Craig Mazin has cemented his position among the best storytellers in Hollywood with this year’s The Last of Us. He co-created the Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey-led series for HBO with original game creator Neil Druckmann and their work finally broke the long-standing ‘video game adaptation curse.’ The series not only pleased the avid fans of the show but also mesmerized casual audiences with its emotional storylines and character-driven plots. While the co-creator was busy before the WGA strike, with the much anticipated second season of the series, he also took out the time for working on another highly anticipated feature, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two.
Mazin recently appeared on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, which was recorded before the strike began, and spoke the host about making The Last of Us as well as his future projects. When Horowitz probed about his work in any of the upcoming superhero films, the screenwriter said, "I'm out of the movie business, basically." Before Mazin broke out as the creator of Netflix’s Chernobyl, which chronicles the events of the 1986 nuclear disaster in Soviet Ukraine, and became a household name, he worked on several comedy movies including the likes of Scary Movie 3, Scary Movie 4, The Hangover Part II and Part III which he said he “enjoyed and loved.” Though he revealed,
"I'll work with certain directors when they call because I love them and because they're so brilliant, so if, like, Denis Villeneuve calls, then absolutely. I'm there for, three-four weeks, a month, to work on what you're working on."
Craig Mazin's Involvement in Dune 2
When Horowitz further probed him about working on Dune 2, Mazin simply confirmed, “I am a participating writer in Dune: Part Two," he says. "I came in and did a little bit of work." Previously, one couldn’t even reveal such details, and the additional writing work used to go uncredited, but thanks to a shift in Writers Guild of America policy last year, now there is such a thing called an Additional Literary Material credit, which Mazin has on the upcoming feature. As for working on any other projects, the screenwriter said, “Mostly I wanna make my own things because I wanna be in charge of my own things and that’s what HBO allows me to do.”
It'll be interesting to see the influence of Mazin’s writing on the Timothee Chalamet-led feature which teased its visceral first look with a sprawling star cast recently. As for the second season of The Last of Us, the filming hasn’t begun given the WGA strike. Watch out for this space for future developments and check out Mazin’s full comments below:
