The Last of US Composer about scoring Joel’s Death, Abby as a villain
Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for season 2, episode 2 of HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’, which now streams at Max.
When composer David Fleming realized that this week’s episode of “The Last of Us” would contain both the bloody siege of Jackson and Joel’s (Pedro Pascal) death by the revengeous Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), he knew that the creation of music would require a care -patient “.
‘Craig [Mazin] spoke about this collecting these storm clouds and there is clearly something shocking about what is happening – but there is also something inevitable, “says Fleming Variety. “We had to protect where we were going and we didn’t play our hands.”
Collaboration between composers Fleming and Gustavo Santaolalla, who also created the music for the video games “Last of Us”, was the key. Santaolalla explains that he focused more on the emotional beats and character work in the episode, while Fleming is completely in the action. “But we both participate in giving the instructions or how we are going to bind one to the other,” says Santaolalla.
One of the most campaigning moments of the episode came during the siege of Jackson, when all city dwellers are forced to defend themselves after the infected infringement. For that extensive order, the approach of Fleming was to constantly expand the soundscape with the use of removal Celos and Banjos, which were used in earlier episodes.
Another difficult scene for Fleming follows Abby while she scales the wall while the clicker hurled her. “How do we make this intense, but not to the point at which Jackson’s invasion feels smaller?” Says Fleming. “It was much of:” How do we run this to 11, even though we are already at 11 o’clock and are we still giving ourselves space? “
After working on the game, Santaolalla has known for years that Joel would die. During Joel and Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) Heartbreaking Final, he weaved in themes used in earlier episodes to create the “emotional peak” of that gut-punch moment. But it was important for Santaolalla to distract from the music instructions in the game while he used instruments such as the Ronroco.
“We have kept the aesthetics of music with not only the themes, but also the instrumentation and rawness,” says Santaolalla.
Episode 2 in particular marks an important no-bend-back point for Abby, which was introduced this season after he was a controversial character in the competitions (to say the least). While the decision to kill Joel brutally is difficult to see, neither Fleming nor Santaolalla approached the scoring of Abbby’s moments like a traditional villain.
“I wanted to capture this power of anger and pain and it is interesting how the Ellie will later influence musically in the show now that she has had this terrible trauma,” says Fleming. “I think it’s great that I am not asked to play Abby as if she is just a bad guy. Of course she is the opponent, but not everything is so simple in this world.”
Episode 2 brings various elements from the game for Fleming to finally play with in his themes, such as Abby’s “Militaristic” crew who accompany her. Although Fleming acknowledges that the “Spirit of the Game” will forever be part of the music in the show, he recognizes Santaolalla and his roles in distracting the source material when needed.
“If you play the game, you are a very active participant who is in that character,” says Fleming. “And in the process of watching a TV program, we didn’t want to lose that feeling that you are in the character. We don’t want to be aware of music like music, we want it to feel our own panic attack.”
