{"id":38630,"date":"2025-04-21T15:18:10","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T15:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/38630\/"},"modified":"2025-04-21T15:18:10","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T15:18:10","slug":"the-last-of-us-director-on-filming-joels-death-scene-and-crying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/38630\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last of Us Director on Filming Joel’s Death Scene and Crying"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSPOILER ALERT: <\/strong>This article contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 2 of HBO\u2019s \u2018The Last of Us<\/a>,\u201d now streaming on Max.<\/p>\n

\n\tDirector Mark Mylod<\/a> was brought to tears filming the heart-breaking final moments of Sunday night\u2019s episode of \u201cThe Last of Us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tGamers who have played \u201cThe Last of Us Part II\u201d have long known Joel\u2019s (Pedro Pascal) fate, but that didn\u2019t 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\u2019s Abby a bone-chilling monologue about her five-year quest for revenge after Joel killed her dad in the Season 1 finale\u2019s hospital shootout. The episode also shows Ramsey\u2019s Ellie weeping and embracing Joel\u2019s dead body before she rides back to the Jackson settlement, which barely survived an attack from a clicker horde.<\/p>\n

\n\tOf course, Mylod is no stranger to filming epic, pivotal episodes of television. He won an Emmy for helming the \u201cConnor\u2019s Wedding\u201d episode of \u201cSuccession,\u201d which shockingly killed off Brian Cox\u2019s character Logan Roy, and the Emmy-nominated Season 3 finale \u201cAll the Bells Say.\u201d \u201cThe Last of Us\u201d co-creator Craig Mazin joked of Mylod, \u201cWhen he shows up, it\u2019s like the undertaker.\u201d He also directed several major episodes of \u201cGame of Thrones,\u201d including Season 6\u2019s \u201cThe Broken Man\u201d which, coincidentally, introduced Ramsey\u2019s mighty Lyanna Mormont in the actor\u2019s first TV role ever.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cKaitlyn and Bella had to make themselves so vulnerable over multiple days to find extraordinary mental and physical stamina \u2014 to take themselves to the edge so that nothing was left on the table, emotionally,\u201d Mylod said. \u201cThere\u2019s 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\u2019t talk afterwards with tears running down my face, and that\u2019s the lovely moment as a director where you know that\u2019s the one.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tUnlike the game, which hid Abby\u2019s final blow to Joel\u2019s body offscreen, Mylod didn\u2019t shy away from the violence. He showed Abby sinking the broken end of the golf club into Joel\u2019s neck, as Ellie screams uncontrollably for him to get up.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe 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,\u201d Mylod said. \u201cSo 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\u2019s why we changed it and did show it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are a few more slight changes to Joel\u2019s 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 \u201cpendejo.\u201d On TV, the spit take was left on the cutting room floor.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was a choice,\u201d Mylod said. \u201cIn some of the takes, Danny did do the spitting move. There was a spit version also. It just didn\u2019t feel right in the edit, or it wasn\u2019t the best take for the rest of the moment to support Danny\u2019s 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\u2019s a huge respect and adoration of the game\u2019s canon, but always in any given moment it\u2019s what\u2019s best for the emotional truth of that moment on camera.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tIn another departure from the game, Mylod showed the immediate aftermath of Joel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe shot was just about desolation, absolute finality and loss,\u201d Mylod said. \u201cWe 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\u2019s and emotional in Ellie\u2019s. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe ending shot of Ellie, Dina and Jesse riding back to Jackson, smoking and ravaged on the horizon, while dragging Joel\u2019s 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<\/a>) sang a haunting rendition of \u201cThrough the Valley\u201d before the end-credits rolled in stunned silence.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe 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,\u201d Mylod said. \u201cIt 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\u2019t know quite what she\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tMylod 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\u2019s Rockies, where they\u2019d shoot in high altitudes of several thousand feet. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere 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\u2019d almost literally been blown off the mountain.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was certainly in the hundreds, particularly with all the special effects creating the environment, wind and blood and the stunt and movement teams. We\u2019d 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,\u201d Mylod said. \u201cWe 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\u2019ve done our job and the prep right \u2014 the shooting doesn\u2019t take care of itself \u2014 but then you can focus on performance and getting an emotional connection to the moment because the logistics have all been prepped.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 2 of HBO\u2019s \u2018The Last of Us,\u201d now…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38631,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[77,22045,989,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-38630","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-mark-mylod","10":"tag-the-last-of-us","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114376625645411330","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}