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LMGI COMPASS
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Summer 2023
been tipped off by our film commission that some people
from HBO were headed up to Canada to scout," Nolan
says, "and asked if I'd be willing to help prepare some
image pulls for them."
After reading the pilot, Nolan found himself so intrigued
by the storyline that he picked up a couple of books about
the art and design of the game to have a better sense of
what HBO might need.
"Location and setting were so central to the journey
of these characters," says Nolan. "The locations set
the mood and created a landscape for the harrowing
experiences the characters navigate through in a world
that had been transformed."
Nolan grew up in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and became
fascinated by photography at a young age, using the
Though that may sound hyperbolic, co-showrunner/
writer-director Craig Mazin agrees. In an interview with
online journalist Jonatan Blomberg (conducted prior
to the May 2 WGA Strike) he said, "I had never played a
game like it, and I don't think I had ever felt that much
about a game—throughout it, not just at the end—and I
was almost sad because I thought, 'I'll never get a chance
to bring something like this to the screen.'"
Mazin, known primarily for comedies like The Hangover
Part II, had recently surprised the industry with his Emmy-
winning limited series Chernobyl for HBO and, following
that success, he was offered a meeting with Sony execs
to see if he might be interested in adapting any of their
game properties.
At the meeting, Mazin was handed a list of titles to
choose from, but when he flipped through the pages
searching for The Last of Us, it surprisingly wasn't there.
The execs explained that Druckmann was trying to
make it into a movie. "Immediately, I was like, 'mm-mm.
It's not a movie. It's gotta be a show,'" says Mazin. The
Sony execs set a meeting for Mazin to pitch his take for
adapting the game as a series. Druckmann loved the
pitch, and, with the full support of HBO, they were off.
SLM JASON NOLAN/LMGI
SLM Jason Nolan/LMGI was prepping Prey, the latest
entry in the Predator film series for Fox, when he got a
call from Luke Antosz who had worked for him as a KALM
in the past.
"He asked if I'd ever played The Last of Us," Nolan
recalls. "And, of course, I'd heard of it, but I didn't know
much about it."
Antosz was a huge fan of the game and was going on
about what an amazing show it could be. "He told me he'd
Jason Nolan/LMGI
Courtesy of Jason Nolan/LMGI
Neil Druckmann stands on the real-life version of freeway. Photo by Jason Nolan/LMGI
