by Kate Egan
President Snow (Donald Sutherland), the leader of Panem.
Executive producer Robin Bissell says, “Gary was like, ‘Okay . . . you know it’s just a couple of days. It’s not that much — you do a speech and that’s it.’ But Donald said, ‘No, I really want to do it.’ I think he knew that this character becomes the embodiment of the Capitol, and he saw what he could do with it. Donald came in toward the end of shooting and he wrote another letter to Gary afterward — he had some ideas and very eloquent thoughts on President Snow. Immediately after Gary read the letter, he said, ‘I have ideas for two more scenes’— scenes between Snow and Seneca Crane. Seneca isn’t thinking about the ultimate reason for the Games. For him, it’s about ratings, it’s about showbiz. But Snow never loses sight of what the Games are about. So . . . Donald Sutherland brought a great deal to this part.”
Gary Ross remembers it like this: “So, we’re shooting in the woods by the edge of this lake, and I read this e-mail from Donald and I was just knocked out. I went down by the lake and there was one folding chair sitting in this little clearing, and I thought, Well, okay — this is a sign. Clearly I’m going to sit in this chair. So I went over, I sat down, and I came up with these two scenes for Snow, which I think are really pivotal in the movie, and define him in a great way.”
Ross and the producers sought out actors they thought were right for other parts, particularly Haymitch Abernathy, the only living victor from District 12, and Cinna, Katniss’s brilliant stylist.
Of Haymitch, Jacobson explains, “We wanted a character who felt like he’d seen it all and experienced it all and had that weariness, on the one hand, but also that subversive, fiery unpredictability. We wanted somebody who could play the drunk without being really obvious about it, who could play that sort of broken clown, but really had the intelligence and the foresight and the strategy to get these two characters through these Games alive.”
Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) raises a glass while on board the train to the Capitol.
“We approached Woody Harrelson,” continues Bissell. Harrelson’s breakthrough role had been in the television series Cheers, and he’d gone on to earn two Oscar® nominations for his work in the films The Messenger and The People vs. Larry Flynt. “Woody loves Gary, really wanted to work with Gary. So he read the books, he read the script, and then he said, ‘I get it. I have to do this movie.’”
When it came time to cast Cinna, the producers approached the gifted musician and singer-songwriter Lenny Kravitz. “Lenny as Cinna was an idea that Gary had very early on,” says producer Jon Kilik. “He wanted Cinna to be not only a stylist but somebody who has a lot of style. And nobody in this world has more style, more charm, more charisma than Lenny Kravitz.”
Cinna (Lenny Kravitz) in his signature plain black shirt.
Kravitz, who had just appeared in the Oscar®-nominated film Precious, was delighted to join the team. “Gary Ross called me while I was in the studio recording my album, and said, ‘I’m doing this movie, The Hunger Games. I’d like you to play the part of Cinna. And if you want the part, you’ve got it. You don’t have to audition.’ That was quite an amazing phone call, because I’ve only made a couple of films — it was just beautiful to get a role like that,” Kravitz says.
The young actors playing the tributes came from many places and many backgrounds. Some were seasoned actors, with experience in television or commercials or smaller films, while others were complete unknowns. What they had in common was an enthusiasm for the film as well as a sense that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Alexander Ludwig was excited to get the role of Cato, a Career Tribute from District 2. He remembers really connecting with the role. “When I finally met Gary and he offered me the role of Cato, it was a no-brainer, because I was just such a big fan.”
Isabelle Fuhrman, the actress who plays Clove, was passionate about the books long before getting cast in the movie. “The Hunger Games is my all-time favorite book series, and I was the biggest book buff that you would ever possibly meet. I turned all my friends on to reading it. When I heard it was being made into a movie, I freaked out. I thought, I have got to be in this movie.”
Fuhrman originally auditioned for Katniss, but was told she was too young for the role. “I got a call a week later. They wanted me to audition for Clove. I read with Debra Zane, who’s the sweetest person I’ve ever met.” Fuhrman didn’t have to wait long to find out if she got cast. She was at lunch with her mother when her agent called with the good news. She was so happy that she burst into tears. “People are staring, and I’m trying to make it seem like it’s not a big deal, and I’m crying my eyes out, I’m so excited. Everyone was like, ‘Who’s this crazy little fourteen-year-old girl crying her eyes out at a vegan restaurant?’”
Jack Quaid, who plays Marvel, recalls, “The audition was kind of weird because it was the first audition I’d ever walked into where the first thing they said to me was ‘Choose your weapon.’ They had a box — there was a crossbow-y type thing, a big knife, and a gun. So I just picked up the big knife and I did the audition and, right about then, I knew this was going to be something cool. I go to NYU and I was in this class a few weeks later when I got the call that I got the part and I was flabbergasted. So . . . I’ll have a unique story to tell about what I did with my summer vacation.”
Twelve-year-old Amandla Stenberg’s audition was a little different. “I went to Gary’s house, and for the audition I’d actually dressed up and I’d been rolled around in dirt, like Rue in the Games. So I was all dressed with all my dirt and my leaves in my hair and everything, and when I got to Gary’s house — well, he has a really nice house. I didn’t want to sit on anything, because I didn’t want to get anything dirty! I went in and I felt really good about it, and then I got a call from my agent saying, ‘What are you doing this summer?’ and I was like, ‘Not much. Why?’ and she said, ‘Because you booked The Hunger Games,’ and I was screaming and squealing, ‘I’m Rue!’ and it was so exciting.”
Jacqueline Emerson, who plays Foxface, remembers, “The Hunger Games was my all-school read at school, and I read the first book, and I just fell in love with the whole series. Then I found out there was gonna be a movie made of it, and I actually spent a whole day with my friends looking up those possible casts on YouTube. I was looking at people, being like, ‘Oh, Emma Stone would make a great Foxface’ — and now it’s me!”
She continues, “I came in and I did an interview for Gary, because he was interviewing kids that had read the books. And I did that probably in the fall, and that was taped. And then, a couple of weeks later, he asked me if I wanted to come in and read for the role. I just completely freaked out!”
While the cast was still coming together, the central actors had already begun training — and training hard.
Nina Jacobson gives an overview of what Lawrence needed to do: “Obviously Katniss is a hunter. She’s an archer, she has to be agile. You have to believe that this person could win the Hunger Games, and so we wanted her to have the skills, we wanted her to feel at home doing all of the things that Katniss does.”
Katniss runs through the woods outside District 12.
Lawrence grins, describing her regimen. “I did every kind of training you can possibly imagine for this role. I had a running coach and I did stunt training so, you know, I did wall climbs and vaults and jumps and all sorts of stuff. I had archery for many weeks . . . it was rough, but it was fun. Archery is such a mind game. You have to just focus on one thing and if you get it wrong you get whipped with a string going over a hundred miles an hour. And it is painful, believe me.” Before filming began, she was driving some fifty or sixty miles around Los Angeles every day, from stunt training to wardrobe fitting to archery practice, getting in shape for the movie.
Once her physical training was over, there was still more. Lawrence admiringly recalls working with T-Bone Burnett, the twelve-time Grammy Award winning musician who has worked on movies such as Craz
y Heart and O Brother, Where Art Thou? “T-Bone Burnett is producing the music, which is still unbelievable to me. So he trained me a little bit with the singing. I have the worst voice in the world, so that was probably one of the hardest things he’s had to do, but I sang the melody, the lullaby, in my big scene with Rue.”
Josh Hutcherson remembers, “Everyone else was learning how to do the weapons and things like that. And in this film, Peeta doesn’t do a whole lot with the weapons. So for me it was all about getting to the right physical condition, which was bigger than I was. They wanted me to put on about fifteen pounds of pure muscle for the role, so I had to eat a lot of food and I was working out five days a week — it was very rigorous.”
Liam Hemsworth had the opposite challenge. “I’m not in the Games, so I didn’t have to do any fight training. But it was more just not eating as much as what I was eating. I wanted to look hungry.”
Filming in the arena. Left to right: Clove (Isabelle Fuhrman), Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), Marvel (Jack Quaid), Cato (Alexander Ludwig), and Allan Poppleton, the co-stunt coordinator
The Hunger Games book became the actors’ guide to the interior life of the characters they were about to play. Jennifer Lawrence recalls, “After I got the part, I read the first book over and over. It’s great when you have a movie based on a book, because you can read the inner monologue of the character and that’s incredibly helpful.”
Gary Ross gives feedback to Jennifer Lawrence (Katniss)
and Liam Hemsworth (Gale) while working on the District 12 scenes.
The actors playing the tributes had some further exploration to do. Gary Ross was instrumental in asking probing questions to figure out who these characters really were.
From left to right: Clove (Isabelle Fuhrman), Cato (Alexander Ludwig),
Thresh (Dayo Okeniyi), Rue (Amandla Stenberg)
For instance, Jack Quaid came to understand Marvel like this: “I’d say if he were in high school, he would be good at one thing and one thing only, and he’d let academics and everything else kind of slide. He is totally vicious. He doesn’t care what he’s cutting up — he just goes for it.”
Alexander Ludwig began to see his character, Cato, as somebody even more brutal. “I like to think that Cato, before he gets into the Games, is kind of popular and charming, but he’s always had that violent anger inside of him. When he gets into the Games he gets lost in this whole sick game and he almost goes insane toward the end.”
Amandla Stenberg says, “My character’s fighting style is to evade, because she knows that she can’t fight the big, tough guys. She knows that if she tries, she’ll lose. So what she does is she climbs in the trees and she eats eggs from birds, and that’s her style — to outlast everyone else.”
And Dayo Okeniyi, who portrays Thresh, came to see his character as a sort of gentle giant. “There’s not too much of a backstory for my character, so that was great, because I got the chance to make it up. He’s very family-oriented and he’ll do anything to make it back to District Eleven to see his mom and his brother again. Thresh is a large character, and a presence to be reckoned with. But he doesn’t want to get in anybody’s way; he’s not out for blood. He just wants to survive.”
The tributes, also, were changing their looks and sharpening their skills.
Dayo Okeniyi says, “I was put on a rigorous diet of just protein, and a lot of chicken, a lot of vegetables, because I had to gain weight but I had to gain good weight.”
Jack Quaid also had to bulk up for his role. “They got me a personal trainer and I put on about sixteen pounds of muscle. It’s good to do something you love for a living and then, at the same time, get in the best shape you’ve ever been in. That’s just nice.”
Meanwhile, stunt coordinators Allan Poppleton and Chad Stahelski were preparing to teach the tributes the fight skills their characters would need to know for the scenes in the Training Center and in the arena. They’d had about eight weeks to put the sequences together, and were eager to see them in action.
Jon Kilik notes, “Safety in a movie like this was a paramount concern for us. With all the stunts, action, fights and weapons, the welfare of the actors and crew was a big priority. Some of those swords and daggers are real, and we constantly had to be aware of the dangers.”
Before teaching the cast each sequence, Stahelski and Poppleton tried to have a few days alone with the stunt performers. That way, when everyone trained together, some of the group was already familiar with the choreography.
Chad Stahelski says, “We took them into the gym and kind of had Romper Room. We trained them to do certain things and to get certain performances out of them. Everybody was game to do everything, but some of the exercises were done with stunt tributes only, for time restraints and, of course, for safety reasons.”
“We did some very intense fight training. That’s what I was focusing on the most, because that is what Cato is, really,” says Alexander Ludwig. “Cato’s weapon of choice is a giant steel sword. I like to think I’ve become very skilled with the sword. . . .”
Isabelle Fuhrman, who plays Clove, adds, “I will say I do know how to throw a knife properly now, which is kind of creepy and a skill that I probably won’t use, but it’s just fun to say, you know? ‘What’d you learn this summer?’ ‘Oh, I learned how to throw knives.’ Just casually.”
To prepare for the fight sequences, the stunt coordinators looked to the actors themselves. “It’s not like we took any of the tributes and started training them in karate or kickboxing or jujitsu or anything like that,” Stahelski points out. “We just took Isabelle or we took Zander [Alexander Ludwig] or we took any of the other ones and found out what they were good at, what character they had. We just kind of took that and ran with it during the big fight sequences, like at the Cornucopia. When you see the struggles between them on film, they’re wild and emotional — they feel like kids fighting on the playground. That’s the concept Gary wanted, and we took that to the next level when we added the weapons.”
All of these preparations were about to come together with the vision of the design team to create one unforgettable film.
Early in the process of making a movie, the director works with his or her design team to formulate the film’s look. For The Hunger Games, there would need to be many looks to capture the spectrum of life in Panem. There would be the look of the districts first, and later the look of the Capitol — it would be essential to set them apart from one another, to underscore the injustices that Collins had set up in her novel. On top of that, there would be the look of the arena itself. It would be a formidable challenge for Gary Ross to make these different pieces appear to be part of one whole.
Katniss walks along the fence that surrounds District 12.
Phil Messina, production designer for movies in the Ocean’s Eleven series, as well as many others, explains his role like this: “I design the physical environment that the actors act in. I select locations and design a lot of the virtual environment, too.” Before sets were built or costumes were designed, Messina was working with Ross to set the overall tone.
Messina first encountered The Hunger Games when Gary Ross urged him to read the book. Messina remembers: “Gary said, ‘Read the book and tell me what you think.’ He texted me probably three or four times when I was reading. ‘You done yet? What part are you on?’ And it was great — I literally read it overnight. Visually, it was striking.”
Messina and Ross began to conceive what the different places in the movie would look like, from the Seam to the Capitol to the arena. They found photos that might guide these looks, and presented their ideas to Lionsgate.
An early digital rendering of what a street in District 12 might look like.
“We went with sort of an Appalachian coal- mining vibe for the Seam,” says Messina. “But then we added little bits and pieces, things that would have survived through the decades. We were careful not to make it feel like they were living in the Depression era — there was an
allusion to that, but we added more modern elements, too,” like appliances and outdated cars.
An artist’s digital rendering of miners in District 12.
He continues: “There wasn’t a very specific description of the Capitol in the book. As I was doing research, I found these buildings from the World’s Fair in New York, when General Motors built a giant complex. And it just seemed to vibe with what we had been talking about, so we riffed off of that for the Capitol. The buildings are pure advertisements of industry. They have a scalelessness, like you can’t tell if they’re ten feet tall or a thousand feet tall.”
Director Ross was thinking the same way. “It was important to me that the Capitol evoke a sense of power and might and authority. Well, that’s not spires going up to the sky — that’s too fanciful. That’s light. So we started to see the Capitol’s power reflected in vast horizontal open space punctuated by buildings that are incredibly solid, heavy in mass.”
What the images had in common were deep American roots: Some were from the American past, and some were past American ideas of what the future might look like. The American references made great sense to Nina Jacobson, who points out, “You don’t want the audience to be let off the hook in this movie. This is us in the future, if we’re not careful.” Once this base was established, everything else grew out of it.
The next step was to decide where to do the filming.
What comes to mind when you think of North Carolina? Lush forests, perhaps. Mist rising over the Great Smoky Mountains. An All-American road trip down the Blue Ridge Parkway. The haunting sound of a banjo. It’s not the first place you’d think to locate an arena where two dozen teenagers fight to the death, or a city full of foolish spectators who cannot look away. Yet Gary Ross saw its possibilities from the beginning. A state with thousands of acres of forests — but also a modern city, Charlotte — might manage to serve his multiple needs.