Yahoo News ‘The Last of Us’ Director Peter Hoar And Cinematographer Eben Bolter On Episode 3 With Nick Offerman And Murray Bartlett: “It Was Epic And Intimate”
While the onscreen travails of Joel and Ellie take center stage in The Last of Us, as they did in the videogame, for Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, the translation to television afforded an opportunity to delve deeper into the larger struggle of survivors of the pandemic. The show’s third episode “Long, Long Time” expands the game’s story of survivalist Bill (Nick Offerman), who turns his hometown into an infected-proof compound, and who seems content to survive on his own. That is, until Frank (Murray Bartlett) gets stuck in one of Bill’s traps, and the pair fall delicately, and movingly, in love with one another.
While Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsay charged headlong into the series without having played the videogame, for the core team behind “Long, Long Time,” director Peter Hoar and cinematographer Eben Bolter, a chance to work on an adaptation of one of their favorite games was unpassable. Bolter, who is credited on three episodes of the season and did additional photography on others, was excited to help execute the explosive infected attack on a cul-de-sac in the show’s fifth episode “Endure and Survive”, which felt like a real opportunity to bring the videogame to life. But he wasn’t expecting to be so struck by the script for “Long, Long Time.”
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“The first episodes establish the season, but reading episode 3, it was this sense of, ‘Oh my God, these people are real. Episode 3 always had this asterisk next to it as a special episode, because it strays from the story we’re following, and we knew it would have the potential to run a little longer. This wasn’t just another episode of television — which I think, by the way, all the directors and crew would probably say about their own episodes. It felt like we were prepping a movie, and getting to make our movie the best it could possibly be.”
“Craig had said, ‘Whenever I see a moment, I’m going to make more of it,’” notes director Peter Hoar. “He had that feeling most strongly with Bill and Frank, that he wanted to know more about these two characters. So, the episode felt like it was giving you everything you wanted, and then more, not less.”
The production built Bill and Frank’s town from scratch, erecting several buildings around a main street intersection and fully furnishing the inside of Bill’s house. The schedule placed the episode in the moment summer turned into fall, offering Bolter and Hoar opportunities to bathe the sets in natural light. “We leaned into the natural light,” says Hoar, “obviously with many thousands of silks and flags because of Eben’s genius. It was two actors in a strawberry patch, falling into them and eating them. It couldn’t have been simpler, and yet it was huge. It was epic and intimate, all at the same time.”
The scene in the strawberry patch was designed around the weather, says Bolter. “We knew this was a special moment, and so we plotted where the strawberries should be based on the sun’s position in the sky. We knew, if it were a sunny day, we’d get this beautiful, low sun. And we got lucky.”
Bolter says working on The Last of Us involved ceding control to the environment wherever possible. “You find yourself doing a lot to make it look like you’ve done nothing,” he explains. “There are times when, as visual storytellers, you have to bring a lot to the party. When the raiders attack the town, you’re bringing in rain, and fire, and that’s obviously a huge technical exercise, but there were times when you knew you had to back right off. When Bill and Frank are sitting at the piano, you cross-shoot it, and stay out of the actors’ way.”
Hoar remembers that particular moment. “You’re almost disappointed from a visual standpoint, because it would have looked beautiful if we’d shot it from the other angle, but there was no choice other than to do it the way we did. We shot with three cameras, as live, and they didn’t do it too many times. That was important to me, because I felt like we opened the floodgates for them to do it, and then moved on.”
Hoar applied that same delicacy to each of the episode’s most heartrending moments, trusting in Offerman and Bartlett to deliver. “Murray was already cast when I came aboard, but when Nick’s name came up for Bill, I thought it was a bit of risk. Of course, we knew he had the survivalist edge for Bill, no question. But when we met him, I was struck by how gentle he is, and how little ego there was. He saw immediately that he had this brilliant script, and he didn’t want to f*ck it up.”
Bartlett, an openly gay actor who has played gay characters on screen, took Offerman under his wing and helped him through the most intimate scenes, Hoar says. “In a very meta way, he just helped that performance out, I think. They are both brilliant, but I know that for Nick and Murray, the perfection was putting the two of them together.”
For Hoar and Bolter, who have attended many episode screenings on cinema screens, the reaction from the audience as Bill and Frank’s story plays out has meant a lot. “The other thing I got really into was reaction videos on YouTube,” laughs Bolter. “So often on set, we’re talking about, how do we get this information that’s on the page to translate to the screen? So, it’s interesting to watch people react to it with no filter. They’re not thinking about the fact that the filmmakers are going to be watching them. They’re just sitting down and watching it. You see people read those visual cues in real time, and that’s been incredibly satisfying and interesting. I keep sending them to Peter all the time. ‘Here’s another one! Watch this!”’
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