The Hunger Games: Official Illustrated Movie Companion (9 page)

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.”