Neil Druckmann, the creative force behind the Last of Us video games, gets why viewers of the TV show would expect any episode he directs to be packed with action. He sort of expected that too. But the episode of the series he just helmed is relatively light on brutality—unless you count heavy-duty emotional violence.
“It felt like a very important and intimate episode,” Druckmann tells Vanity Fair in an interview about episode six, “The Price.” ”Unlike last season, when I directed a very action-heavy episode, I really liked the idea that it has no action. It’s all drama.”
There isn’t much in the way of characters running from or destroying hordes of infected here, as there has been in other chapters from The Last of Us. There aren’t battles between warring factions of survivors fighting for dominance in the wasteland of what used to be America, either. But there is still significant tension, conflict, and revelation in Druckmann’s script, which he cowrote with fellow showrunner Craig Mazin and Halley Gross, a Westworld veteran who worked with him to craft the 2020 game The Last of Us Part II.
“The Price” also brings back Pedro Pascal’s Joel—who died in episode two of this season—by way of flashbacks focused on him and Bella Ramsey’s Ellie. The story culminates with Joel confessing to Ellie that he killed the hospital staff who were trying to extract a cure from her. She reacts with grief—not only because he lied to her for so long about that rescue, but also because she would rather have given her life for something so meaningful. “We’re getting deep into Ellie and Joel’s relationship,” Druckmann says. “The stuff they’re talking about on that porch should resonate, going backwards and forwards with everything that the story has left to tell.”
Vanity Fair: Ellie and Joel lay all their secrets out in episode six. What made this one you wanted to direct yourself?
Neil Druckmann: Sometimes those dramatic sequences are more engaging than any action. I want people to lean forward and really be invested: How is this argument going to turn out? Ultimately, this show is about these relationships. We have really cool infected, and we have cool set pieces, but those sequences can only work if you care about the outcome for the people involved. Otherwise, you’re not going to be emotionally moved by it.
The opening sequence shows Joel as a teenager with his brother, and we meet his cop father. His dad is played by Better Call Saul’s Tony Dalton, who can be so intimidating.
He is the scariest charming person onscreen. He does so much with so little, with just the intensity in his eyes. And then how that intensity turns to pain as he’s recalling what he had to experience with his father, and how he’s trying to do a little bit better. It was important that you believe him.
I kept expecting their conversation to explode into violence.
In the writing process, we had versions of the scene that you are describing. It ultimately felt more interesting for this dad to find some camaraderie with his son. It’s like, “This time the wrong thing that you did was actually the correct thing. Because you did violence to protect your tribe, your family, your brother. And that’s what I have done. Sometimes I’ve even hit you to protect you. So maybe now you can understand who I am.” And then he admits he doesn’t know if even that’s the correct thing. All he knows is that he didn’t beat them as badly as his dad did, so he knows he’s done a little bit better. And he’s hoping that when his son grows up, Joel would do a little bit better than him.
Joel says something similar to Ellie in the final scene on the porch. We know from the previous episode that Dina (Isabela Merced) is pregnant, and Ellie is going to help her care for the child. Joel didn’t know that would happen, but his words feel very prophetic now.
Again, he’s not sure he has done the right thing or he has done better. He’s just hoping.
“I made these choices. If I could go back in time, if I’m placed in that same scenario, I would make those choices again. And I don’t know if they’re right. And maybe I didn’t handle it the best way, but maybe you will do an even better job than me.” That’s a feeling I have now as a parent. My parents made certain mistakes when they raised me. That was some of the inspiration for the writing of this game and the show. In trying to course-correct their mistakes, I have made different mistakes. I just hope my kids will do even better than me.
This is a prevailing theme throughout the second game and in this second season of the show, isn’t it? The notion that sometimes you must use violence to defend yourself or to protect yourself, but sometimes you have to be willing to let go, or else it’s eye for an eye forever.
You’re touching on the complexity of how we’re all the same species, and then we subdivide ourselves into these groups. Then within these groups, we subdivide ourselves even further. This season the atrocities become more intense and more violent. And we keep forgetting that we’re all part of this very large tribe called humanity.
But also, Ellie has been advocating that they have to fight back or risk being overwhelmed.
Sometimes, in the course of history, there are moments we could look back on and say, “In those instances, violence was the correct path.” It’s not like protecting your city is always wrong, but sometimes it is. And sometimes it’s even hard to discern whether it was right or wrong. We wanted to explore the complexity of all of that.
It seems like you’re interested in that notion that over time we should begin to forgive. Vendetta after vendetta is the other alternative.
Those are the two choices that you have. Or I guess there’s three, right? You keep fighting forever until you completely defeat one side. Then it could end if you completely eliminate the other side and commit genocide. You could choose to find peace. Or you could just say, “Okay, we’ll just live with these skirmishes forever.”
You were born in Israel, and I know this is probably a very sensitive subject because of the war that’s raging over there right now—but does this have more resonance for you now, given October 7 and the ongoing clash between Israel and the Palestinians? There is so much division in the United States, and you have Russia versus Ukraine—people who are neighbors are warring with each other all around the world, to one degree or another. Do these themes in The Last of Us feel different now, compared to when you first conceived them for part two of the game in 2020?
I think you’re right in that we look for reasons to be really upset at other tribes. But at the same time, as humans, we’ve always dealt with this. And I suspect we always will. This idea of tribalism and conflict, I don’t see that disappearing. I would love for us to find some utopia where we could all live together, but it seems to just be a thing that just keeps repeating itself. I hope that each generation, we can imbue them with an openness to let people in. But the other thing we explore is sometimes that openness leaves you in a weak state. And that’s where it’s like there’s no clean answers. I feel like our job as artists is just to explore the complexity of it.
That brings us back to the personal—a parent figure and a child. Each hoping the other has a safer, more peaceful life.
Exactly. Going back to the game, I was intrigued with this idea of unconditional love a parent feels for their child. I remember, the moment I held my daughter in my hands, I just knew: “I would do whatever it takes to protect you. Whatever it takes.” And I wanted to just explore that here.
Is there a dark side to that?
That is a wonderful thing. And I could see the biological advantage that it gets you. But it could be a horrific thing when you say: “at any cost.” And often we do. Sometimes it’s not even about our kid—it’s about our country, or it’s about our political party, or it’s about whatever you want to come up with, whatever tribes you belong to.
This episode suggests that restraint can actually be a protective measure. Not fighting back, not extracting revenge, could be a smarter and more beneficial tactic than venturing out to take that revenge.
You’re right. And you could say that Ellie misinterprets what Joel says. She thinks she’s as badass as he is, and she could torture someone and just move on. And she can’t. But she also misunderstands that he would’ve not wanted her to go. He would’ve wanted her to stay safe.
And yet she laments that she could have died for the cure, especially after so many other survivors she cared about gave their own lives for hers.
In her mind, that would’ve all been okay if at the end something better than their deaths came out of it. If we could have saved more people than people have died, that would’ve been okay. And he took that choice away from her. She felt, in doing so, he’s kind of damned her to this plain life in Jackson. She felt like those deaths will always be on her shoulders.
They never really reconcile from the conversation we see in episode six. He was killed before they could make it better.
She says, “I don’t know if I could ever forgive you for that.” But she loves him so much. The next thing she says is, “But I would like to try.” And we get this notion of like, Oh man, if they just had a few more moments together, they could have gotten past this. But then it’s taken from them by this other tribe, by this other person [Kaitlyn Dever’s vengeance-seeking Abby, who murdered Joel for killing her doctor father in the hospital massacre]. Ellie comes from this culture of honor. She must make them pay.
I think that applies to two other warring groups we’ve seen this season: the religious order formally known as Seraphites (a.k.a. the Scars) and the Washington Liberation Front (WLF, nicknamed the Wolves).
It applies to a lot of people. It applies when someone cuts us off on the road and we act irrationally at that moment. All of a sudden, you’re like, Wait, I wasn’t myself. You lost yourself. You’re in some kind of spell or something. And what I realized when I was working on this story is that we all have this within us, and it wouldn’t take much to tip us into that state of mind.
Has that ever happened for you?
For me it happened when I watched certain events on TV and I just felt such rage. I’m like, I don’t even know the people that are having these atrocities committed on them, and I’m feeling such anger and such vitriol. Then I was thinking, But what if it was someone that was the closest to me? What if that happens to the person I love the most? What kind of rage would I feel then? And that’s where the whole story fell into place for me. That’s where we had to make certain decisions that I know some people are upset about, but that is by design. That is the purpose of it.
What part are people upset about?
Killing off Pedro Pascal, the most beloved person in Hollywood. [Laughs] I’m sure not everybody’s happy about that. You could go on TikTok and you can see a bunch of people are unhappy about it, but you can’t tell the story without it.
Episode six also shows us what happened to Eugene, a fellow survivor whom we’ve heard Joel killed, although we’ve never met him. Joe Pantoliano brings him to life. Tell me about creating that scene.
I think there’s a certain mystery. You’re just intrigued about who this guy is and what’s happening. You know Joel has killed him. So there’s a dramatic irony of watching that scene, in that you have more information than the characters. Then when you see him get bitten, you’re like, Oh, this is the moment. It’s less about, Is Eugene going to survive? And it’s more like, How will this play out?
Eugene begs Joel to take him back to the survivor compound because he has an important message for his wife, Gail (played by Catherine O’Hara), before the infection turns him into a monster. Later, he confesses he has nothing to tell her—he just wants to see her one more time. What was behind that lie?
I think he was honest: He’s scared. It’s not about any words that he would have to give to her. He needed her to comfort him in this moment where he’s about to die, and he doesn’t know how to deal with it. Joey made this beautiful acting choice where he decided to regress to being a child. And if you watch his performance again, you’ll see he’s acting like a child that is just terrified.
Did that scene evolve much in the writing?
We spent a really long time in that Eugene sequence and had so many different versions of it. There were versions with a lot of action. And ultimately, when we landed on this idea that Joel’s going to lie about killing him, and that will be the proof that Ellie needed, everything just fell into place, and we got this beautiful, dramatic reveal that was different from the game.
What were other variations on this sequence you considered?
Actually, when we first wrote that scene, because it’s Joey Pants, we had more humor in it. And [while shooting] I’m like, “These lines just don’t work.” The scene became bigger than that. And his acting choices affected the writing of that scene.
It becomes much more tragic as it is now. Joel says he will lead Eugene home before he changes, but then…he doesn’t.
Joel does his best to give Eugene as beautiful of a death as he can. Under the constraints of, “I will never take you back to Jackson because that’s too dangerous.” But in this moment, Joel also becomes vulnerable and says, “If you love someone, you could always see their face.” My interpretation of that is Joel is thinking about his lost daughter. And he shares that with Eugene.
Eugene knows he is about to be killed, and he tries to follow Joel’s suggestion.
Whether Eugene is telling the truth in that moment or not when he says, “I see her…” [Shrugs] You could say he sees her—or he’s given Joel an out, to say, “It’s okay for you to shoot me now.” I don’t know which one it is, actually.
I don’t know either.
I never asked Joey because I didn’t want to know.
This theme we’re discussing about being unable to forgive, but needing to try—isn’t it being practiced by O’Hara’s character? She can’t forgive Joel for killing her Eugene, even though he was going to die anyway. But she’s trying.
That’s right. That is the big question of, are there certain acts that are unforgivable? It’s not a coincidence that Unforgiven was a big inspiration when I was working on this game. With enough willpower, with enough mindfulness, is everything forgivable? If you were to ask a bunch of people, you’d get every answer under the sun. I don’t know if you’ve played the game, but to this day, five years later, people still are arguing about that ending and whether it was correct or not.
You’re talking about the first game or the second game?
Well, kind of both. But in this particular instance, I’m talking about the second game, because it deals with this exact question. And that’s ultimately where the show goes.
Does it bother you to have people stirred up in that debate?
I love that. As an artist, you can’t ask for anything more than people really engaging with your art and wrestling with it. And different groups of audiences come to different conclusions and will then argue about it and argue the philosophy behind it. I’m like, Yes, that is the point of this.
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