The Hunger Games: Official Illustrated Movie Companion (7 page)

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.

E
arly 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.

“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.”