Neil Druckmann on adding backstory to the game's characters

Neil Druckmann, creator of “The Last of Us” and head of successful game studio Naughty Dog, is no stranger to the chequered history of adapting video game content to other mediums.

He’s seen some clumsy directors who don’t understand the game and therefore distort its essence when translating it to TV or film. At the same time, content creators who try to cling too tightly to every detail of the game’s story will also struggle to create something that’s effective as a TV show. At heart, the two are two different things, Druckmann stressed in an interview with Variety for the latest episode of the “Strictly Business” podcast.

Another mistake adaptations make, Druckmann observes, is to “stay so close to the source material that is built and designed and written for this other medium that has strengths and weaknesses, and try to translate it as is, without making changes to this other medium that has different strengths and weaknesses.”

HBO is currently in production on the second season of “The Last of Us,” which is slated for release in 2025, while PlayStation is preparing to release an “enhanced” version of Naughty Dog’s “The Last of Us Part II Remastered,” the source material for the TV series’ second season, for its upcoming high-end graphics-focused PlayStation 5 Pro gaming console in November. As the lead on both projects, Druckmann explained how the story of the second game will be expanded upon in “The Last of Us” season 2.

“What I really enjoy now is that sometimes you have these people who watched the show and then went and played the game and talked about what a great experience they had,” Druckmann said. “The game sometimes hints at things that we don’t get to touch on in the show, but the game doesn’t, and vice versa. If you experience both, both are richer. And I love hearing that experience from people. They’ll say, ‘I watch the show and then I play the game, and I really like how different the sequence with Bill is, and it gave me a different insight into him.’ And there are things in this season that I’m really excited about — things that we’ve suggested — one scene in particular sticks out to me that I think fans of the game are going to love because it really tells you a lot of the story of this important character that we didn’t really have a way to do in the game.”

Druckmann didn’t feel any pressure to adapt the popular PlayStation game for television. His path to bringing “Last of Us” to HBO began with “Chernobyl.” Druckmann was so moved by the power of HBO’s 2019 miniseries about the 1986 nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union that he sought out lunch with the show’s writer and executive producer, Craig Mazin. The two hit it off so well that he was eventually open to considering a TV adaptation of Joel and Ellie’s story, Druckmann says.

“I just wanted to meet the guy and tell him how much I love him [‘Chernobyl’]“I asked him how he conceived it, how he wrote it, and how long he worked on it,” Druckmann said during a Sept. 18 interview as part of the Variety Presents: Gaming on TikTok Leadership Summit. “And so I was there having lunch with this guy — and he wanted to meet me, too — he started talking about ‘The Last of Us’ and talking about it in such an intimate, fundamental way of understanding what it was that I was like, ‘Oh my God, this guy is in love with this game that we’ve made.’”

In the wide-ranging interview with Variety co-editor Cynthia Littleton and Variety senior business editor, TV and games Jennifer Maas, Druckmann details how the game development team at Naughty Dog, the PlayStation-run studio also behind the “Uncharted” game franchise, coordinates with Mazin and his team.

“We approach it by starting at the beginning of the season, analyzing the season and analyzing the game. Our goal is to tell the best story possible,” Druckmann said. “Then we look at the content of the game and ask ourselves, ‘OK, what are the things that we both like that could be adapted as is?’ We just check off those cards and say, ‘OK, these things could stay as is,’ and that becomes the building blocks.”

Druckmann cited the much-loved “Last of Us” season 1 episode “Long, Long Time” as an example of a significant difference between the game’s storyline and the show’s. Druckmann and Mazin agreed that video game characters Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) needed a stronger emotional anchor for the episode to work, as it deviated greatly from the overall plot of Joel, played by Pedro Pascal, fighting to get teenager Ellie (Bella Ramsey) through decimated cities to a medical facility where she might hold the key to a cure for the disease that has plagued the planet for 20 years.

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“We did this for a couple of reasons. In the game, you get to know Bill through action, because the game is really about interactivity and action,” Druckmann said. “And if we were to translate that sequence of Bill, maybe that would be okay, it would be great. It wouldn’t be great, because that amount of action on screen, when you’re not interacting with it, you don’t get the kind of tension or immersion that you would get in the game. Instead, you just get spectacle, and that spectacle would eventually wear thin. So we knew a big change was needed.”

Mazin changed the story. “When you come into the game, Frank is no longer alive. So we just hinted at this relationship between these two men. And then instead we said, well, let's focus on that relationship,” Druckmann said.

It's important to “recognize the areas that aren't working because they're designed for this interactive medium, and then start thinking. How can we expand this world? How are we going to build it? Sometimes the best surprises for players are when they discover a backstory or, like, 'Oh, this was mentioned in the game, and now they get to see a whole episode about this, again, like Bill and Frank.' It makes the game richer. To me, that's the best kind of adaptation,” he said.

“Strictly Business” is Variety’s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the media and entertainment business. (Click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes air every Wednesday and are available to download on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.

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