Entertainment- "The Last of Us" shows Joel and Ellie trekking across the United States, through villages and violent cities.
- Insider spoke with production designer John Paino about creating the post-apocalyptic world.
"The Last of Us" is set in a post-apocalyptic America, with its protagonists Joel and Ellie trekking across the country. Given that the show was filmed in Alberta, Canada, however, engineering a desiccated, pandemic-transformed United States was a heavy lift that at times required building entire villages from the ground up.
The show follows Joel, a smuggler who lost his daughter at the onset of the show's pandemic, and Ellie, a teen who appears to be immune to the cordyceps fungus that transforms people into violent Infecteds. The pair travel cross-country from a state-run quarantine zone, or a "QZ," in Boston, attempting to bring Ellie to a resistance group seeking a cure and finding Joel's estranged brother in the process.
By episode five, which aired on Friday, the pair has reached Kansas City. In the process, they've passed through cordyceps-era lovers Bill and Frank's northeastern hamlet, driven along Midwestern highways, and holed out in underground tunnels.
Insider spoke with production designer John Paino about building the world of "The Last of Us" and constructing sets to stage sweeping love stories and violent conflict.
Warning: Major spoilers through episode five of "The Last of Us" ahead.
Insider: This series is a huge undertaking. It was reportedly the most expensive television show shot in Canada, with each episode costing an estimated $10 million-plus to make. Is that true?
John Paino: I can't confirm the exact amount, but I have a feeling it was north of that. We built a lot because our show is set in the United States and Canada has a different architecture. And they're always moving, going from the east coast to the west coast. But we're in one part of Canada that doesn't have an east or west vibe to it.
When we are in the middle of our story and we're going across the middle of America, and we go to Jackson Hole and everything, it was very good for that. So it totally makes sense that there was cost because you don't have a home base that people can go back to.
You told Vanity Fair that you constructed the entire Boston QZ. Was Bill and Frank's town something that you constructed as well?
Paino: That is 100% created. That, and the QZ, and the whole ruined town cul-de-sac in episode five — we call that our cul-de-sac set — that whole area with all those houses, that's all built from scratch. Bill's town is built from scratch. The QZ is built from scratch. Those are our three back stages we created, and they're a couple acres each in size.
It makes sense because you'd be hard pressed to find this in a lot of places: 20 years of neglect, no electricity, with everything flooded and taken over by nature. And for Bill's town, the architecture was just that hamlet. It's colonial, it doesn't exist in Canada. So that made sense for Bill.
Right. It's very idyllic.
Paino: Yeah, that is the idea. I've been in hamlets like that, growing up on the East coast. They exist, and they're very much kept like museums. The idea is that Bill, his family, maybe even founded that town. Their house is the nicest house because they had money, they founded the town, and they had the matriarchs and patriarchs of the town.
When you go to those towns today, you have the historical markers and signage that says, "The Proctor House, 1765." That all feeds into the story of Bill, who is a loner, shutting himself off from the world, making this glass menagerie existence for himself. So it very nicely reinforces what his personality is, and it also is a nod to an America that is gone forever.
We also see Frank's influence on the town, but also on Bill's house. What was on your mind when you were crafting the transformation he brings over the years?
Paino: That's Frank, so full of life and everything. Frank is bringing a sense of art and style. He's sartorial in a certain sense and that was a great way to show the passage of time.
With his paintings, we wanted to make sure that many of them were still life of the buildings. He's bored. What is he gonna do here? He's certainly not gonna venture outside of the gates and set up a tripod and paint, but it's bringing life and love into Bill's life. But we also used Frank's art to show his debilitation as his degenerative disease progresses. You see how he can't finish paintings and they become fragmented, and disorienting.
It's different for Bill. It's just the house he grew up in. He's obviously closeted, maybe a little bit of a mama's boy. He was probably like a lot of kids, where they get to take over the basement and their bedroom, and everything else is like your parents' house. That was the idea, that his world, his life, is in the bunker. And so when Frank comes in, he's adding life to it.
What was the process crafting those portraits and getting them staged in that space?
Paino: We talked a lot about what kind of art he would do, and then we were able to find an artist in Calgary where we shot. We gave them some examples of what we were going for and pictures of Frank and Bill. We also took snapshots of the set as it was being done so that the person could paint the church, the Civil War monument that was there, flowers, things like that, so it didn't feel like it was just made up.
It was a nice respite from our world of desiccation, decay, and ruin. It was also a great way to really dig into both characters. And it fleshes out Tess and Joel, too. It grounds it. It was a beautiful script, best I've ever read in my life. It's just as poignant and deep as the episode is.
Going back to the desiccation, what was your involvement when it came to the infected and how the mycelium and fungus interacted with the set?
Paino: The infected was all [prosthetics designer] Barry Gower and his folks. Developing the show from the game was a very long process for him. Our involvement was wherever it interacted with the set, making sure that it was realistic, that the set could support it, that the colors didn't blend too much.
Going back to the cul-de-sac from episode five that you mentioned earlier, what was it like building out that set, particularly knowing it had to handle that sequence at the end and a swarm of infected?
Paino: I gave my team the reference, and [cocreator Craig Mazin], rightly so, said "This should be built." There's no way to do it otherwise. Not only because we won't find the architecture, but because of all of the elements that have to come together and work safely as well: the crash, the truck running down the street hitting other cars, people going into a house and collapsing the front of it. We met extensively to discuss how we were gonna do it, the logistics of the stunt work, the pyrotechnical work, the gunfire, the physical effects work, rigging the trucks. All of it has to be figured out.
It was one of the few sequences in our show that was storyboarded, and it had to be because of all the elements of it, and coordinating and choreographing it. Also, things like figuring out how Joel sees the action, and reacts and yells and shoots people. How tall should this be? Is this a two story house, a three story house?
We make computer models, 3D models of the layout and everything, they're very realistic. At some point, they're given to VFX, for when they have to overlay additional fire or the background that's outside of our set.
Were there any specific challenges in that scene when it came to the pyrotechnics and having a structure that could take the impact from that truck?
Paino: Some of the pyrotechnics were practical and some of it was augmented. For our show, we always wanted things to have as much realism as possible.
The truck ran into the house, which was rigged, the front half of it, to fall, I think. Then we pulled the truck away. We had pre-dug a hole, but now we exposed the hole, so then we put the truck back in with the computer effects. They made it feel like it's gonna sink into the hole and disappear. And then, let's get rid of the truck and make it safe for the people to climb out in all this makeup and stuff.
I think it was four weeks of shooting for that one sequence. And when you think about all the moments of it, all the things, pulling things away, shooting it, we have people crawling out of cars, we have Ellie kicking through things. It sounds like four weeks is a lot, but it's also at night when things are harder to do. But everyone was safe, no one got hurt, so that's the best you can hope for.
Earlier in episode five, there's a sequence in an underground bunker that should be familiar to fans of the game. In the game, we discover a series of letters that tell the story of Ish, a character alluded to with a drawing in this episode. How do you think about adapting that kind of video game storytelling in a moment like this for the screen?
Paino: That's a unique situation, because that's one of the few interior locations that we didn't build. We found this great tunnel system with large areas underneath a beer brewery in Calgary. It just had an eeriness to it and it worked very well. We painted it, dressed it as a settlement, put some ducts in the ceiling.
Even though we have a somewhat designed world, we have to bring that into the real world. I looked at the mural in the game, and we had to extend it and extrapolate from it. So part of the design process of the show is that even though we do have that existing world, there are places where we have to extend and enhance it. Make it so that it works for our actors, our schedule, and the practicalities of the building. The game characters can walk across a two-by-four, but our actors probably can't.
Finally, I read that the word "zombie" was essentially banned on set. Can you confirm or deny?
Paino: I don't think anyone called them zombies. But the thing is, as a production designer, I don't really spend a lot of time on set, because I'm always prepping or dealing with what's coming up. I'm only on set if there's some catastrophe. So I don't know if it was banned. I think it might have been unofficially banned, but it's not like, "There's a jar over there, and $50 in if you say zombie."
They're really not zombies. And we had so many people who were familiar with and loved the game, so I'm sure somebody would say, "They're not zombies, they're infected." But they weren't on set that much, if you really think about it. Some episodes, we've got Infected all over the place, but there's a lot of times where they're not.
I think it was frowned upon. That's a polite way to say maybe it was, maybe it wasn't.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
"The Last of Us" is currently airing on HBO.