The Last of Us has three main characters: Ellie, Joel and Gustavo Santaolalla’s music

The haunting songs of the video game and TV series get to the heart of Joel and Ellie’s story. The man behind them talks about the ‘magical’ process of composing

The Last of Us is a story about tension – the tension between love and loss, violence and intimacy, protecting and destroying, life and death. It’s a study of how impossibly delicate life is, but also the terrifying stubbornness of our will to survive. As its composer, Gustavo Santaolalla’s job was to navigate and soundtrack that tension, a mediator between the game’s warring themes. His mission was to score music for a video game that was doing something different, and really had something to say.

Santaolalla tells me that when he was a child in rural Argentina, one of his tutors quit on him after just a few lessons, telling his parents “there is nothing I can teach him”. His career proper began in 1967, when he co-founded the band Arco Iris, which specialised in fusing Latin-American folk with rock. Later, after leading a short-lived collective of Argentine musicians in Soluna, he began striking out on his own, releasing solo albums and composing for TV shows, adverts and, eventually, films (most notably Amores Perros, 21 Grams and The Motorcycle Diaries).