The Last of Us: Johan Renck explains the differences of the HBO TV series

In the past few hours, Discussing Film colleagues had the pleasure of interviewing Johan Renck, well-known Swedish director, musician and photographer, who has worked on several successful projects, including the miniseries “Chernobyl"License plate HBO, and will take care of the pre-production of the next live-action adaptation dedicated to The Last of Us. During the interview Renck he expressed himself on various topics, focusing in particular on the main differences between the game created by N and the TV series of the US company. We report below when declared:

This is a very pertinent question. For example, you have The Last of Us with Craig, in which the protagonist is a character from a video game, and everyone who has played it is very clear how it is represented. They know exactly what he looks like, how he speaks, how he acts and so on.

Another project I'm working on is based on John Fowles' book "The Magus", and this will be another type of "limited series". There you have a fictional character, where anyone who has read the book will have their own idea of ​​how he moves, behaves, looks and everything in between. On the other hand, it has always been represented only on the pages of a book, which means that you will not be right or wrong. Except the idea of ​​who he is because he becomes more impressionist again.

So, we're currently discussing how to approach The Last of Us. We often talked about me, Craig and Neil [Druckmann] who created the game, about possible approaches and how to approach it. Clearly treating a character from a video game is completely different from that of a book. But also different from the treatment of a real person.

For example, Valery Legasov from Chernobyl because no one had ever seen or heard of him, it was not essential to agree on him. We were brief because obviously we wanted to represent it as faithful as possible to reality. On the other hand, there were no preconceived ideas about him. With something like The Last of Us, I think we're going to opt for a very different story. We have been talking about this for some time, especially in the early stages of development of this process. There are many things to consider and many decisions and choices to be made in various ways without saying more about it.