by Kate Egan
Ross used a handheld camera to shoot some of the pivotal scenes, giving them an intense you-are-there feeling. Nina Jacobson explains, “It’s a big movie, and at the same time we didn’t want it to be a grandiose movie. We wanted it to have a little bit of that guerrilla quality. It’s set in the future, but it’s not a movie that’s all about technology.”
While many of the young actors were new to filmmaking, they couldn’t help but notice Ross’s unusual technique. Dayo Okeniyi, who plays Thresh, says, “The fights are shot in a very gritty documentary-type style, almost like the Super Bowl. The camera gets right in there with us, and audiences are gonna feel like they are right there on the field, fighting for their lives.”
The film was shot between May and September, beginning with some of the District 12 scenes, skipping ahead to most of the arena’s action, and then returning to the Capitol scenes before and after the Games.
As in most movies, the scenes were not shot in chronological order, which meant that the Hunger Games team had to keep careful track of how the actors and backgrounds looked in each frame, to ensure continuity in the final film. It also meant that the team was moving across North Carolina, shooting in place after place, all summer long.
Alli Shearmur of Lionsgate says, “I went to North Carolina every few weeks during the filming — it wasn’t a typical situation. Gary had to make sure he had the footage he needed for every single scene, because there would be no time to reshoot later if he missed something. The movie would be in theaters in March 2012, ten months after shooting began. Because of this schedule, the production had to be unbelievably well choreographed and well rehearsed, and everybody worked long days to get what they needed there and then. They were in the woods for a long time, because they weren’t going back.”
Willow Shields gets direction during the shooting of the reaping.
The actors playing the tributes had already been through training together, but filming was a different kind of experience, eerily reminiscent of the Games themselves. Producer Jon Kilik says, “Once the kids were selected and they all came together, it was not so different from the Hunger Games. They were brought into this world; they were a little suspicious of each other, a little competitive with each other. And they were performing. They had to survive. Then they slowly started to work together, get to know each other, and they really embraced and embodied their characters beautifully.”
The young actors filmed the first Cornucopia scene almost right away, and their training made it go smoothly. Their moves were choreographed ahead of time, and stunt trainers were on hand if they needed them. Putting their training into practice brought the group closer together, and made them think about the story, too.
Gary Ross and Jennifer Lawrence work on a scene in the arena.
One highlight of the shooting was a visit from author Suzanne Collins. The actors were overjoyed — and awed — to have her on hand as they filmed one of the movie’s pivotal scenes. Collins recalls, “I was on the set for Rue’s death. The scene’s so key, not only because of its emotional impact on Katniss — Rue’s essentially become Prim’s surrogate in the arena — but because it has to be powerful enough to trigger the first rumblings of the rebellion. It’s very demanding for the actors. All three of the kids — Jen, Amandla, and Jack — they gave terrific performances. T-Bone Burnett had come up with this lovely, haunting melody for the lullaby. And Gary, who was, of course, masterminding the whole thing, filmed it beautifully. There’s this one shot of Katniss cradling Rue in the periwinkle with the lush background of the forest. On the monitor it looked like an exquisite portrait, like something you’d frame and hang in a museum. I remember Amandla came and sat next to me between takes and she asked me, ‘So, what did you imagine it would be like?’ And I said, ‘Like that.’ But really, it exceeded my expectations.”
Leven Rambin, who plays Glimmer, remarks on another notable aspect of the shoot. “It was an extreme experience to be out in the middle of nowhere with no electricity or Internet service or anything. It definitely felt like you were there — like you were really there. We were really hot — just dying out there — and isn’t that really the point?”
“Our shooting schedule was crazy!” says Josh Hutcherson. “We were shooting three to four pages a day, which doesn’t sound like much, but when you realize how many shots you have to have for each one of those things, it’s an incredible amount.” Like the tributes in the Games, the actors were exhausted at the end of every shooting day. And then they had to deal with the elements.
Amandla Stenberg perches in a tree with the help of a few crew members.
Summers in North Carolina are hot and humid — and wet. “We shot the arena section in state forests in North Carolina during the rainy season,” Jon Kilik says. “It rained almost every afternoon but we rarely stopped. It was a very physically challenging film.”
The crew shelters from the rain.
The crew preps for a scene in the DuPont State Forest.
Alli Shearmur remembers: “Joe Drake and I were there the day that Gary shot the aftermath of the tracker-jacker scene, when Katniss thinks she sees Peeta, then hallucinates that she sees Caesar Flickerman. They were doing a tremendous amount of work — and then the skies opened up. There was a torrential downpour. Everyone just stood around in their rain ponchos, cheerful as could be, because this was happening to them every day, and they knew it would stop soon. After the rain stopped, the mud was ankle-deep, and then it was like, ‘Everybody! Take your places!’ like it was no big deal at all.”
Jennifer Lawrence comments on the heat: “My Games costume was great in the fitting. It was perfect. As soon as we took it out in the hundred-and-something-degree weather, though, the leather jacket and the pants and the boots were quite different.” Still, the team kept to a strict schedule, shooting through the rain and the heat and the mud — and watching out for other potential obstacles, too.
“We had a snake wrangler — a full-time snake wrangler — on set,” Nina Jacobson points out. “We had a lot of bears. One place we shot in — North Fork, North Carolina — has one of the highest per-acre bear populations of any place in the United States.”
Not all of the animals were dangerous, but most of them were a nuisance — especially the wild turkeys. “We had wild turkeys on the set where the Cornucopia was,” recalls Isabelle Fuhrman, who plays Clove. “We’d be in the middle of a shot and the turkeys would come in and they’d send the ADs and PAs to chase them away. One day after work, we were driving home and we saw the turkeys on the pedestals on the Cornucopia — like they were having their own Hunger Games!”
Alli Shearmur remembers the experience of watching Ross shoot at night. “The woods where they shot the arena scenes were pristine. Untouched. They hadn’t been used for a movie since The Last of the Mohicans. The crew would bring in equipment on ATVs, sometimes put a scene together overnight. It appeared to be spontaneous, but there was an enormous amount of effort behind the scenes. I was there the night they shot the scene with the mutts. In the woods . . . in the dark . . . it was unbelievable.”
Ross spent time with each of the actors, digging to the core of their characters. As Ross knew, an actor who understood his or her character could more easily be that person in front of the camera. The young actors, especially, were grateful for his careful approach.
“We did the scene where I was dying,” says Amandla Stenberg, “and I was talking to Gary about it, because I thought I’d be sobbing my eyes out. But he decided I shouldn’t be crying so much because my character was trying to be brave for Katniss, and that was really the start of the rebellion.”
Jennifer Lawrence prepares to practice snares in the Training Center.
Wes Bentley plays Seneca Crane in the movie. He says, “When you’re playing a character that’s not as defined as the others, you really look to your director. Gary and I talked about Seneca being this sort of cocky kid who’s never had anything bad happen to him in his life. He’s just
had success after success, climbing the ladder.”
After their conversations, Ross watched Bentley closely, trying to remind him of what they’d discussed without destroying the momentum of any particular take. “Gary has such an amazing ability to feel the energy of a particular actor, to see the struggles you’re having at any moment, and to set you on the right path without you really knowing what just happened,” Bentley adds. “Gary understands the lens; he understands the performances; he understands the whole film as he’s putting it together.”
Dayo Okeniyi agrees. “Working with Gary is amazing because he has a way of making the set very calm, of making the actors feel comfortable. It feels like an indie set, being on this movie, very homey and family oriented. Gary doesn’t put pressure on the take. He’s just very light with it. Do this; try that; no, that’s not working, let’s try it again. He’s very much like the script is the skeleton and as an actor it’s your job to put the flesh on that.”
Ross’s approach set the tone for everything the actors did together. It could have felt arduous, but instead the shooting felt joyful and exciting. “It isn’t always the case where you’re in a constant state of laughter and merriment on a set,” says Woody Harrelson. “But it was on this one.”
“We were avid readers on the set,” says Alli Shearmur. “Gary, Jennifer, Nina. Everyone. I bought Jennifer the collected works of J. D. Salinger for her birthday. There was a real family feeling there. Josh hosted Saturday night barbecues for the cast, and everybody was always playing basketball. One night, when T-Bone Burnett was there, Gary hosted a dinner for him. Jennifer’s assistant and good friend, Justine, brought her guitar, played it beautifully but kind of shyly, and, before you knew it, T-Bone Burnett was playing, too.”
The actors playing the tributes developed a special bond. Leven Rambin says, “For a lot of us, it’s our first film. We’re in the trenches, we’re covered in mud; we’re fighting and sweating and we don’t even care. We’re just happy to be here.”
After shooting wrapped for the day, the tributes spent time exploring nearby areas, or just getting to know each other better. “Most of us are in the same hotel,” explains Jacqueline Emerson, who plays Foxface. “We go out to dinner every other night. We go to movies together. The other night I spent three or four hours just walking around with Jack and Dayo. We went to this great little bookstore and just hung out there.”
“When we’re doing all the scenes in the woods where we’re fighting, those other kids are actually our friends,” Josh Hutcherson points out. “You’re used to hanging out and laughing with them, so it’s kind of a weird transition when they say ‘Action!’ and suddenly there’s a giant bloodbath.”
While the actors were exploring their characters and their new friendships, other teams were putting the pieces in place for the movie’s action sequences.
Location manager Todd Christensen had found the perfect place to film the scene where a wall of fire comes at Katniss, cornering her. “DuPont State Forest let us do a controlled burn, not only on their forest but about a quarter of a mile from the ranger’s house. For Katniss to feel like she was trapped, they put in a tree that they ratcheted so it could come down, but then she also had to fall into a rock. We had the tree — not the rock — so they put a rock in to make the drama of the scene better.”
Then special effects foreman Brandon McLaughlin rigged a wire to make it appear as if fireballs were shooting at Katniss. “It’s what we normally do when a director says, ‘I want this to go from Point A to Point B and hit it every time,’” he explains. “There’s a sixteen-inch cable right down the middle of the fireball, and we shoot it down a wire with what looks like a slingshot. The fireball itself was a steel apparatus — like a giant corkscrew — with a product wrapped on top of it that we could ignite and burn.” Any signs of the rigging would be erased in postproduction.
Another special effects challenge was building — and then destroying — the pyramid of Career Tributes’ supplies. McLaughlin remembers that he didn’t discuss the pyramid in great depth with Gary Ross before he began setting it up. “We put something together to show him. What we thought was fairly good in size. And Gary said, ‘I want it four times bigger.’ So our eyes lit up, and we went back to the drawing board and we came up with something for him. He absolutely loved it.”
When the pyramid’s size increased, the size of the eventual explosion increased, too. Location manager Christensen hoped that wasn’t going to be a problem. “The pyramid was built at North Fork in the same meadow as the Cornucopia. That’s a watershed, and they don’t want anything going into the water. We had to not only have that pyramid in a particular place, but also far enough away from the water, and blowing up away from the water. But it kept getting bigger! When I told the conservancy that our plans had changed — that the explosion would be larger — they were great. They just said, ‘I wish we could be there to see it.’ But they were busy doing other things.”
The crew prepares to shoot the fireball sequence in the arena.
Some scenes were too large or too complex to film in real places or with real actors, but these scenes could be extended with computer imaging. “When I’m choosing locations,” production designer Phil Messina says, “I’m often thinking about which parts get set-extended, and where the extensions could start. You have to think of the entire frame, and some of it is virtual. For the Avenue of the Tributes, it was just kind of a no-brainer that it was going to have to be a virtual environment. So I created the chariots and I designed the space — about a mile, from one end to the other, ending with the president’s box. We just picked out the pieces we really needed to build — that’s what made the most sense.”
Jennifer Lawrence prepares to shoot the fireball scene.
Visual effects like the rest of the Avenue, or the hologram in the Games Center, would be added after the movie was finished filming (and are being added as this book is being written). They will add texture and depth to many scenes, and create parts of the scenes that would be impossible to film.
One final dimension to the film, of course, is the music. The movie’s haunting and memorable score was composed by musical legend James Newton Howard. Just like the production design, the music hits two particular notes: the past and the future.
Ross describes James Newton Howard as “One of the greatest composers in movies. Somebody who’s written some of the greatest scores. I think he’s worked on over a hundred movies — his body of work speaks for itself.”
Katniss’s lullaby sprang to life when T-Bone Burnett read the lyrics in Suzanne Collins’s book, says Gary Ross. “Suzanne’s lyrics were iconic within the story already. Katniss sings the lullaby to Prim in the beginning and to Rue later in the movie. T-Bone went away one night and called me the next morning, saying, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ He was so thrilled. And then when I heard it, what was remarkable was it felt like it had always been there. It felt like something that came out of Appalachia that mothers had been singing to their kids for generations.”
With months of filming, and many additional layers of postproduction work, the movie was finally ready to show to the larger world.
In The Hunger Games there’s something for everyone.
A gripping adventure.
A political commentary.
A love story.
A cautionary tale.
Some call it science fiction, some call it potential reality.
Some say it’s for teenagers, some say it’s for adults.
The book — and now the film — captures themes and concerns that seem timely.
But its real strength, in the end, is that it’s timeless. It speaks to us today and it will still speak — even more powerfully — tomorrow.
Director Gary Ross says, “The Hunger Games gets people invested in a contest. People are rooting for their favorites, rooting for their survival. And suddenly, unwittingly, the people being oppressed are actually engaged in this form of enter
tainment. That’s one of the things Suzanne did that was so brilliant. She understood the ultimate extension of something like this. The way you get to control people is to make them participate, not just subjugate them. If there’s one survivor, one victor, we get them participating in our system.”
It’s one of the tricky questions about making The Hunger Games into a movie, of course. In a New York Times interview, Suzanne Collins wondered about this herself. “When you go to see the movie, you’ll be a part of the audience in the theater, but will you feel like part of the Hunger Games audience as well? Will you actively be rooting for certain tributes to live or die? Or will you distance yourself from the experience? How much will you be caught up in the Capitol’s Game? I can’t even answer that question for myself yet, but I’m really intrigued by it.”
Katniss and Prim embrace the morning of the reaping.
It’s not every movie that makes you question the experience of watching it in the first place, but that is a part of the genius of the series. From the very start, it was willing to grapple with serious subjects within the framework of a compelling story. Collins deliberately constructed Panem with echoes of the world we live in, and these echoes reverberate in every moment of the film.
