Chernobyl director Johan Renck has revealed that he will be teaming up with Craig Mazin once again on the upcoming Last of Us HBO series. Speaking to Discussing Film, Renck revealed that he will be serving as executive producer rather than director because he’s unable to take on an ongoing series to that extent at present. However, he will at least be directing the pilot episode.
“Then we’ll see how it goes on further,” said Renck. “I mean, both Craig and I, we are working with each other again and we will work with each other on other things because we like each other.”
When asked what he thinks of the differences in adapting historical characters à la Chernobyl and pre-existing characters like the ones in the game, Renck said:
With the The Last of Us, this is something that we’re discussing. We’re having weekly calls, Craig and I and also Neil [Druckmann] who created the game, about various approaches and how to deal with that. How to deal with the fact that a video game character is way further than a character from a book. But also it’s more different to deal with than a real person. For instance, Valery Legasov from Chernobyl because nobody had ever seen or heard of him, it wasn’t pivotal to honor anything of that. I’m being brief because of course we wanted to portray him as true to reality as we could. On the other hand, there were no preconceived ideas of it. With something like The Last of Us, it’s going to be a very different story. This is something that we spent a lot of time talking about here and in the early development stages of this process. There are a lot of things to take into consideration and a lot of decisions and choices to be made in various ways without saying anything more about it.
The Last of Us TV series has yet to be dated.
[Source: Discussing Film]
