by Kate Egan
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Part 1: The History of The Hunger Games
Part 2: The Cast of The Hunger Games
Part 3: The Look of The Hunger Games: Places and Props
Part 4: The Look of The Hunger Games: People
Part 5: The Filming of The Hunger Games
Part 6: The Legacy of The Hunger Games
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) stands in the crowd during the District 12 reaping.
An extraordinary girl is trapped inside a game of life and death. With no special training, no magic powers, she finds a way to survive — just like she always has. But now the world is watching, and she’s playing with forces bigger than she knows. Where some find inspiration, others see rebellion. And so the girl discovers: In these games, nobody really wins.
With its twisting plot and constant suspense, Suzanne Collins’s novel The Hunger Games is impossible to put down. It keeps you reading, breathless, until the final page. You’re not alone if you stayed up half the night to finish it, racing toward the end.
But it’s not just the storytelling that hooks you. It’s that the central character, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, is at once so brave and so real. What carries her through the grueling challenges of the arena? What’s her one goal, in this perverse place where violence leads to victory and love leads to defeat? She’s not after wealth or fame — she just wants to get back home.
Katniss has a focus, a raw power, that ordinary people can only dream of. And yet, like us, she’s not entirely in control of her own destiny. In our difficult times, Katniss is a heroine we can understand.
The Hunger Games and its sequels, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, have been on the top of bestseller lists for the last three years and counting. In the United States alone, there are sixteen million copies of these books in print. They’ve lured in readers young and old, become the basis for countless articles and fan sites, and inspired other artists. Now, for the first time, fans of the series will see The Hunger Games brought to life on film.
It’s a major motion picture in every sense of the word: major talent, major effort, major interest. This book will take you behind the scenes, from script to screen, casting to costumes, training to trees. Lots and lots of trees.
First, though, to the book’s beginnings, the soul of the film . . .
It all started when author Suzanne Collins was up way too late one night, sitting on her couch and watching TV. She was flipping channels, switching between a reality show and news coverage of the Iraq war, when suddenly the images began to blur in her mind.
On one channel, young people were testing their limits and going to extremes to entertain an audience. On another channel, young people were fighting for their country and risking their lives.
An idea began to form.
What if a group of kids was required to fight — and risk their lives — as entertainment? Who would be watching? What would this show look like? Could anybody win these games? And what would happen if they did? Suzanne Collins was in the middle of writing a different book, but these questions lingered in her imagination.
It had been five years since Collins had followed a friend’s advice and tried her hand at writing a children’s book. Her first novel, Gregor the Overlander, was about an eleven-year-old boy who falls through a grate in the laundry room of his apartment building. Suddenly he finds himself in a strange world populated by giant cockroaches, spiders, bats, and rats — all the creatures you might expect to find beneath New York City. These species have coexisted uneasily for years, but their world is on the brink of war. Gregor can’t wait to get out, until he discovers that his presence in this world, the Underland, has been foretold in a prophecy, and sticking around might just help him find his missing father. He embarks on a quest that will change both him and this strange land forever.
Suzanne’s first novel, Gregor the Overlander. Above: Author Suzanne Collins.
In 2003, Gregor the Overlander was published to wide acclaim, making Suzanne Collins an author to watch. Soon her publisher, Scholastic, signed up the next books in what she had always envisioned as a five-part series. By the time the third, Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods, was published, the series had found a loyal following of readers. The series finale, Gregor and the Code of Claw, was a New York Times bestseller. With a hungry audience and a growing reputation for fast-paced, thought-provoking stories, Collins was poised to take her next step as a writer.
Most of her career had been spent in children’s television, writing shows for Nickelodeon and PBS, like Clarissa Explains It All, Oswald, Little Bear, and Clifford’s Puppy Days. Collins loved writing for young children, and several of her shows had been nominated for Emmy Awards, but she’d long been fascinated by subjects more suitable for older kids.
In The Underland Chronicles (as the Gregor books came to be known), Collins had created a complex society that exploded into war. Her readers were mostly in middle school, but she had written genocide and biological weapons into these books. She had killed off beloved characters to explore the cost and the emotional fallout of war. Still, she had more to say about when and how — or whether — war could be justified. In a young adult novel, she might delve more deeply into the subject. While waiting for editorial comments on her final Gregor book, Collins wrote a short proposal for a young adult trilogy called The Hunger Games.
Collins found inspiration in several places beyond her TV set. First, in her childhood love of Greek mythology, particularly the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. As part of the surrender terms of a war, King Minos of Crete required that the city of Athens send tribute to him in the form of seven youths and seven maidens. These tributes went into a labyrinth to face the Minotaur — half man and half monster — who would then destroy them all. This savagery continued until the Athenian prince, Theseus, went as tribute to Crete, and killed the Minotaur instead.
As a child, Suzanne Collins was struck by the cruelty of the Cretan king, and it stayed in the back of her mind as she began to construct the country of Panem, the setting for The Hunger Games. Like King Minos, Panem’s cold and calculating President Snow sends a clear message to his people. As Collins puts it: “Mess with us and we’ll do something worse than kill you. We’ll kill your children.”
One of Collins’s favorite movies is the classic Spartacus, based on the true story of a Roman slave. While being trained in a gladiator school, Spartacus and his mates overthrew their guards and escaped to freedom. Led by Spartacus, they were joined by other slaves, and the rebellion built to the Third Servile War with the Roman Empire. Like Katniss, Spartacus followed a path from slave to gladiator, from gladiator to rebel, and from rebel to the face of a war.
Most important, all of Collins’s ideas for the trilogy were steeped in the war stories she heard as a child. Her father had spent his entire career in the Air Force, as a military specialist as well as a historian and a doctor of political science. He served in Vietnam when Collins was six, and moved the family between the US and Europe for his work after he returned. War was never far from his mind, and he had a unique gift for making the subject come alive for his four children.
The Collins family visited many battlefields, and Collins’s father never shied away from telling his kids what had happened there. He told them what led to the battle, what happened in the battle, and what its consequences were for the real people who fought in it and the citizens whose futures depended on its outcome. Other parents tried to shelter their kids from the idea of war, but Collins’s fa
ther challenged his kids to ask questions. What, if anything, made these bloody battles worth their cost? Collins knew only too well what it meant to wait and worry for a parent who might never come home.
All of these pieces went into the proposal, which she sent out in the summer of 2006. The three-and-a-half-page write-up included an overview of the Games and brief descriptions of each book. “Although set in the future,” Collins wrote, “The Hunger Games explores disturbing issues of modern warfare such as who fights our wars, how they are orchestrated, and the ever-increasing opportunities to observe them being played out.” She also noted that Katniss, though “distrustful,” has “a deep capacity to love and sacrifice for those few people she cares for.” The final books have hewn closely to the original outlines — except for the titles. The original working title for the first book in the trilogy was The Tribute of District Twelve.
Tributes pay close attention to Atala (Karan Kendrick) during their first day in the Training Center.
On the strength of those few pages, Scholastic snapped up the right to publish the Hunger Games trilogy.
“When I sat down to write this series, I assumed it would be like The Underland Chronicles,” Collins told the New York Times later. “Written in the third person and the past tense. I began writing, and the words came out not only in the first person, in the present tense, in Katniss’s voice. It was almost as if the character was insisting on telling the story herself. So I never really make a concentrated effort to get inside her head; she was already very much alive in mine.”
The publisher knew it had something special on its hands as soon as Collins turned in her first draft. Editorial director David Levithan says, “I remember that the manuscript came in on a Friday, and I read it over the weekend. Two other people read it — Kate Egan, Suzanne’s longtime editor, and Jennifer Rees, an editor who was also working on the books. On Monday morning, we were dying to talk to each other — it was simply one of the most astonishing things we’d ever read. Our editorial conversation pretty much consisted of one word: Wow.”
Everyone involved knew the best way to sell the book was to get people to read it. First up were the people in Scholastic’s sales, marketing, and publicity departments, who were blown away and started off the buzzstorm. Advance reader’s copies went out and were devoured in one sitting by booksellers and librarians. Scholastic announced a first printing of 50,000 copies . . . and then doubled it . . . and then doubled it again, as the buzz got louder and louder. Suzanne’s literary agent, Rosemary Stimola, began selling foreign rights to publishers across the world. To date, it has sold in 45 territories. When The Hunger Games was published in October 2008, it met with resounding praise.
The first reviews came from book-industry magazines like Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and every one of them was a rave. Horn Book said, “Collins has written a compulsively readable blend of science fiction, survival story, unlikely romance, and social commentary.”
School Library Journal agreed, writing, “Collins’s characters are completely realistic and sympathetic as they form alliances and friendships in the face of overwhelming odds; the plot is tense, dramatic, and engrossing. This book will definitely resonate with the generation raised on reality shows like Survivor and American Gladiator.”
As The Hunger Games began to climb to the top of bestseller lists, other bestselling authors began to weigh in.
In Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King reviewed The Hunger Games, calling it, “A violent, jarring, speed-rap of a novel that generates nearly constant suspense. . . . I couldn’t stop reading. . . . Collins is an efficient no-nonsense prose stylist with a pleasantly dry sense of humor. Reading The Hunger Games is as addictive (and as violently simple) as playing one of those shoot-it-if-it-moves videogames in the lobby of the local eightplex; you know it’s not real, but you keep plugging in quarters anyway . . .”
Producer Nina Jacobson on set in North Carolina.
Stephenie Meyer loved it, too, and as the author of the Twilight series, she knew what it was like to be a sensation. She wrote, “I was so obsessed with this book I had to take it with me out to dinner and hide it under the edge of the table so I wouldn’t have to stop reading. The story kept me up for several nights in a row, because even after I was finished, I just lay in bed wide awake thinking about it. . . . The Hunger Games is amazing.”
The response to the book was more than anyone involved had dared to hope for.
Two months after it was published, The Hunger Games was on several best-of-the-year book lists. It was catching on with teens and adults alike — it was even being taught in schools. Collins visited a middle school in Plainfield, Illinois, soon after The Hunger Games was published. Its students created a tribute parade in the gym, and Collins did her presentation in front of a large inflatable Cornucopia. Later, a silver parachute was lowered by pulley from the ceiling — containing the mockingjay necklace that Collins wears to this day. The enthusiasm at the school was as contagious as the enthusiasm in newspapers, magazines, and online.
Katniss and Gale relax in the woods outside District 12.
Naturally, The Hunger Games had begun to capture the attention of Hollywood.
Film producer Nina Jacobson, of Color Force Productions, had overseen movies like The Princess Diaries, The Chronicles of Narnia, and the Pirates of the Caribbean series. She describes her first encounter with The Hunger Games: “A smart guy who works for me, named Bryan Unkeless, read the book and fell in love with it. Just the first book had been published — the sequels hadn’t come out yet. He read it, and he gave it to me and said, ‘It’s a really great book. You should check it out.’ I just picked it up, couldn’t put it down, and spent a lot of the time that I was reading it thinking, How can you make a movie that has violence between young people? And yet, as I saw the way that Suzanne had walked that line, by staying inside Katniss’s character and managing to comment on the violence without ever exploiting it, I became more convinced there was a way that a movie could do the same.”
Many production companies were vying for a chance to make the movie version of her story. Collins put off making any decision until she had finished promoting The Hunger Games and writing its sequel, Catching Fire, but eventually she had a series of phone meetings with interested producers. “It’s the major choice you make as an author,” Collins says. “I was looking to get a feel for who they were, how they operated, what their priorities and game plan might be for a movie.”
Jacobson knew that other producers were approaching Collins, which made her even more determined to make the movie herself. “I became pretty much obsessed with the book and then couldn’t bear the thought that anybody else would produce the film.”
Her pitch to Collins hit a nerve. “I made a very passionate case to Suzanne that there were versions of her book, as a movie, that she could really hate and that would end up being sort of guilty of the crimes of the Capitol. There could be a version of the movie which stylized and glamorized the violence, where the movie became, say, the Hunger Games. I felt that an ethical version of the movie needed to be made and needed to be safeguarded. And I felt very passionately about doing that and felt very confident that I could do that. And so I was able to win her over.”
Collins says, “There were so many great choices, but ultimately I felt that Nina had the greatest connection to the work. I believed her when she said she would do everything she could to protect its integrity. And the fact that we had a mutual friend [novelist and screenwriter Peter Hedges] — who spoke so highly of her — tipped the scales in her favor.”
The next step was to find a movie studio, and again there were many competing for the option.
Alli Shearmur, president of production at Lionsgate, recalls, “When Nina Jacobson got the opportunity to produce The Hunger Games, she called me and I read the book right away. I knew it would be worthwhile because it was from Nina — I have known her for a long time and always admired her. I read the book soon after it w
as published, before it was so well-known, so I was responding to the central story of Katniss, not to the cultural phenomenon that it has become. Of course I loved it, from beginning to end.”
She shared the book with Joe Drake, president of Lionsgate’s motion picture group, and Tim Palen, the company’s president of marketing. They had questions about how the book would translate into film, but by the time they spoke to Suzanne Collins, they shared a clear vision.
Drake, who runs the motion picture group at the studio, explains that “Lionsgate is known for fearlessness — we have never shied away from bold projects that stir up conversation. But we don’t make projects simply because they’re edgy — whatever the genre, first and foremost we are always looking for quality stories that are character driven. So it wasn’t anything controversial that drew us to The Hunger Games — it was the irresistible character of Katniss. Early on, we had a clear sense of what our priorities would be when telling the story . . . it was about her character and our connection to her story.”
While Collins was finishing her first draft of Mockingjay, Jacobson met with many studios — including Lionsgate — and eventually came to feel that Lionsgate was the best choice for The Hunger Games.
Jacobson says, “I felt that Lionsgate really understood the material and that they would let us make a faithful adaptation; that they wouldn’t soften it, they wouldn’t age up the characters, to make them older so that it would be more palatable. I felt that the power of the book was in the youth of these protagonists and that you couldn’t cheat on that in terms of their age in the story. Lionsgate was on board for, of course, the PG-13 version of the movie, not something full of blood and guts, but something more thematically driven.”
The intense interest in her book still felt slightly unreal to Collins, and she had some practical reasons for feeling comfortable with Lionsgate. “Everyone we needed to get the movie going was right there on the phone,” she remembers. “The studio was small enough for that to be possible. I agreed with Nina that this was probably the best home for the story, our best chance of seeing it made into a film.”
