Cinematographer Catherine Goldschmidt worked on episodes two, four, and seven of season two of The Last of Us, with directors Mark Mylod, Kate Herron, and Nina Lopez-Corrado. All of these episodes have significant developments for the series, notably Joel’s (Pedro Pascal) death in the second episode, which sets the rest of the events of The Last of Us: Part II in motion.
Shooting such a harrowing moment, Goldschmidt explains to Awards Radar on Zoom that the sequence was shot during their first week, and it felt daunting “because it was the beating heart of the whole episode. We wanted to make sure that we nailed it.”
For the cinematographer, Mark Mylod is “wonderful with the actors and prioritizes performance above all else. It was challenging for me, just because we were shooting in a real location, and the sun was changing in that room all day long. And the scene is meant to be set during one afternoon of one snowstorm. My challenge was to figure out how to control the lighting environment and make it so that we could just be as flexible as Mark and the actors needed us to be, and shoot in whatever direction was good for them.
What I was doing was invisible, so that they could have the floor and play. We had three handheld cameras shooting that scene, but it’s all Bella’s performance and their reaction to Joel’s death. We tried to shoot that scene from Ellie’s perspective, keep the camera close to Bella, and further away from Joel.”
Shooting the scene from Ellie’s perspective was not purely a cinematographic decision, but an editing one as well, and the right one, because “everything that Ellie is going to do from this moment forward is motivated by this experience. So you do have to see it through her eyes to understand why she then goes on to do what she does.”
In shooting the battle of Jackson, Goldschmidt says that it was “hugely exciting to read on the page. As far as I understand it in the game, it’s something that characters refer to, but you don’t actually get to experience it, because if you’re playing as Joel, Ellie, or Abby, you’re not there. But in the TV show, that’s something that we can’t do that the game can’t. We could be there with Tommy and Maria, and it was so thrilling and so action-packed on the page.
If Joel’s death wasn’t enough for one episode, we got to do a battle too. Even before Mark and I had started shooting, Alex Wang, the VFX supervisor, had done a pre visualization for the sequence with Craig Mazin, which is something very common in VFX heavy set pieces, so you can know how much they might cost.
We showed up already with this working animation, and we went from there. We gave notes, edited them, and returned to storyboards to develop new shot ideas. We were working on a living thing, but it’s such a great planning tool, because then you get to split it up and see which shots the main unit should do with the actors, what the second unit should do with stunts, and we were able to use that with our assistant director, Dan Miller, for planning purposes.”
