Veteran TV director, self-proclaimed sci-fi nerd, and video game lover Peter Hoar quickly said yes and soon fell in love with his assigned episode of The Last of Us, “Long, Long Time.” In telling the story of two men who find love later in life, survive the zombie-apocalypse for two decades, and then end their lives on their own terms, Peter helped create one of the most memorable episodes of the television year.
In our conversation, Peter and I discuss his approach to the episode, his great delight in working with Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman, and the profound response the show, and particularly his episode received.
Awards Daily: Even with the involvement of Craig Mazin, did you wonder if an adaptation of a zombie-like video game would be potentially dicey?
Peter Hoar: Well, gosh, it probably should have been because history has shown us that many video game adaptations have failed. One of my other personal favorites is Splinter Cell and I don’t know what’s happened to that. I also love Assassin’s Creed, and if anybody wants to try again, I’m more than willing to be that person because I feel like it has so much to give, but it hasn’t succeeded. It was way too serious. So here’s The Last of Us, a game I loved, a game I played, a game where I could see its merit and its value. I knew how beloved it was by its core audience and by a wider audience as well. I thought, yes there is an issue, but I got sent the script and honestly the script was so good that I would’ve been a fool not to be a part of it. I’d already said I’d do any episode. My friend Rose Lam, who’s the line producer, said would you want to be involved in a show called The Last of Us? And I was like, I’ll stop you there. Yes, please. (Laughs). And that’s when I didn’t know anything about which episode.
I spoke with Craig, who is phenomenal, clever, funny, warm, and that was that. I was on a plane to Calgary. I guess I should have thought well, what if this doesn’t work? And there were issues. There always are on big shows. There were things that I wouldn’t say were going wrong, but there were definitely challenges along the way. I was actually shooting episode four. It became episode three because episodes one and two got amalgamated. There was stuff under the bridge that already happened and there were conversations going on about this, that, and the other. That’s normal. That’s what happens. You don’t wake up one day and go I’m going to make the best piece of television ever made. There’s always a process to get to that point, but I never feared for it though. I just loved every minute of what I did. I guess there’s that remorse that you can have when you get home: did I do everything I should have done? You get so wrapped up in it, you’re like what if I should have done this or should have done that. But there is a part of a director’s life, I think, where that is always the case. I could look at something I made ten years ago and go why did I do it like that?
Awards Daily: I think what’s interesting about your episode is that it is a sort of left turn. The first two episodes move forward in a more conventional way. What happens in episode three does move the story forward, but it’s sort of a standalone in many ways as well, which is something the show did more of as it went along. Did you get this sense that we are sort of doing a mini-movie within a larger series?
Peter Hoar: Definitely. I don’t think I was supposed to think that because as a TV episodic director, you’re supposed to be fitting in. That’s your job. You’re not supposed to be standing out. But as we were making it, myself and Eben Bolter, the DP, both remarked many times about how much this felt like a little indie movie, like a Sundance movie. There were mostly two people in each scene. I mean, there was one scene with four people sat around the table and everybody panicked. It’s like oh my God, how are we going to shoot this? (Laughs). But it was two-hander after two-hander, beautifully set. Obviously that whole village was built for us. Once we were shooting it, there was this massive team of people and one camera and two actors, and normally natural light just falling away. So that’s what made it feel very, very special and very much like an indie movie because it didn’t need much. I’m going to qualify “much” by saying it did cost a lot of money to make that episode.
But when you’re actually at that moment of the camera switching on and turning over on that piece, it felt very simple and easy and gentle. As a director, I don’t want to be noticed. I feel like my job is not to be the one where everybody goes oh, look at all those shots he threw in, or look at this, or whatever. I should be the last person that you notice if ever, because my job is to put you in a position where you feel very privileged. You ask yourself the question: how did I get to watch that? How did I get to see that beautiful, powerful piece of emotion? How could I have been allowed to be able to see that? That’s my job. Doing this episode, we were just constantly getting to set, getting ready to shoot the scene, watching the performances, and then just sitting back and finding out where we could put ourselves that would be the most impactful as viewers, as the camera. It did feel like a movie. Obviously I want to make a movie, so fingers crossed. I did a show before this called It’s a Sin, which was not a movie, but it was five parts and I did all of them. So I was able to control and author that whole five-episode arc. That’s definitely where I want to see myself a little bit, being able to tell whole stories, which is quite a different undertaking.
Awards Daily: Obviously, the key to this episode is Murray and Nick and their relationship. They seem like very opposite personalities from afar. How did they mix? How did they find their way into their characters and into the relationship?
Peter Hoar: They’re both wonderful human beings. Murray couldn’t be nicer. Nick’s hilarious, right? Nick has the gift. Nick will tell stories and you know you’re going to laugh. You prepare to laugh. He has this sort of hangdog expression and seems to be very serious. He doesn’t seem like he smiles very much. But he has such a great heart as a human being. He was so concerned about getting it to work and him being the right choice to do it. He’d had conversations about the show with his wife and she said you’re doing this. You’d be an idiot not to do this. So I think he had those pressures building up on him, but Murray is so generous and so kind that the two of them just worked so well together. They were both a similar age, both had careers before then as well. Murray hadn’t done anything, to my knowledge, that was of the sci-fi element or genre-based. His casting came as a suggestion, but not an absolute, from HBO because they had seen The White Lotus and said this guy’s incredible. We just think we want to use him again. And we know this character exists and Craig met him in the group. What casting is partly about is not just how good are they as actors, but who are they as people. Can I work with those people? Can my sensibilities work well with theirs and with Craig’s obviously, because it’s a television project so we’re all in this together. We want to be able to collaborate, to be able to talk to each other, and to be able to understand.
A lot of the time, honestly, we didn’t talk as much about the script as we did about life. But it allowed us to understand each other a bit more. We were filming a relationship from beginning to end, so they had the opportunity to discover a relationship. So, the first meeting was the first meeting and so on. We shot it as chronologically as we could, but at the same time, it felt like they had the opportunity to get more into character and more into their relationship as the schedule progressed. I’ve mentioned this before in other interviews, but there is this sort of meta sense here because Murray is a gay man, has played gay, and has had many bed scenes in a TV show called Looking, also for HBO. So he’s done this before and in fact, I think he took his shirt off and jumped in for the rehearsal in seconds. Very confident, very comfortable. And then Nick has not done this very often, so I feel like what was happening as well is that Murray’s kindness as a human being was affecting Nick and allowing him to feel comfortable, relaxed, lay back, do it, be present in the scene. That was literally the same as the story was. Murray being so kind to Nick and Frank being genuine and kind to Bill in that moment. I don’t know whether Nick had planned to giggle when he ate that strawberry. I don’t know if that was a choice, but it was so perfect and so unexpected and so beautiful, so human like oh my God, that’s the best thing I’ve tasted in years. It’s so pure and everybody just leaned into that. Even if they’d never tasted a strawberry, they knew what that feeling was like. We all held the script with a passion, and from the word go, we knew that this was good and so we just said let’s not fuck it up. (Laughs).
Awards Daily: As you mentioned, Nick is a straight man. Early on, his character seems to relate to our perceived ideas about his persona. And then he stretches, obviously. One thing that Craig said when I spoke to him was that Murray had a lot to do with making Nick comfortable, as you’ve pointed out. He also thought that Nick being a straight man and, as the character, discovering himself and love later in life, and the awkwardness, who Nick is as a person and who Nick was playing as a character, those two things intertwined.
Peter Hoar: There was a big process in it for Nick. I wouldn’t say there was a lot of humor on the page, but Nick found more humor in the character, particularly the scene with the gun. We couldn’t help but laugh at that, and it was wonderful because all great, rich stories have everything. They have humor, they have fear, they have love, they have passion and all of these things. That’s definitely what Nick brought, but yes, you are right. Nick was learning and expressing new things that he’d never done before. He said this to me actually, he said I’ve never felt like this on a job. I’ve never had these feelings happen. It is all new. I think that’s my job as well, to make him feel able to do that. To make him feel comfortable and to give him the space. I’m an enabler basically. I want to make sure that he knows he can come to work and do his best.
Not forgetting Murray too, we can’t rely on Murray just because he’s done all of this before, because he hasn’t played this character before. I think Murray’s beautiful moment was at the dinner table at the end, they both were beautiful in that moment. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when we shot that. They were in it. They were feeling it. I actually gave a note to Murray, which was, should we try a less emotional version? I’m not saying Frank’s all cried out, but I feel like there’s a point at which he could accept the gesture of love in a more stoic way maybe than emotional way. Murray accepted the note and said I’ll give it a go. Then he said, “I can’t, I can’t do it. Every time I watch that man do that speech, I’m in tears.” That’s the true success really. I’m not that person that says no, you must do what I say. I think those two work together on a level which is very rare and it’s wonderful. We all want to congratulate ourselves about how we did it but sometimes we take a risk. As I say, I’m an enabler, I like people to feel good at work. It’s my job to make everybody want to come to work because this is not an easy job. There are too many stories of people behaving like absolute idiots on sets. So I do the opposite. I just want to give them, as actors, everything they could possibly need. And then the rest all falls into place. Like it’s a magic trick.
Awards Daily: There’s a sense that we have about what we might consider suicide. But our lives play out in specific circumstances, and this circumstance is post-apocalyptic: these two find each other, they find love, one character gets ill and is definitely going to die. What it really said to me though is that choosing to live and die on your own terms is maybe more important than raging against the dying of the light, so to speak.
Peter Hoar: That is the perfect way to put it. It’s all about on your own terms. If you look at all of the things that happen in episode three, you don’t deny the world, we walk somewhat into a new version. We start in a clean, pure version of nature where one man, Joel, is trying to understand the past, making penance with the past about the fact that he lost his beloved. But nature’s never been so pure because there aren’t humans around to fuck it up anymore. Well, there are, but not many. To start in that world felt for us a very different way to start the story. Bill’s town is purer. Initially for the wrong reasons because Bill keeps everybody out, but then it becomes pure for the right reasons because they create their own little world. It’s all about those choices you make with what you have. There’s a perfect line where Murray/Frank says how we care for things is how we show love. And that is so true. At the end of life when they are faced with the inevitable and they’re in their seventies, at this point they’ve had a 20 year relationship against all the odds. Frank knows it’s not forever. He’s in a bad way. There is a scene that didn’t make the cut and one of the reasons is because I think it was too difficult to understand all of the parts of the scene. Basically, Frank is selling stuff to some ladies by the gate and they’re obviously regular ladies because they wave at Bill and they go, hi, hi Bill. He hates that and he’s sort of pulling a face like they keep talking to me like I’m Father bloody Christmas, but all of this is dialogue free. In that moment, per script, he’s supposed to realize that the reason they’re so kind and loving to him, even though he is carrying a gun, is because he’s an old man and he can’t do what he needs to do. If something kicked off, he couldn’t protect the man that matters the most to him.
It was very difficult to see and feel all of that in the moment. And it was never done better than by Nick himself at the table when he says you know, this isn’t the tragic suicide at the end of the play. You were my purpose. It’s all expressed there so beautifully that I don’t think you need anymore. The great thing about The Last of Us, via Craig Mazin, is why are we surviving? Obviously Neil as well. Neil created incredibly diverse characters and stories for part of the computer game. But Craig made us realize more, he focused in on the idea of “why do we survive?” A lot of survivalist zombie stories are more interested in the practicality. You know, what do we do to survive? That’s how Bill’s story starts, of course. I think everybody who watched it went yeah, I’d probably do that. I’d probably build a big fence.. No they wouldn’t, nobody would have the knowledge to be able to do all that. We wish. (Laughs). Being aware of those choices and being in control of your life, I think it’s quite wonderful. It’s quite beautiful.
Awards Daily: This show obviously started out being very successful from the jump. The first two episodes got great viewership, but when your episode “Long, Long Time” hit, there seemed to be an explosion in terms of social media chatter. In that moment, did you say, oh my, I really was a part of something that connected in a way that was beyond the way that it was already connecting, which was already significant. The show was already at a high level and somehow it went even higher because of “Long, Long Time.”
Peter Hoar: It was an incredible time. It really was. It is still going on. I mean, here we are talking together, we’re doing events this week for the Emmys, and it’s just wonderful. Obviously they’re moving the Emmy date, so the whole thing is going to go on forever it feels like. It is quite astounding what happened. HBO is still a hugely powerful voice in drama, and in the telling of stories. They also are one of the few networks at that level who tell stories episodically on a given day. It’s a schedule-driven thing. That can be rare. A lot of the world wants to binge, they want it all now. But, this works so well. Of course social media helped. I also watched people filming themselves watching the episode and reacting live to the episode without knowing what was coming. They obviously knew they liked the show. Their shtick was filming themselves, reacting. So they’ve reacted to episode one and episode two and nobody knew what was coming.
They just thought yeah, I’ll be watching an episode where lots of zombies get shot because that’s what happens in the game. But no, we sent them on a completely different journey, and I love that. I love watching people react live to the show because it felt very genuine. I think lots of people were taken aback by how they felt. But also they would spot things. They’d say out loud oh my God, look at that, and they were things that I had done. They were choices I had made or we had made as a team together at that moment when you are right on the line and you’re like okay, we’re going to film now, why don’t you just do this? They get noticed. I know it seems obvious, but actually you don’t get to see people react to your work very often. That was really nice. In today’s world with social media, that’s when you know you’ve got a hit, where you can see it trending. What was one that was trending…”Ron Swanson gay kiss” or “Ron Swanson zombie”? There was one tag that was really going crazy. The new world order of what we aspire to. But that was certainly great.
Awards Daily: I don’t think it was anticipated that a show that a lot of people, like you said, might have thought was about shooting zombies, would have all of this inclusion. I enjoyed The Walking Dead, but it was very much about how we stay alive and forward momentum. Not that there wasn’t anything more to it than that, but obviously The Last of Us does not ape anything that any other show is doing. It’s very character driven. There’s episodes that barely have any zombies in it or none. It’s very much about the characters, your episode in particular, I’m sure you had to feel like oh, wow there’s I think one zombie, right?
Peter Hoar: There were two. There’s one where she stabs the one that’s been pinned down by a rockfall. The shop had crumbled and she goes down there and taunts it and she stabs it. It’s a really powerful moment. The other was one that gets shot and Bill has a little chuckle to himself. At one point, the Infected that gets shot outside Bill’s house was going to be a clicker. I got really excited because that would’ve been the first time we’d have seen a clicker on set, not on the show, but on set, because episode two was shot out of sequence after mine. They were like yeah, we think it’s going to be ready so we’re going to give you a clicker. Oh my God. I get to do one clicker shot. This is great.Then they said no it’s not ready, we’re not getting a clicker. Looking back, that seems so reductive for me to say oh, I didn’t get to shoot the zombies. But, I love the show. I love the whole thing. I love the game. I love what it does. I love the story. I love the science, the understanding. People googling cordyceps and getting panicky about it. It’s wonderful.
Science is beautiful and threatening. It has to be. I think that a lot of the time people’s fear comes from a misunderstanding or a non-understanding. People reading about cordyceps on Google and thinking I’m never eating a mushroom again are actually missing the point entirely. But in fact, I know people that actually used to take powdered cordyceps as a health aid and don’t anymore. One of the reasons cordyceps doesn’t affect humans is because it’s the wrong temperature. As we know, the temperature of the planet is going up and up and up so it’s potentially only a matter of time, but I think way beyond our existences, David. So don’t worry about that. (Laughs). I think I’ve always been a science fiction nerd and I love it because it tells the stories about us, about who we are so purely and so cleanly. But I think if they were told as contemporary stories, people would not want to watch, they wouldn’t want to learn that way. Whereas sci-fi allows us to sort of sit back and think, it’s not really about me. But then actually it’s everything about you. I think that’s why people were so affected because they didn’t expect it to be as real as it was. So yeah, science fiction is the genre to beat all genres.
Awards Daily: The show got a slew of Emmy nominations. You obviously got one of them. This is a very weird year. Does it feel like any sort of a detraction to be recognized in a year where we don’t really know what’s next?
Peter Hoar: I got a BAFTA for It’s a Sin, and that happened almost by accident. Suddenly somebody messaged me saying you’ve got a BAFTA nomination. And I was like oh, have I? Then the next thing I know, I was at the awards and I got the award, and I was like, huh, how did I get this? This is unbelievable. And it just sort of happened to me. The Emmys was never like that. You have to sort of work forward to get noticed in the Emmys. Craig Mazin said to me on the set “Peter, you better get your suit ready, it’s going to be so good.” And I’m like thank you, Craig. But yeah, whatever. And then it started to gear up. So in a way I had been preparing for this for some time. When the nomination came through, it was such a relief because I was like, what am I going to say to myself, because I built myself up to thinking that it was even possible. Basically, whatever happens to me personally at this point, I have achieved the thing I wanted to achieve. I’ve made a wonderful piece of TV and it got recognized by real people. It’s now been recognized by the television academy themselves.
That’s enough for me. And I think there will be a glitzy ceremony at some point and we’ll all turn up and somebody will win and it’ll be wonderful. I think, I hope at least, if it is next year, that between now and then we’ve managed to sort out all of our differences and find a common ground and a way through. And there obviously is one. The problem is bigger than just the writers and the actors strike. It’s about the fundamental misappropriation of funds and they’re all going to the wrong or to the few. It’s never been so acute as it is right now in 2023. There are discussions about AI that need to be had, but I also think it’s going to be rubbish for a lot longer than people think it is. It’s a learning tool. It learns from itself, it’s going to get better. It’s not going to cure cancer, but it’s going to be able to detect cancer a hundred thousand times quicker than a human. I want that, that’s something I want. So we have to take the rough with the smooth, but the fundamental issue that really annoys me is how the basics aren’t being adhered to because the people at the top are taking all the money. That’s wrong, and whether or not the writers and the actors will be the beginning of the end for that sort of way of life, I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think there’ll just be an agreement and we’ll all go back to work. But actually what we all need to do is say, enough’s enough, share it out.
Awards Daily: As to your point about awards and work, I always like to say that awards are like a snapshot in time. If we look back ten years ago, we might say that one thing lived on better than that thing that won. What you have here is a piece of work that, regardless of whether you win or not, will stand the test of time and be seen as a serious moment in the history of television in the genre, and aside from the genre, to be perfectly honest. All credit due. I can tell you’re very proud of it.
Peter Hoar: It’s sometimes nice for us creative people to say well done and to pat ourselves on the back because we don’t do it very often. I think we feel like it’s a mistake to do that because we’ll never be our best. We’ve got to be rigorous and work hard all the time and push, push and push. Actually I’ve decided in my latter years that I’m not going to do that. I’m going to accept the praise when it’s there, and I’m going to treat myself more kindly along the way because it’s relentless, a lot of what we do. Ultimately we’re making TV. That’s what we’re doing. We’re not saving anyone’s lives. But if you can make a piece of TV like this, you can affect people. You can make them think and make them feel things. And that’s the key.
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