“The game is the vision,” production designer John Paino told E! News, referring to the 2013 PlayStation title that HBO’s The Last of Us is adapted from. “The concept art for the game always looked cinematic. It had a sense of place and lighting and realism to it.”
But, as movie-like as it looked, it was still a game. The job of Paino, set decorator Paul Healy and hundreds of other craftspeople was to build tangible versions of the game’s dueling worlds: The not-so-distant-but-subtly-retro 2003, and the frozen-in-time version of that same year, two decades after life as people knew it imploded.
“The biggest challenge was just working in a real-life situation,” Paino explained. “We’re doing a period piece on top of a desiccated apocalyptic piece, that is also a drama about the people. So there were these multi-layers.”
Production kicked off in Calgary in July 2021, and the Canadian city “worked for certain things,” he said, but “I don’t think there was ever a location that didn’t get some love from the art department or rebuilding. Also, everything has been neglected for 20 years,” so even if an area had the right look for filming, they’d have to change anything too recognizably modern, such as computerized parking meters.
