SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 6 of HBO’s “The Last of Us,” now streaming on Max.
“The Last of Us” production designer Don Macaulay vividly recalls watching an emotional Neil Druckmann, who directed this week’s Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) flashback episode, walk around the interior set of the natural history museum.
“It’s interesting to see, because he’s seen and lived with these things digitally for so, so long that he describes it as being surreal,” Macaulay tells Variety. “He was sending pictures to people who worked on the game, so it’s very rewarding that way.”
For this episode, Macaulay and his team knew that strictly sticking to the game was crucial. While Season 2 has focused on dark cycles of violence and vengeance, this episode gives a rare glimpse into more tender moments between Joel and Ellie as they explore the Wyoming natural history museum like wide-eyed kids. Suddenly, everything else in their lives slips away.
Since filming took place in Vancouver, the first course of action was to find a forest clearing that could feasibly pass for Wyoming’s geography. While the crew had gotten used to capturing “nature taking over” in this season’s new location of Seattle, moving to Wyoming meant approaching things differently. “We make the assumption that the roof has failed and that there’s been a lot of growth happening over the years,” he says.
The team brought in an animatronic dinosaur from China, which had to be durable enough to use for stunts when Ellie climbs on top of it. The team also built in the bridge that goes over a nearby creek, while visual effects took over to create the actual exterior of the museum.
When Ellie and Joel first step inside, they enter in darkness before the sparkling walls give the illusion of being lost in space. To evoke that feeling, Macaulay’s department did countless lighting tests with various kinds of paint to see what would reflect well.
“Ultimately, we lined that entire hallway with black velvet,” he says. “And then just on a whim, one of my art directors went to a dollar store and got a whole bunch of bedazzling fake diamonds. And so we literally just lined that hallway with a million fake little diamonds.”
The room with the solar system was all done practically as well, with the planets having to move in a circular motion when a curious Ellie checks it out. “You probably don’t pick it up in the footage, but all the planets are geared appropriately so that they turn at the right rate around the sun and everything,” Macaulay says.
The space capsule, Macaulay explains, proved to be the biggest challenge to recreate, with the interior shot on a completely different stage. In that scene, Ellie and Joel climb into the capsule and imagine taking off into space together.
“It became this incredibly complex puzzle, so we built a small 3D printed version of it. We made changes to that and built a full-scale foam version that people could put the seats and windows in,” he says. “We even tested big LED screens outside the windows, so a lot was learned from that process.” For the final product, they ended up using blue screens instead.
The most time-consuming part of that scene was sourcing all the panels, chairs and lights featured in the capsule to give the illusion of a real ship. “All that takes an incredibly long amount of time and planning, but the actual assembly of it comes together amazingly quickly,” Macaulay says.
Recreating the image of Ellie and Joel looking at the capsule with the ivy coming down through the skylight, as featured in the Season 2 trailer, was a specific moment that Macaulay and his team wanted to play on when lighting every section of the museum sequence. “That was an image we were all trying to be as truthful to the game with as possible,” he says.
While the entire sequence mostly stays true to the game, fans might notice one exhibit missing. Macaulay reveals that the dinosaur exhibit, which featured “moss and water dripping and all sorts of greens,” ended up being cut.
“It certainly wasn’t as big as the one in the game, but we had six or seven full-scale dinosaur skeletons in their displays, all obviously overgrown, and we had a gift trolley that had fallen over. That’s ultimately where Ellie picked up the hat,” Macaulay says. “We built up to about 20-feet high and the structure was all just painted blue for visual effects. But we didn’t fully finish it.”
Episode 6’s structure is particularly significant as it marks Pascal’s final turn as Joel in the series, ultimately explaining what led to Ellie and Joel’s strained relationship during Season 2’s premiere episode. And to effectively illustrate that point, Macaulay and Druckmann took on the challenge of making these final moments in the museum poignant. When Ellie and Joel take off to space together for one last ride, they are forever bound together by this final moment of pure, unfiltered joy.
