SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 2 of HBO’s ‘The Last of Us,” now streaming on Max.
Director Mark Mylod was brought to tears filming the heart-breaking final moments of Sunday night’s episode of “The Last of Us.”
Gamers who have played “The Last of Us Part II” have long known Joel’s (Pedro Pascal) fate, but that didn’t make watching his torture and death at the hands of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) any easier. As in the game, Abby bludgeons Joel to death with a golf club as Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is forced to watch helplessly. However, Mylod expands the moment by giving Dever’s Abby a bone-chilling monologue about her five-year quest for revenge after Joel killed her dad in the Season 1 finale’s hospital shootout. The episode also shows Ramsey’s Ellie weeping and embracing Joel’s dead body before she rides back to the Jackson settlement, which barely survived an attack from a clicker horde.
Of course, Mylod is no stranger to filming epic, pivotal episodes of television. He won an Emmy for helming the “Connor’s Wedding” episode of “Succession,” which shockingly killed off Brian Cox’s character Logan Roy, and the Emmy-nominated Season 3 finale “All the Bells Say.” “The Last of Us” co-creator Craig Mazin joked of Mylod, “When he shows up, it’s like the undertaker.” He also directed several major episodes of “Game of Thrones,” including Season 6’s “The Broken Man” which, coincidentally, introduced Ramsey’s mighty Lyanna Mormont in the actor’s first TV role ever.
“Kaitlyn and Bella had to make themselves so vulnerable over multiple days to find extraordinary mental and physical stamina — to take themselves to the edge so that nothing was left on the table, emotionally,” Mylod said. “There’s always one take that does it. We built up a number of takes with Bella of just me and her feeling that there was further she could go, and she was prepared to go further. Then there was one take where I just couldn’t talk afterwards with tears running down my face, and that’s the lovely moment as a director where you know that’s the one.”
Unlike the game, which hid Abby’s final blow to Joel’s body offscreen, Mylod didn’t shy away from the violence. He showed Abby sinking the broken end of the golf club into Joel’s neck, as Ellie screams uncontrollably for him to get up.
“The intention was very much initially on the page to not see it happen. The decision to change was because it felt coy. It felt like we were ducking out,” Mylod said. “So much of the game is about consequences and facing the music. The idea of them blinking and hiding from that felt coy and almost dishonest and disingenuous. That’s why we changed it and did show it.”
There are a few more slight changes to Joel’s death scene, including swapping Tommy (Gabriel Luna) with Dina (Isabela Merced) in the ski lodge. Instead of bringing a larger crew, Abby has only Manny (Danny Ramirez), Owen (Spencer Lord), Mel (Ariela Barer) and Nora (Tati Gabrielle) with her. Also, after Abby kills Joel in the game, Manny walks over and spits on his body, calling him a “pendejo.” On TV, the spit take was left on the cutting room floor.
“It was a choice,” Mylod said. “In some of the takes, Danny did do the spitting move. There was a spit version also. It just didn’t feel right in the edit, or it wasn’t the best take for the rest of the moment to support Danny’s performance. It became what felt like the most powerful incarnation of that moment, rather than wanting the spit because it matched the game. A lovely thing about working with Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin is that there’s a huge respect and adoration of the game’s canon, but always in any given moment it’s what’s best for the emotional truth of that moment on camera.”
In another departure from the game, Mylod showed the immediate aftermath of Joel’s death, where Ellie gives him one final hug before bringing his body back to Jackson with Dina and Jesse (Young Mazino). One of the many haunting images from the episode is an overhead shot of Ellie embracing Joel on the ground as the broken halves of the golf club are visible a few feet away.
“The shot was just about desolation, absolute finality and loss,” Mylod said. “We specifically shot the scene in a very unflashy way. It was very much about the humanity, vulnerability, anger, all the emotional elements of the character. It had to be honest and observational and not standing too far back, so there was almost a voyeurism of being uncomfortably close to to the action and emotion, to the ferocity of Abby, to the extraordinary pain, both physical in Joel’s and emotional in Ellie’s. That top shot was about breaking out of that camera grammar to a place that was final, judgmental and hopefully heartbreaking to see the desperate need for that final physical contact.”
The ending shot of Ellie, Dina and Jesse riding back to Jackson, smoking and ravaged on the horizon, while dragging Joel’s wrapped-up body through the snow was another powerful one. Ashley Johnson (who starred as Ellie in the game and cameoed as her mom in Season 1) sang a haunting rendition of “Through the Valley” before the end-credits rolled in stunned silence.
“We played with this reveal of the ignominy of this body being towed back through the snow, and the idea of finding this beautiful tragedy timed with the music track,” Mylod said. “It started with the horses right into the foreground, finding the pain and heartbreak as we get into that closer shot of Ellie across the horse and then through her looking back. We still don’t know quite what she’s looking, so that motivated the camera to come back and reveal Jackson in its smoking ruins beyond. Then to jib down and find that sad ignominy of his body in the sack with the bloodstain. It just felt heartbreaking and without hope, but also beautiful in terms of trying to take the audience where Ellie is.”
Mylod shot the Jackson clicker battle an hour north of Vancouver, where the weather would be 60 degrees and rainy when the cast had to pretend it was bitterly cold and snowing. The real blizzard conditions were in the Fortress Mountains in Alberta’s Rockies, where they’d shoot in high altitudes of several thousand feet.
“There were days up there when it was just frigid, and we really needed those warming tents and every bit of clothing we could get. A director can always run off and get to some heat, but I felt bad for the stunt team who were repeatedly being buried in snow, having to emerge then keep themselves warm by running through the snow at a full sprint. Even though it was freezing cold, it could have been a lot worse. If the wind had come up past a certain level, we’d almost literally been blown off the mountain.”
As for the Jackson battle, which featured a frenzied horde of infected clickers, one giant bloater and a sputtering flamethrower, it required months of planning and a giant crew.
“It was certainly in the hundreds, particularly with all the special effects creating the environment, wind and blood and the stunt and movement teams. We’d already done this boot camp with all the infected stunt people to get that very specific way of moving. It was literally months of sitting in the boardroom and walking through it,” Mylod said. “We were all obsessed with achieving this very ambitious sequence in a relatively short period of time in the middle of the rest of the team prepping, planning and shooting the other six episodes also. If we’ve done our job and the prep right — the shooting doesn’t take care of itself — but then you can focus on performance and getting an emotional connection to the moment because the logistics have all been prepped.”
