Israeli creator of ‘The Last of Us’ finds inspiration for sequel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Neil Druckmann, creator of the hit game and its successful HBO adaption, grew up in an Israeli settlement before moving to the U.S.
Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey in ‘The Last of Us.’; Neil Druckmann at the show’s premiere. Photo by HBO/Getty
By Itamar Katzir April 19, 2023
This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox.
Just before I start recording the Zoom conversation with Neil Druckmann, who is at his office in California, he checks that I am not using Zoom to film the interview. When I tell him it’s only so I can transcribe the conversation, he responds with “cool,” and then a second later adds, “sababa.”
It’s an excellent opportunity for me to ask if he prefers to conduct the interview in Hebrew. “We can try, but my Hebrew isn’t that good, and I would have to jump between Hebrew and English.” I was hoping he would speak to me in Hebrew. After all, when will I have another opportunity to interview an American Israeli who is behind one of the most talked-about television shows of the past several years?
I’m referring to “The Last of Us,” now one of HBO’s flagship series, whose first season recently concluded, and an Israeli with a life story that begins in Tel Aviv, passes through the tiny settlement of Beit Aryeh, and then jumps to Florida before landing in California.
The series, for those who missed it, follows Joel (Pedro Pascal, “The Mandalorian”) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey, “Game of Thrones”) – a 56-year-old man and a 14-year-old girl – who set out on a journey across the United States in a post-apocalyptic world in which humanity has succumbed to a fungus that turns people into creatures similar to zombies. It is based directly, and at times precisely on a video game by the same name, which was created by Druckmann a decade ago at the gaming developer Naughty Dog, and became an immediate, and trailblazing, classic.
While the game takes place in a monstrous world, at its center is the relationship between the two protagonists, and a diverse arsenal of unexpected supporting characters. Most of all, it raised moral and philosophical questions about human nature, love and complex human relationships, of the sort that Emmy Award-winning series and Cannes Film Festival films might envy.
Druckmann, 44, who created the concept, the story, and the direction of the game – as well as the series, together with the screenwriter Craig Mazin (“Chernobyl”), tried to prepare himself for success, but still found he wasn’t totally ready.
“It’s a wonderful feeling, and it’s a strange feeling, and sometimes it’s an anxiety-inducing,” he says, describing how he felt throughout the season. “Whenever we ship a game … you work on something for so long and you pour so much of yourself into it, that there’s this high, this dopamine hit when it hits the market , and people are talking about it – and with our games, they’re arguing about it and discussing the character and story – and it can be really exhilarating.
“But then there’s like this crash that happens afterward, and the best thing I can compare it to is like a postpartum [depression] of like, well, what do I do with my life now? You’ve decided so many hours of the day into this thing, then you kind of have to find yourself again.
“With the show, it was going through many of that week to week, there’s high and there’s crash, there’s high and there’s crash, there’s high and there’s crash. So now I feel like I’m finally normalizing again, now I could see the show in the rearview mirror and really focus on what’s next. There’s still stuff like interviews and things that we’ll talk about the season, but now it’s really focused on the next games we got coming out on Naughty Dog, and the next season of the show.”
Avoiding the curse
Naughty Dog, where Druckmann has been CEO since 2020, is a video game company founded by two other Jews, Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin, friends who met at Hebrew school in Virginia. The company’s breakout game was “Crash Bandicoot” (a classic), which came out for PlayStation in 1996. The first game that Druckmann participated in writing, before he was even 30, was “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune,” which came out in 2007 and earned critical praise, including comparisons to Hollywood films in terms of production quality. In 2009, Druckmann began developing a game that he wrote himself, which would subsequently be given the name “The Last of Us.”
As far as he’s concerned, at that point, the possibility of the game becoming a hit and being adapted into a series was not likely at all. “Not at all,” he says. “In fact, quite the opposite. While making the game I was so insecure about it, I kept thinking to myself, ‘oh, I love it, and I’ve somehow made my dream game, but I don’t know if it’ll find its audience.’
“I didn’t feel like it had the mass appeal of something like ‘Uncharted,’ so I was sure that this will be a ‘one and done’ for me and they’ll never let me direct another game, which in a weird way kind of helped me, because then I was uncompromising. I just wanted it to be the best game for me first, everybody else afterwards.
“On paper, it doesn’t have as much spectacle as something like ‘Uncharted,’ Druckmann says. “ If you think about what you do in ‘Uncharted,’ you’re like running along a moving train, shooting people, swinging on ropes. ‘The Last of Us’ was much smaller, more intimate, the pacing is more measured. The writing is more nuanced, [there’s] a lot more subtextual stuff and thematic things going on.
“We tried to make something more literary – without sounding too highfalutin – and I didn’t know if people will read into it, or be invested enough in it to look for those things that you have to unearth. So for those reasons, I thought we just made a really expensive art house game.”
All of these concerns, it turned out, were unwarranted. “The Last of Us” – which began as a student project and went through an attempt to translate it into a graphic novel before being made a game – became an immediate blockbuster hit, captivated the hearts of its audience and made more and more people understand that the video game world is built around storytelling just as much as other types of media.
From practically the moment it was announced, the game piqued Hollywood’s curiosity, partly in the wake of the success of “Uncharted,” which was already in the process of being developed into a Hollywood film.
Druckmann says that early on, he and his partners turned down all of the offers so that they could focus on development of the film version of “Uncharted” and on work on the sequel game. At one point, once “The Last of Us” had already been launched, Druckmann’s team was offered to adapt the game into a film at Sony Pictures Entertainment, which offered Naughty Dog creative control, which Druckmann said had not been offered before. The problem was that it turned out to be impossible to compress the plot – a journey that – depending on the player, takes between 15 and 20 hours to complete into a two-hour film.
And then HBO came into the picture. Its offer to develop the game into a series seemed ideal. The network offered creative control and Druckmann’s involvement in every aspect of the series itself, the largest and highest-quality stage that U.S. television has to offer, as well as impressive lead actors Ramsey and Pascal, who went through the casting process and pre-production work via Zoom because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Nevertheless, the adaptation of a video game into a television series or film is always attended by an irrational but very logical fear – the fear of “the curse.” You could argue about whether the curse is real or not, and what the factors is that contribute to it, but it’s a fact that every time a film or a series based on a video game comes to market, there’s always a debate over whether it’s a successful adaptation, because the common wisdom is that it’s usually not.
In numerous cases, the reviews are brutal (such as with Netflix’s “The Witcher,” or even the aforementioned “Uncharted” film); in other cases, the game’s original fans are shocked by the changes made to their holy of holies (as happened with “Sonic the Hedgehog,” where the design of the characters was completely changed in the wake of reactions to the trailer).
It isn’t like there haven’t been successful adaptations, certainly in financial terms – “Tomb Raider” with Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft is one notable example – but have we ever seen a series so directly based on a video game become not only a hit, but also had this quality and critical acclaim?
It is therefore tempting to ask Druckmann if he is also afraid of the curse. “Yes, always afraid…” he acknowledges. “‘The Last of Us’ was as successful as it was, and people connected with it to such a level, that I was always afraid that whenever we went back to it, we would somehow tarnish it. So even when we did the ‘Left Behind’ extra chapter [an expansion for the original game that was also turned in an episode of the series], I was just like a ball of fear – of somehow this is where I’ll be found out, that it was a one-hit wonder and this will crash so hard, and this will be the end of my career.
“Every game, I have this kind of fear and thought. And then somehow ‘Left Behind’ found its audience, and spoke to a lot of people, and then the same thing happened with the game – even though the second game had all this controversy, it still found its audience and became incredibly successful.
“So with this movie and then later the TV show, there was always this fear that we’re going to do a poor adaptation and titwill tarnish the entire series,” Druckmann says. “Or, and this was always my hope, it could be so successful, and engage with people on such a level, that someone that will watch it and be blown away by it, or get so attached to the characters and their journey, and then be like, ‘Wait, that’s based on a video game?!’
And because so many people who aren’t in games have such a different perception of where games actually are, I love the idea that the show, in a way, like other successful adaptations, could be an ambassador for video games. And you’re seeing now the shift change in how people are talking about video games, in large part due to the show, but, you know, due to other adaptations like ‘Sonic’ and the Mario movie, and even novels like ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’[by Gabrielle Zevin] that speak about video game culture.
“There’s just this massive shift, that people that don’t even engage with games are immediately accepting it as art. There used to be this debate in the ‘90s and early 2000s, ‘Are video games art?’ I don’t think that debate is worth having anymore.
No simple solutions
In general, the next season of the series will be based on the sequel, “The Last of Us Part II.” When it was released, Druckmann told the Washington Post that one of the inspirations behind it was video of the mob killing of an Israeli in Ramallah in 2000, which he watched in real time.
And generally, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a sort of point of origin for the sequel game. Without getting into spoiler territory, the game revolves around two groups fighting over a piece of land, and forces players to shift between two characters. One character is on “the bad side,” and does something horrifying that hurts the chief protagonist; suddenly, we move over to play the “bad” character at an earlier period of time, learn to understand her motives, and so zigzag between the two sides throughout the entire game.
When I ask in which way the game was influenced by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Druckmann takes care to be precise. “There’s a slight nuance there that I think is important, based on the conversation that happened on the second game, and I never talked about it. But it was inspired by, not based on. That’s a really important nuance, because my inspiration is like my feeling towards a cycle of violence that I’ve experienced as a child growing up in Israel, growing up in the West Bank specifically, coming to the United States and observing it then from the outside, vs. being in it.
“Those feelings, and not my wrestling with those feelings, were the inspiration for the inciting incident. But I have to make this clear because again, it’s not based on, and it’s not an allegory of, and you can’t point to any group and say, ‘oh, that’s this group and that’s this group.
“This game deals a lot with tribalism. Sometimes tribalism on a very large scale, between two groups that are fighting for land – and again, that has obvious similarities to stuff that happens in the West Bank – but sometimes it’s tribalism within its own group, of like religious people vs. secular people, or people that have experienced violence and feel – and that’s another theme of the story – a sense of a group that feels righteous. And when you’re righteous, it’s very easy to diminish another group and say, ‘They are less than me, and I’m correct and they’re wrong,” and therefore that gives me permission to inflict violence upon them.’
“And I really wanted to kind of explore that, and what does it take to let go of that righteousness? Can you ever let go of that righteousness? And if you do, is there ever coming back from the horror you’ve committed in the name of that righteousness? Those are the kind of questions that I had in my mind when starting to embark on that journey.”
The conversation about the sequel was an excellent opportunity to discuss his personal biography, which turns out to have had a direct influence on the two games. Until the age of three, he grew up in Ramat Aviv with his parents Yehudit and Jerry Druckmann, but in 1981 his life took a sharp turn: the family decided to move to the small communal settlement of Beit Aryeh in the West Bank, which consisted of a settlement “nucleus” of 60 families, most of them secular, and most of them employees of Israel Aerospace Industries – including Druckmann’s father, a former flight test engineer.
An article that appeared in the newspaper Davar on the day the first settlers moved in, June 18, 1981, reports that then-prime minister Menachem Begin had arrived to dedicate the settlement, and that “riots” broke out when students from Bir Zeit University demonstrated on the road to Neve Tzuf, which ran close to the new settlement.
Seven years later, the family went through another no-less-extreme relocation – from the tiny settlement to giant Miami. Druckmann notes there were several places in which the reality in which he grew up was saturated with violence, while he escaped to the video games to which his older brother, Emanuel, had introduced him.
“Imagine being part of the initial 12 families in a town in the middle of nowhere, and then [you] move to Miami, Florida,, where I barely spoke the language,” he says. “It was such a culture shock from everything I knew. All that I knew was this little town, except when we go visit my grandma in Tel Aviv or my other grandma in Haifa. I was pretty oblivious to a lot of the politics, you know, because I’m a kid. It was a town where everybody knows everybody.
“I remember when I was in school, we used to have a giant [dog], half German shepherd, half Great Dane, so like a Giant shepherd, that would always get loose. And the principal would come into my class and be like, ‘Neil, you gotta go get your dog again,’and I’d leave the school and go looking for my dog and tie him up, and then return to class and just continue. That was my life before moving to the United States.”
Druckmann takes a long pause to consider his response. He doesn’t want to say anything that might be misconstrued.
“I think that when you’re young, especially when you’re much younger, it’s very easy – and this is the feeling I tried to tap into in the second game – when you feel like your group has been wronged, the concept of an eye for and eye, that the only way that I could make it right is to then inflict that same pain onto someone else, or someone close to that someone else – which is even worse pain, right? When your loved one is hurt [it] can be way more painful than when you’re hurt – and I think, to get out of that cycle, you sometimes have to accept some form of what you might perceive as injustice.
“And I think that requires a lot of empathy that we often lack, and I think that’s been a lot of my own evolution. It’s sometimes seeing a group that I might hate on a very kind of fundamental level, and still trying to walk in their shoes, and still trying to see the other side, and trying to better understand why they are acting this way, why are they feeling this way, and broadening the conversation, to instead of just black and white – one side is right, one side is wrong – it’s multivariable, it’s multifaceted, it’s incredibly complex, and you have to approach those problems from many, many different angles you you ever hope to solve them.
Let’s put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict off to the side, but stay with politics: How do you see what is happening here in the framework of the judicial overhaul?
“I don’t want to get into it, because I don’t live there, and even though I see myself [as] an Israeli and I have opinions, I don’t think I should use this platform, especially when I have such a spotlight on me because of the games, to advocate for a position here. I do think…” he once again halts in order to phrase the answer in his head, “something sometimes scary, when you’re seeing the changes that are being proposed, but what I am encouraged by are the conversations against it, and seeing peaceful protests across the country. To me, that’s democracy, that’s democracy at play.
Since we were already speaking about violence, I asked Druckmann if he always knew that the story of “The Last of Us” would end the way it does. Caution, a MAJOR spoiler follows: “I always knew that Joel would kill the doctor that could make the cure – that was always in the story. The thing that played more organically, as I was writing those last few scenes, was that Joel would lie to Ellie about it in order to protect her, and that’s something inspired by my own childhood and the lies that my parents told me to try and protect me.
“And I see now that it was always motivated by love. The motivation was to try to protect me. When trying to get Joel to the end of the line –the end of the line meaning, [to] show how far the unconditional love of a parent can go – those two events to me are the worst things he could commit: damn all of mankind, because there was a chance for a cure, and put his own relationship on the line with his surrogate daughter in order to protect her.
“If you want to type back to Israeli politics – Gilad Shalit. When the [prisoner] trade happened, I was talking with my dad about it, and I asked him: ‘Do you think Israel did the right thing, trading all those prisoners some of which have blood on their hands, for one guy?’ And my dad in his wisdom said to me, ‘Are you asking me as [though I were] the prime minister of Israel, or are you asking me as the kid’s dad? Because as the prime minister of Israel, I think they made a huge mistake. As the kid’s dad, I would have traded the entire country for my son.’ For me, that is ‘The Last of Us.’”
Would you do for your daughter what Joel did for Ellie?
“Oh, if my daughter was in the same situation, I hope I have the will and the capability to get her out of that hospital the way that Joel did”
In praise of the melting pot
The ethical question described by Druckmann, which lies at the heart of the game and the series, is part of what made the original and the adaptation so successful. Since these topics are there in the original, it’s to be expected that the television adaptation would to a very large degree remain faithful to it.
Still, at times the extent to which it does remain faithful is surprising. Watching the series at the same time as watching a gameplay walkthrough on YouTube (for those of us who didn’t play it), it’s astounding to see the number of elements that were meticulously preserved in the transition between the two media.
Some of the best dialogue exchanges in the series – including the final scene – are taken directly from the game itself and are shot with frame-for-frame accuracy and the same score. This is also the case for excerpts that are only significant for their introduction to the characters and not necessarily for plot development, such as the moment when Ellie finds a gay adult magazine in the car in which she and Joel are driving. It’s surprising to discover that the joke book “No Pun Intended,” which is prominent in the series, also exists in the original game, and it’s astonishing to see how in the transition to television the creators succeeded in creating an adaptation of the gaming experience. We see most of the action scenes from the subjective perspective of a “first-person shooter” game.
That doesn’t mean that there are no changes in the series. The most acclaimed episode is without doubt the third episode, which various critics in the U.S. have already described as the finest TV production of the year (in my opinion, episodes two, five and eight are better, but it makes no difference). The episode centers an intimate love story between two men throughout the years of the epidemic.
This plotline doesn’t exist in the original game. The series also allows us to delve into the supporting characters more deeply, such as the wonderful Henry and Sam from episode five, or the most disturbing and frightening villain of the entire season, David from episode eight.
It isn’t always easy when you choose what’s best for the story and the characters. Once the second game came out, for instance, there was a flood of negative reviews even before gamers had time to complete it, evidently due to some plot choices made early in the game, and the fact that Ellie was revealed to be an LGBTQ character (first shown in the “Left Behind” add-on, but explored more clearly in the sequel) .
Criticism from gamers was malicious and overwhelming – this is a community known to be not particularly forgiving and to have knowledge of how to exploit the Internet to express their holy rage. Druckmann acknowledges that the game was at the heart of a “scandal.” But eventually the reviews became more balanced, and the sequel is now widely considered a triumph.
In the first game, too, Druckmann made some risky choices: it focused on a non-binary character, and diverse LGBTQ characters of different ethnicities appeared in the story. We are talking about 2013, well before such representation was seen in major releases, and about the video game industry, which is much more masculine and conservative than its older siblings, cinema and television. Nevertheless, for Druckmann there was no question as to which direction he would take.
“One of the wonderful things in the U.S. – and I think it’s its superpower, more than anything – is what a melting pot it is,” he says. “And sometimes you come from other places in the world that aren’t as much of a melting pot, and it’s kind of shocking when you come to the United States and you look down the street, and everywhere you look you see someone from a different walk of life, different nationalities, different religion, different background, different identity. And I think that if we’re going to tell a story that’s so much about the United States, this journey through the United States with these characters, and it’s about relationships and connections, and ultimately love, and both the wonderful and sometimes the horrible things that love can lead us to, then you have to explore every kind of character and every kind of love.
“And you mentioned episode three, one of the most beloved episodes of TV this year, as far as I’ve read the comments about it, even here, and I love that a zombie show can have this incredible love story in it. At this point, it’s a no-brainer to explore these things, and maybe initially it took a little more courage to do that stuff right now. It’s just what needs to happen, and if you don’t have it, then I think you’re not being authentic to where the story takes place, and how broad these stories need to be to really capture, as clichéd as it sounds, the human condition.”
An attempt to identify the sources of inspiration for “The Last of Us” is as fascinating as the work itself, be it the video game or the television series. There’s Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road,” in which a father and son head into the unknown in a post-apocalyptic America that has undergone a holocaust and a society that has collapsed. Stephen King’s “The Stand,” which depicts a global disaster, has led society to split into dark, evil factions, and the possibility of finding good in these opposing camps.
P.D. James’ “The Children of Men,” in which a pandemic makes humans sterile and turns their last children into slaves. And the graphic novel “Road to Perdition” by Max Allan Collins (which became an acclaimed film), in which a mafioso and his 12-year old son seek revenge against the man who wiped out their family.
A global press conference held on Zoom immediately after the conclusion of the series, a discussion of literary sources led to moments of profound insight. At the press conference, held under the HBO banner, the two creators shared insights and anecdotes pertaining to the season they had just completed – and the next one, too.
They discussed violence and the attempt to tone it down and to justify it (in the sense that the body count in the game is at least three times higher) or about the difficulties of the production, like in episode three, when the plot required them to create three different versions of the same set. They promised that Ramsey would also be starring in the next season, but mainly tried to explain the moral decisions of the characters.
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