by Kate Egan
“What we’ve been able to do,” Messina explains, “is use a lot of actual locations and amend them and bring them into the world of the movie, so it’s not all created from the ground up.” In other words, Ross and Messina tackled two tasks simultaneously: scouting locations and building sets in North Carolina.
For the Seam in District 12, they had an incredible stroke of luck. Messina says, “Through the North Carolina Film Commission, we ended up finding an abandoned mill town. There were thirty-five almost identical factory homes for the workers — they lived on the premises, right where they worked — it was absolutely perfect.”
It appealed to Gary Ross because, as he puts it, “It’s one thing to live in squalor, but it’s another thing to live in squalor without any individuality, where the houses are cookie-cutter and manufactured by the company, not the people.”
Messina’s team built an interior in one of the houses — for the Everdeen family — and added details to the others to make it appear as if people were living in them. The only problem, really, was that Messina had first seen the town in winter, months before the filming began. “Without leaves and brown grass, it looked the right sort of dismal,” he remembers. “As spring took hold, though, it started getting greener and more lush. It looked sort of like a golf course.” Before the cast arrived, the crew plucked leaves off trees and covered patches of grass so it would turn brown.
In Shelby, North Carolina, Messina’s location manager, Todd Christensen, found an old warehouse complex where the people of District 12 might gather for the reaping. “Phil wanted a big enough square to do our scenes, which meant we had to cut one of the buildings in half,” he remembers. “I had to negotiate that. And then the building was filled with junk, so we had to find the guy who owned it to get the junk out — so we could cut the building in half. It’s one of those things that people don’t know about that happens in order to make a look.”
The crew sets up for a shot in District 12.
On one of the warehouse walls the team built a Hall of Justice, the Capitol’s headquarters in the district. And the Capitol’s shadow was also visible in the railroad cars Messina had painted with Capitol Coal and lowered onto the site with cranes. Just to emphasize, says Messina, “that the district’s raw material was not going to them — it was going to the Capitol.”
Near Charlotte, a former Philip Morris plant was sitting empty. Todd Christensen says, “When I got here in February they were toward the end of cutting up every piece of machinery for scrap and they had cleared out this building in order to sell it.” It was a two-thousand-acre campus, with three million square feet of manufacturing and office space.
Messina and Ross had talked about building a Training Center for the tributes, but because it was in the Capitol it would have to be enormous. “I suggested to Gary that he come and look at this Philip Morris plant because there were some huge spaces.” It had high ceilings, no pillars, and just the scale the production needed. Rather than build a Training Center from scratch, the team decided to construct one within the plant. There was plenty of room to create multiple training stations for the tributes, as well as a balcony for the Gamemakers.
The tributes run through the gauntlet in the Training Center.
Even the woods locations required a great deal of advance planning. Messina scouted in various state parks in January and February. “I was scouting in the snow, with no leaves on any of the trees. I’m referring back to books about what this place looks like in the summertime and there’s a little bit of a leap of faith, but ultimately it worked out well.”
Ross adds, “The arena’s obviously in the forest and I wanted it to be different from a lot of forests you see in movies. I wanted it to have hardwoods — I didn’t want it to be just coniferous. I wanted it to feel uniquely American.”
Eventually they used the same woods for District 12 and the arena, but postproduction work changed the lighting and the feel of the arena setting, so the woods didn’t look quite natural, but more like a creation of the Gamemakers. As Messina describes it, “We just took out a little bit of the haphazardness of nature.”
Lawrence and Hutcherson begin a scene in the arena.
Creating the Cornucopia was a special challenge to the design team. “In the book it says that it’s a cornucopia like the one that’s used at holiday time,” says director Gary Ross. “But we paused and wondered: What does that mean in the future? I wanted to create a large metallic sculptural element that almost seemed like a knife-edge into the natural world. We came up with this faceted, sculptural object that felt evocative of the Capitol: hard and cold.”
Messina explains, “We looked at some of Frank Gehry’s work such as Disney Hall and we looked at a lot of modern architecture that’s taking place right now, with sort of folded planes. I think Suzanne described it as being painted gold, but we ended up going with a gunmetal gray. It’s actually one of my favorite pieces in the movie. We built it in Charlotte and trucked it out to Asheville, set it out with a crane on location.”
Set decorator Larry Dias was responsible for furniture, lighting, carpets — anything not a floor or a wall on a location or a set. “I go into an empty shell of the set and then put everything inside of it,” he explains. Once Ross and Messina had articulated their overall vision, and identified or created places for filming, Dias could get to work.
At first he thought it could be difficult to decorate the Everdeens’ house. The location was perfect, but where would he find the furniture to flesh it out? “I’d never worked in North Carolina,” he says. “I wasn’t really sure what I was going to be able to acquire here, so we’d done a lot of prep work in Los Angeles. But once I got here I realized, it’s kind of a treasure trove for this type of a movie. The first day I got to North Carolina, Sara Gardner-Gail, my assistant, and I did a little research, trying to find some antique stores. And we happened to find one that’s literally less than a mile from the Philip Morris plant where we’re shooting — eighty-eight thousand square feet of antiques. We hit the mother lode on day one.” They bought tables, chairs, photographs, all in keeping with the visual tone of the film.
Even with such a rich source of materials, Dias had a harder time finding stuff to fill the Hob. He says, “The Hob was difficult because you’re trying to create a marketplace with things that have no value except to the people that live within the Seam.” Luckily, he found a man who was “sort of an antiques dealer, but his antiques are in an unfinished, raw state. He has a yard, probably on forty acres, so there’s a lot of stuff outside that’s just in piles and heaps. We were able to get lots of stuff there.”
Katniss barters in the Hob.
When it came time to decorate the town square, Dias says, “We sourced these giant glass balls that became the reaping balls and rigged them onto some tables that we found here in North Carolina. We outfitted them to make them look like they were a tool of the Capitol, sent out to all the districts. So all the districts, when we see the reapings, have the same balls.”
Just as Messina had looked to the past to design the Capitol’s exteriors, Dias looked to the past to create its interiors. In addition, he says, “There’s a coldness to it all, a sort of spare quality. The spaces lack anything personal.” He special-ordered period pieces from the 1960s and 1970s, and mixed this furniture with light fixtures from a North Carolina showroom.
The Capitol’s style extended even to the interior of the hovercraft, which Dias helped to design. “Inside the hovercraft, we were going after a militaristic feel. There’s a coldness to it, too, obviously. They’re taking these kids off to these Games, and they all know what’s going to happen next. I found the seats early on — they’re actually NASCAR race-car seats. I found a North Carolina manufacturer less than a mile away, and we customized the seats. Made them all have symmetry instead of asymmetry, because that’s what the Capitol would have.”
The tributes in the hovercraft that will bring them to the arena. Rue and Clove sit in the
seats closest to the camera.
Trish Gallaher Glenn, the movie’s prop master, was responsible for everything the actors picked up and touched in the movie. One of her greatest challenges was making sure that Katniss’s weapons were representative of the various places she used them.
“Katniss has two bows in the movie,” says Glenn. “The first bow is the hunting bow that her father has made, that she hides in the district. We wanted something very organic, very real, very simple. And we wanted the other bow for the Games to reflect the Capitol, as if everything that was made for the Games was made by artisans in the Capitol. We went black and silver, and we tried to do a lot of combinations of matte and shiny. And we wanted super-clean lines. Her arrows for the Games are bright and shiny, silver aluminum rods with a really elongated tip. We did the fletching, which would be the feathers on the arrow, in a clear plastic with silver Mylar on it. And we had Jennifer pull them, we had her run with them, so that we could all see and make sure we had it right.”
Glenn also created the other tributes’ weapons, which had to look lethal but be practical during filming. She says, “Some weapons are made of aluminum. It’s a super-high-quality aluminum that you can actually fight with, blade on blade, metal on metal. Then we figure out if we need any rubber replicas, soft ones you can hit somebody over the head with.”
A close-up of the backpack Katniss grabs at the start of the Games — with a knife protruding.
Careful thought went into designing the parachutes that deliver sponsors’ gifts to the tributes during the Hunger Games. Glenn says, “When I read the book, it said ‘a tiny parachute’ and somehow in my mind it was something very, very small. But when you get the reality that Katniss gets a roll, she gets soup, she gets all these different medicines in the parachute and the container is beneath the parachute . . . it had to expand a lot. We kind of went into this direction that it’s all being controlled anyway by the Capitol, that it didn’t really have to be working but it should appear to be controllable.”
The Capitol’s cruelty even extended to the shocking color of the berries Glenn chose. “We started out thinking, well, maybe we can take blueberries, those really big blueberries that you can find at a certain time of year, and dye them,” she says. “And that didn’t work at all. So we came up with a wild berry that I ordered online, and this particular one that I think is pretty amazing. The juice of it is red, bright red, almost like blood, which we thought was really cool. We went with a frozen one and we have this technique for defrosting them very slowly with paper towels, and we try to keep them as dry as possible so they don’t squish. Still, they were everywhere. Scott Hankins, the costumer, hated us for a few days because of the berry juice that was all over the costumes.”
Gary Ross and Phil Messina hired Jack White, a food stylist, to design and create the food of Panem. “When we were at District Twelve, there were a few scenes with Katniss and her mom where her mom is cooking. The beans and the greens that we had for them to eat looked almost rotten. The thought was not to bring in beautiful food, but to pick stuff that looked almost like it was about to decompose.”
Top: Phil Messina, production designer, arranges the food in the train car.
Below: Examples of Capitol food.
In the Capitol, though, he worked with fresh food and bright colors. “Blues, oranges, greens . . . but not any pastels, not any earth tones. Nothing brown.” White’s job was not to make food that the actors would eat while filming, but rather to make food that seemed right for the strange and luxurious world of the Capitol. “I have to make things that could last twelve hours on the set. Showpieces, really. Israeli couscous — you can make that any color you want. And quail eggs. Two seconds in a colored water and they come out looking beautiful.”
Food plays an unusually important role in The Hunger Games, since it’s one way the Capitol exerts its power over the districts. People feast in the Capitol while they starve in the districts, and over the course of the book Katniss’s experiences are reflected in the food she eats. “Before the Games, when Katniss is at home, she’s hungry,” says Jack White. “She’s having to hunt for food, struggling to find something to eat. Then, as she’s on her way to the Games, she experiences — for the first time — an abundance of food. It’s probably the first time in her life that she’s seen that much, and it’s all available to her. Then, once she arrives in the Capitol, it’s completely over the top and she’s not even sure what it is that she’s getting to see.”
As Collins lavished attention on the food in her book, Ross lavished attention on the smallest food details in the film, working with Jack White to bring his vision to life.
Creating the bread of District 11, for instance, was a long process. White remembers, “In the movie, Katniss receives a gift from District Eleven — the roll floats down to her in the arena. The director was very specific in what he wanted that roll to look like. So I think we made about fifteen or twenty different kinds of rolls. They all had to be a specific size and weight to make sure they would fit in the container. It ended up being a half-wheat, half-white flour, so that gave it a nice color. We were stenciling the number 11 on, until the director asked us if we could try to burn it in. So then that involved another company that did the brands for us. We had to find the right font for that. Then they decided they’d like to see a ring around the number, so that was another step. I had the eleven burned right into the center of the roll, but that looked too perfect — it needed to seem more like an afterthought, so the brand ended up in the right-hand corner. And then I had to make seventy-five of those, because you can’t just have one.”
Likewise, a great deal of thought and effort went into creating the bread that Peeta throws to Katniss when she’s on the brink of starvation. White says, “We went to a bakery in Asheville and we got several samples of different sizes of bread to show Gary, and Gary picked the one he liked. In the scene, Peeta throws burned bread from his family’s bakery to Katniss. So we stood with a blowtorch and burned roll after roll. They used two per take, and it was raining in the scene, so we needed a lot of extras.”
White worked closely with other members of the design team to make sure that the food created a flawless look together with the sets and the props. “Some of the food choices depend on what the set decorator, Larry Dias, does. For instance I need to know what the plates look like before I know what sort of food I can put on them. On one of my first jobs, they ordered lobster for the scenes, and the lobster was three times bigger than the plate.”
And when he cooked for the filming, he always cooked extra, in case something went wrong. “The suckling pig was cooked with something in its mouth to keep it open. After it was cooked, we replaced that with an apple. We had to make three pigs because if something happened while they were shooting the arrow into the apple, we’d be up the creek. Every take, we put a new apple in there.”
The visual sense of the movie began with the locations and props, but soon extended to the characters at the heart of the story.
Now that the overall look of the movie was in place, it was time to design the look of the characters. Costume designer Judianna Makovsky spoke extensively with Gary Ross early on about a general look for the characters in The Hunger Games. “Gary and I agreed that it had to be a recognizable world, not a foreign, futuristic world,” Makovsky says. “People needed to be able to relate to it.” She smiles and adds, “But it was really fun for us, too. We could do outrageous things that we don’t usually get to do in a movie.”
Rows of wigs for the Capitol cast members.
Makovsky worked with makeup artist Ve Neill and hair department head Linda Flowers. Between them, the three had designed costumes, hair, and makeup for dozens of movies and garnered three Academy Awards® and eleven Academy Award® nominations. “The way I work as a designer, I don’t just design a frock,” Makovsky says. “I’m designing a person. I start from the head and go to the foot. I work very closely with makeup and hair and we design it a
ll together. I have the most collaborative team and I think it’s more successful that way.”
Shooting of The Hunger Games started on May 23, 2011, when director Gary Ross flew to North Carolina from Los Angeles. Many of the actors were assembled there already, with more to come as larger scenes were filmed. Locations had been identified, sets had been built. Training was finished, lines were memorized. Everything was ready to go.
Director Gary Ross on set.
Ross had a clear sense of the way he wanted to shoot the film, and it was different from any approach he’d taken in his previous movies. “One of the things that’s most important here is to convey the immediacy, the first-person point of view that the book has. The cinematic style has to reflect that. So in this movie I got to shoot in a way that I’d never shot before — more urgent, more personal. I needed to give the audience that incredibly immediate sense that they’re not watching this girl — they are this girl.”
Wherever possible, then, he kept to Katniss’s point of view. “I didn’t want the audience to know more than the character knew. I wanted them to be in her shoes, to experience everything through her eyes,” Ross adds. Occasionally the film cuts away to show developments in the Capitol that will affect Katniss, or reactions back home to her performance in the Games, but for most of the movie the audience is with Katniss, filled with suspense and fear.