to Catherine, and said, 'I think we need to do something else here. I don't know what. What if, like, his proximity to this body is somehow desecrating it now that you know the truth, and if you want, you could yell at him to get away?' And she's like, 'Oh, I'm not so sure. I like the beauty of there being no dialogue.' And I'm like, 'Please, just try it. If it doesn't work, we'll go back to the other version. But I always like experimenting, just shaking it up in some way.' So I asked her to yell to get away. I thought that would motivate Pedro [to step back]. Instead, she almost did the opposite. It was so beautiful. She goes inside [herself] and starts sobbing, and begs him to please get away in this very soft spoken voice. I'm like, Oh, my God, that's so much better than what I asked for. It's one of those beautiful moments of collaboration, where I asked for something, she internalized it, made it something else, and it's better because of it. That's the take you see in the episode.
We didn't. Pretty early on, we talked about the tragedy of that. We had a conversation about Episode 1 where, like, 'Should there be a picture of the two of them in their home?' 'No, just the shoes.' That's the only sense you see, his shoes next to her shoes. Sometimes those are my favorite moments in storytelling, those gaps where we trust you as a viewer to fill in that relationship. You can picture them smoking weed together and doing all this stuff, but we felt like for this story, we didn't need to show.
I haven't found the words to describe this feeling. It's so surreal. I can't even tell you why I get so emotional when I'm on these sets. The first time I walked on set, I was in Joel's house with Hallie, my co-writer on the game and was the other co-writer on the show on this episode as well. We're like, look at this dining room! This is where in the game, Maria talks to Ellie and Dina, and it looks exactly the same. Every set felt like that.
This [museum] set in particular, the day we're shooting this, I had two visitors from Naughty Dog, Arne Meyer, who is our heads of communication, and Alison Mori, who is my partner in running the studio. They got to see a part that we end up cutting from the episode, more in the dinosaur museum. I'm like, come with me, and we walk through this dark hallway with stars, and we got to the space capsule, and I'm like, 'Look at this.' I'm emotional, but I've been seeing it as it's been built. I look at them, and they both have tears in their eyes. This thing that we worked so hard to perfect in digital forms with pixels on a flat screen, now you could stand in it, you could go into it, you could touch it. All the buttons are working. The seats are real. They creak when you sit in them. It felt like we went into the game. It's this really wonderful feeling to know that this incredible crew that I worked with treated the source material with such reverence. It literally moved us to tears.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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