At that point — with Mockingjay finished but not yet published — Collins began to develop the first draft of a script. She’d been writing scripts since she was twenty years old, and making a living as a writer since she was twenty-eight, so in some respects adapting her own work brought her back into familar territory. It also meant making some difficult choices.
Collins says, “There were several significant differences from writing the book. Time, for starters. When you’re adapting a novel into a two-hour movie you can’t bring everything with you. So a lot of compression is needed. Not all the characters are going to make it to the screen. For example, we gave up Madge, cut the Avox girl’s backstory, and reduced the Career pack. It was hard to let them go but I don’t think that the choices damaged the emotional arc of the story.
“Then there’s the question of how best to take a book told in the first person and transform it into a satisfying dramatic experience. In the novel, you never leave Katniss for a second and are privy to all of her thoughts. We needed to find ways to dramatize her inner world and to make it possible for other characters to exist outside of her company without letting the audience get ahead of her.
“Finally, there’s the challenge of how to present the violence while still maintaining a PG-13 rating so that your core audience can view it. A lot of things that are acceptable on a page have to be handled very carefully on a screen. But that’s ultimately the director’s job.”
Soon veteran screenwriter Billy Ray, director and writer of acclaimed films like Breach and Shattered Glass, came on board to further develop the script. Lionsgate’s Alli Shearmur says, “We thought that the bridge to the movie could be explored even further by someone who’d done this many times,” and Collins adds, “He was a complete pleasure to work with. Amazingly talented, collaborative, and always respectful of the book.” Then, off the strength of this revised script, Lionsgate went to directors.
There was no shortage of interested directors reading the script, people with great talent and experience. Once a director was chosen, Collins knew that person’s vision would be the guiding force behind the project. Color Force and Lionsgate interviewed potential directors, hoping to find one with a vision that would complement Collins’s. Before long, the team found that person in Gary Ross, the Oscar®-nominated writer and director known for movies like Big, Dave, Pleasantville, and Seabiscuit.
Ross’s teenage twins had read the book first, and they raved about it. “I mentioned The Hunger Games to my kids, and they exploded, went on and on, and I had to actually stop them from telling me the entire story,” Ross says. “So I went upstairs, started reading around ten o’clock at night, and finished around one-thirty in the morning. I literally put the book down and said, ‘I have to make this movie. I just have to.’ I got on a plane Monday morning and flew to England to see Nina Jacobson.”
Director Gary Ross views the action on set.
Jacobson was in London, making another movie, when Ross arrived in town and made reservations for dinner. “We sat down and we had a two-hour meal in which his understanding of the themes and the characters — the way that Katniss’s point of view is the heart and soul of the story — was so spot-on,” she says. “He just felt it so deeply. He understood the epic nature of the story and the intimate nature of the story. He was clear that he didn’t want to make a sentimental movie, but it was important to him that the action comes from the characters, it doesn’t just happen to the characters. Gary had great ideas for the movie visually, but we always knew he would come from a character place.”
“Katniss understands the truth so clearly,” Ross says. “That’s why she can’t tolerate tyrants, and that’s what ultimately gives her the ability to rebel. She lives her own truth and she’s very clear about who she is, about what is right and what is wrong. Kids hook into this character not just because she’s kick-ass — though she is. They hook into this character because she’s complicated, too. She’s wrestling with a lot of things that a girl her age would wrestle with, just under incredibly urgent circumstances.”
Alli Shearmur will never forget her first meeting with Gary Ross about The Hunger Games. “After Gary met with Nina in London, he came to Lionsgate to convince us he was the right director for the film. Many directors were interested, but he blew us away with his presentation. He’d made a documentary to show us — interviews with friends of his teenage children, talking about what The Hunger Games meant to them. He showed examples of the filmmaking style he’d want to use to tell Katniss’s story. He even brought artwork to show what he imagined the film could look like. It was an electric presentation.”
Suzanne Collins tells what happened next. “As part of Gary’s creative process, he wrote a subsequent draft which incorporated his incredible directorial vision of the film. And then he very generously invited me in to work with him on it. We had an immediate and exhilarating creative connection that brought the script to the first day of shooting.”
“I’ve had great relationships with all the authors I’ve adapted,” Ross says. “But with Suzanne it was very special because we ended up actual collaborators. It wasn’t just that she was involved — it’s that we became a writing team. We were always talking, we had a good relationship, but then she came to LA in person. I got her thoughts on the script, and her thoughts were so good that we began writing together before we even realized it. It was important to me that she be involved, and it felt so natural and spontaneous that it was a wonderful thing.”
Meanwhile, the cast of the movie was beginning to come together.
Katniss faces the Gamemakers during her private session.
Nina Jacobson recalls her first thoughts about casting the movie. “Once people knew a movie was going to come out, then people got very opinionated about who should play the roles and obviously that’s a lot of pressure. But I think a book adaptation doesn’t have to be just like the book, it has to feel like the book. That’s what you want. You want to get the feeling from the movie that you got from the book, and you want the characters to evoke the characters that you fell in love with. And so it was really a matter of looking for the essence of each character in each actor, knowing we can manipulate hair color, we can manipulate a lot of things, but we can’t really change somebody’s essence.”
“It was definitely a different casting process than I’d ever been through before,” Gary Ross comments. “The fan base feels incredibly connected to the story and everybody had a visceral sense of who should play these characters. People are connected to the material — for them it’s personal.”
Veteran casting director Debra Zane cast a wide net for actors to play the main parts, but the production team also had some intriguing ideas of their own. “The loudest, most influential voice in the casting was Gary’s,” says Alli Shearmur of Lionsgate.
Producer Jon Kilik was working with Nina Jacobson and Gary Ross, and he was a part of many early conversations about casting. “I had seen Winter’s Bone and I didn’t want to influence Gary,” he says. “But when Gary mentioned Jennifer Lawrence, it literally sent shivers up my spine because I thought she was so perfect.”
“We all knew it was about Katniss first and once you found her, then you could find everybody else,” executive producer Robin Bissell adds. “So Katniss was our focus. From the start we talked about Jennifer Lawrence, but we couldn’t just say we’re only going to see one person. So we had a lot of people come in and read, but we were still thinking about Jennifer on some level.”
Jennifer Lawrence as Ree in Winter’s Bone (2010).
Twenty-year-old actress Jennifer Lawrence had only one starring role to her credit, but it had earned her an Academy Award® nomination for best actress. Her performance as Ree in Winter’s Bone had catapulted her out of obscurity, startling audiences with its raw intensity. Lawrence was blonde and beautiful, a few years older than Katniss Everdeen — she wasn’t an obvious match for the role. And yet she’d been completely believable as a destitute
teenager living in the Ozarks. Ross, Jacobson, Lionsgate, and Collins were eager to give her a chance.
Lawrence remembers reading The Hunger Games for the first time. “I read the books around Christmas [2010], and I went through them all in a matter of days. I just thought they were amazing. I loved the futuristic Joan of Arc character of Katniss. And it’s hard to say that something in the future is ‘true,’ but the book speaks truly about our time — it’s incredibly relevant.”
At first she wasn’t sure how she felt about seeing the books in movie form. “I was skeptical because I loved the books so much, but when I met with Gary Ross I realized within about thirty seconds that he was the only one who could make the movie and make it in the right way.”
With great confidence in Ross’s team, Lawrence read for the highly coveted lead role of Katniss. From the moment she walked into the room, her presence was magnetic. Nina Jacobson remembers, “There was instant power and intensity and certainty in Jen’s performance. She came in with this great understanding of this character. This is actually a girl whose fierceness comes from a nurturing place, not a conquering place. In her audition we used the scene in which she’s saying good-bye to her mother and her sister and Gale. There’s a line in the scene in which she tells her mother, ‘Don’t cry.’ And just in the way she tells her mom ‘Don’t cry,’ it’s kind of like ‘Don’t you dare cry. Don’t you dare fall apart in this situation.’ In that one little moment, she spoke volumes about this character and her past and her present and her future.”
Katniss runs through the arena.
Gary Ross adds, “I’ve worked with amazing actors. Someone like Jen comes by once in a generation. I mean, this is an unbelievably rare thing. This is Michael Jordan, this is Baryshnikov, this talent is almost stunning to witness. There’s nothing you can ask her to do that she can’t do.”
Lionsgate’s Joe Drake reminisces about the audition tape that landed Lawrence the unanimous support of the studio, and ultimately the role: “We always factor in a certain degree of research and analysis when we make these major casting decisions. But what ultimately led us to cast Jennifer in the role of Katniss wasn’t anything that could be calculated — it was the visceral reaction of myself and the other decision makers at Lionsgate to her audition. Jennifer’s read gave me chills, and it made me cry. At the end of the day, all of the best casting decisions are made based on raw talent and gut reactions, and we are particularly proud of this one.”
Jennifer Lawrence was in London when she heard she’d landed the part and was overjoyed and overwhelmed: “I was convinced I didn’t have it. And then I got the phone call while I was in London. I was then terrified. I knew this was going to be huge, and that was scary. I called my mom. She said, ‘This is a script that you love, and you’re thinking about not doing it because of the size of it?’ And I don’t want to not do something because I’m scared, so I said yes to the part, and I’m so happy I did.”
Jennifer Lawrence loses herself in a book while taking a break from shooting a scene in the Training Center.
Suzanne Collins had been in on the audition, and she was one of the first people to set Lawrence’s mind at ease about the role. She drove it home to Lawrence that it didn’t matter if people said she was too old or too blonde to play Katniss. “I talked to Suzanne after I got the part, when I was still in England, and it was incredible — I mean, I’m her biggest fan. She said, ‘I know you can do it,’ and all of these other nice things that just gave me the boost that I needed. Hearing them from the woman who created Katniss — I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders,” Lawrence recalls.
“And then we moved on to Peeta and Gale,” says Robin Bissell, “and it was almost exactly the same thing. Josh came in and he sat down and read the cave scene, where he’s hurt and Katniss is nursing him back to life, and immediately he was Peeta. I mean, it was that clear.”
Jacobson says, “When Josh Hutcherson came in to audition, I had actually just met with him earlier in the week, and he was so comfortable in his own skin, so charming and so at ease and so likeable. I felt that he really captured that ‘Peeta-ocity’ of somebody who seemed genuinely sweet, genuinely likeable, but also that he could be a little smooth when he needed to be. You could see how he could cover the politician side of the character that Katniss is both attracted to and suspicious of.”
Suzanne Collins put it this way to Entertainment Weekly: “If Josh had been bright purple and had had six foot wings and gave that audition, I’d have been like, ‘Cast him! We can work around the wings!’ He was that good.”
Josh Hutcherson had been working as an actor for almost a decade already. He had appeared in classic children’s movies like The Polar Express and Bridge to Terabithia; as he grew, so did the depth of his roles. When Gary Ross and the producers were considering him, Hutcherson had recently played a key part in the acclaimed movie The Kids Are All Right, with Julianne Moore and Annette Bening. Starring in The Hunger Games, though, would change the course of his career.
Josh Hutcherson as Laser in The Kids Are All Right (2010).
Hutcherson says, “I fell in love with Peeta right away. His self-deprecating humor, his outlook on life, and how he doesn’t want things to change him — those things are really a part of who I am as a person. I’ve been in this business since I was nine years old and that can change you. Staying true to who I am, and what my value system is, has been important to me since I was really young.”
There was an immediate rapport between Lawrence and Hutcherson, according to many people involved in the casting. Jon Kilik says, “Jennifer and Josh have gotten along great from the beginning, right when they met in rehearsals and even in the casting process. There was a real connection there. They’re both from Kentucky, very close to where District Twelve is supposed to be. So there was this common bond, and it just grew from there.”
The final part of the pivotal trio was put in place with the casting of Australian actor Liam Hemsworth as Gale. Hemsworth had recently drawn attention as the love interest of Miley Cyrus in The Last Song. He wouldn’t have a great deal of screen time in The Hunger Games, but Ross and the producers were already looking ahead to future movies, where Gale would step into the spotlight.
Katniss and Gale relax in the woods outside District 12.
Jacobson puts it this way: “Liam is this big, hunky guy. He has a clear physical advantage over Peeta, which we found interesting — that they would be physically contrasting types. And when we put the actors together in the auditions, you could see how, when Katniss asks Gale to take care of her family, she would trust that he’d do it. Liam is able to communicate very effectively with his eyes and with the small gestures. But you also believe that he has that revolutionary spirit, that he has that fiery quality inside of him.”
Like Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth had a great relationship with Josh Hutcherson. The two would be rivals in the film, but not in real life. Hemsworth says, “I was friends with him before this, and he’s a great actor. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, too. Honestly, I’ll listen to him talk sometimes and it’s like I feel he could lead us into a battle, and I’d follow him. He’s that persuasive.”
Gale carries a crying Prim (Willow Shields) away from the reaping. He promises Katniss that he’ll look out for her family while she’s gone.
Jacobson also noticed their chemistry. “We sent the two guys into training and they got really into it, really gonzo. They got to be very good friends during the training process.”
With the three central characters cast, Ross moved toward casting the key adult supporting roles.
Elizabeth Banks, an actress known for her roles in the Spider-Man trilogy, Seabiscuit, and 30 Rock, was immediately interested. She says, “I called everyone I knew the minute I heard they were making a movie of it. Gary and I worked together on Seabiscuit, so when he got the directing job I sent him a little e-mail like, ‘Just so you know, I’ll totally play Effie!’ It w
as a dream of mine from the get-go.”
Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) holds the microphone for Katniss onstage at the reaping.
Ross had a dual vision for the role of Effie Trinket, Katniss’s escort to the Capitol, and not just anyone would be able to pull it off. “We wanted an actress who could have the comedic chops,” explains Jacobson, “but also the dramatic undertones. Somebody who could do a lot with a little, because there’s a version of Effie that could be very over-the-top, very distracting. The person needs to be ridiculous in some ways and yet have a reality to her. Elizabeth Banks, we felt, brought all of that to the table.”
And Banks was not the only actor actively pursuing a part in the film. Film legend Donald Sutherland, a fixture in movies and on television for the better part of six decades, wrote a letter to his agent and Lionsgate indicating that he’d like to play Panem’s President Snow. “Though the part that I play is, in the first book, small, the film can be so significant in reaching young people and teaching them how to deal with the oligarchy of the privileged, the hegemony of capitalism, it is a revolutionary piece of work. I’m thrilled with it.” Plus, “I wanted to work with Gary Ross,” continues Sutherland. “He’s a brilliant, brilliant writer and, working with him, you discover that he’s a perfect director.”