The Last of Usco-creator Craig Mazin questions the inherent positivity of love.
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Spoilers follow for the season finale ofThe Last of Us, Look for the Light.
Craig Mazin will carryThe Last of Uswith him forever literally.
By all measures, they succeeded:positive critical reviews,record-breaking viewership numbersfor HBO,a second-season renewal.
Druckmann hasnt gotten his tattoo yet.
Shes bit as she gives birth to her daughter and mercy-killed by Marlene, who takes Ellie to raise.
Hes ready to talk, too.
Youve said you write to endings.
How did you write to the Joel ending?I had the gift of the source material.
Its violence that Joel does to Ellie because Ellies attempting to do it to Joel.
Thats watching somebody go from anti-theme to theme.
All of the story is about injury.
Theyve been injured similarly and theyre gonna continue to be injured.
This is the culmination.
Good stories are not built on themes like brotherhood or anger; those are just words.
Good stories are built on arguments:Its worth killing everyone to save the person you love.
We can debate that.
We intentionally put in Ellie asking specifically about Marlene.
How was Ellie born?
The worlds worst Pieta of mother and child.
Marlene becomes her mother of a kind.
We made a joke about it What are you, my fucking mom or something?
And Joel kills her in cold blood.
I go back and forth on the ending in the context of that quote.
Is it pessimistic or optimistic to save one life instead of theoretically saving countless others?
Neither our will nor our optimism is rational.
We just think they are.
Ellie says to David, Youre an animal, and he says, Well, we all are.
Thats sort of the point.
Were just really smart monkeys.
We behave in a way that is subrational.
We are inventing rationality to account for irrationality.
I straddle the line.
We cut a line out ofepisode fiveand I regret it.
I wish I could put it back in.
It was when Henry says to Joel, I did a bad-guy thing.
And then I probably would.
If Joel walked away without regrets, if Joel walked away without shame, that would be different.
Then I would say hes a monster.
But you dont lie unless you know youve done something wrong.
Youve previously used the term hero to describe Joel and Ellie.
Protagonist would be just as good of a word.
The protagonist has goals, and the protagonist ultimately does or doesnt achieve them.
Thats always been a discussion aroundThe Last of Us.
Its something that captivated me when I played the game for the first time.
The story didnt let me walk away clean.
Yes, Joel is the hero, but we have to interrogate how we feel about our heroes.
Heroes of the kind that we see in comic books, thats bullshit.
Theres no such thing.
I rewatched your previous TV project, the miniseriesChernobyl, and itscentral ideais What is the cost of lies?
Its so powerful; we give ourselves over to it.
We have been waiting for this moment for so long.
For Joel, the answer is Yes, I do.
That is profound, and the ambiguity of the positivity of love is what we should be taking forward.
What Joel has done in the name of love is a selfish act but an understandable one.
It is setting a chain of events in motion that will not be undone.
That love manifests as fear, hatred, xenophobia, racism, religious superiority.
We are invested in Joel.
We dont want him to lose the person he loves.
What about all the people he kills?
What if we were telling their story?
Its also about the power of narrative, which Im obsessed with.
This is very relevant toChernobyl: We are constantly being manipulated by the power of narrative.
What is the story were telling, and how does it make us feel?
Who gets to tell the story?
Are we willing to look on the other side?
What does it mean for us as humans?
Theres no easy answer.
Shes not wrong there are kids dying all the time.
How many of the people around her lost kids or siblings?
Theyre not doing these things.
Meanwhile, the person listening to that conversation is Joel.
We cut to him as shes getting to the point.
Whats relevant to him is, Do you think one person is worth everything?
And the answer is no, unless its me and my person, and then the answer is yes.
As we get older, theres also a beauty to us.
One of the things director Johan Renck and I would talk about onChernobylis the idea of beautiful ugly.
Fungus is the thing thatultimately devours us all, along with bacteria.
They return us to the Earth.
Its weird that we struggle against it.
We ought to be looking at it with open eyes.
How did you decide which scenes need more from a TV perspective?
But theres a difference between Joel and Tess, and it starts to emerge after Ellie wakes up.
The idea was that maternalism maintains hope because mothers make humans.
When I say make, I mean carry them and give birth to them; men dont.
Im using the cisgender heteronormative terms, I apologize.
My point is, there is this spark of hope.
Tesss maternalism is awoken, and she actually gets angry at Joel for not buying in.
That mother thing kicks in.
It isnt,Im gonna kill everybody to keep this kid alive.
Whats nice is, I didnt say any of that to Anna Torv.
Youve said, Im not interested in the zombies.
The back half of this season, past the Kansas City outbreak, is Relatively zombie-free.
Was anyone saying, Maybe we should have more Infected?No.
Neil and I worked very hand in hand.
Well, were nothing but cutscenes.
What well never do is the scene where its like, Ah, fuck!
Bunch of Infected, lets just kill them.
It will always be worse than that.
Season one was a 200-day shoot.
I was there every day.
I fell apart a few times.
I dont fall apart for long its usually an evening but I got used to drowning.
There is anindustrywide crisis in visual effectsthat people arent talking about, andthey need to.
The explosion of content times the amount of effects inside all of the content has created an impossible situation.
Theres more work than there are visual-effects artists.
The artists out there are working insane amounts of time.
We have to figure out how to take care of everybody.
The system cant keep going like this.
Its gonna break.
When I talk to people who have played the game, everyone mentions the giraffe scene.
Its also not particularly interactive in the game youre watching it.
Ellie lost her innocence; she has killed not to save somebody but rather out of this horrible rage.
Shes not who she was anymore.
When she sees the giraffe, its a moment where Joel can help her reconnect with something beautiful.
Its where she starts to be okay.
What I liked is how we built on it.
Thats what comes back here: I was the guy who shot and missed.
What happens if the only way to heal somebody is to hurt someone else?
People are gonna have interesting discussions after the episode concludes.
People may be angry at the show, may be angry at Joel.
They may be angry at people who are angry at Joel.
To me, the giraffes were this shows version of the green-inchwormscenefrom theChernobylfinale.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
