Next Hunger Games Movie ‘Sunrise’ Confirms Switching Genres in ‘Return to Form’
[post_content]
Disclaimer: This article has been automatically aggregated from
Francis Lawrence has been making Hunger Games movies long enough to bring the series back to a “return to form.” He joined the franchise with Catching Fire in 2013, and now, five films later, November’s Sunrise on the Reaping finds him staging another Quarter Quell in another spectacular arena, and, as he told me behind-closed doors after a special preview of footage, expanding the screen into IMAX-sized proportions to send a chill down audiences’ spines. (I still think about Catching Fire’s aspect ratio twist to this day.) In telling the story of the 50th Hunger Games, and the origin of fan-favorite Haymitch Abernathy, Lawrence was stoked to revive the “scope and spectacle and scale” of the films in an era before Katniss.
But as much as Sunrise goes back to basics, Lawrence and longtime series producer Nina Jacobson were just as excited to finally tell Haymitch’s story, an arc that takes him from an “optimistic kind of carefree kid” to the bitter alcoholic Katniss meets in the first movie. Ultimately, it’s the story of an apolitical young man radicalized into defender of District 12 and beyond. Lawrence sees the film as particularly relevant to the moment.
“When something’s wrong, you have to stand up,” he said. “You have to say something. You have to fight.”
That idea — of Sunrise as both an echo of Catching Fire and the hidden beginning of the revolution Katniss would one day lead — loomed over the gut-wrenching preview footage. So when I had the chance to sit down with Lawrence and Jacobson afterward for an exclusive interview, I jumped at the chance to dig further into how they built that connection.
Francis, you emphasize that Sunrise on the Reaping feels like a return in some ways. What does that mean? Why did The Hunger Games need a return?
Francis Lawrence: When you look at the original trilogy, Suzanne had very specific ideas in mind and she tells a very complete story. But the first book, second book, and first movie and second movie, have a very specific structure to them where you’ve got District 12, somebody gets reaped, you go into the games, right? You have the chariots, you have the interviews, you have the games, then the movie’s basically over. So there’s a certain structure, there are certain expectations, and there are certain things that people love.
Mockingjay is different because the arena is actually the Capitol. But what ends up happening is it suddenly feels like a different world because it doesn’t feel like games anymore. Now you feel like you’re in a war movie, they’re living in a silo, and there’s no District 12.
When you tell Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, everything’s very different. Now you’re doing the origin story of the antagonist and you’re so far back that the games are very rudimentary. And the games are the middle of the movie — you still have another hour-plus after that. So structurally, it’s completely different.
So that’s what I mean by sort of “return to form.” Because I think people fell in love with the original book and movie and Catching Fire. They want to get to the end of the story, which is important, but they don’t feel like the things that people really love, love, love about these stories.
Nina, you told me in the lead up to Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes that you wouldn’t make a Hunger Games movie unless Suzanne showed up with a manuscript for a new Hunger Games book. How did you luck out with the timing on this? Did Suzanne follow Ballad right up with this?
Nina Jacobson: She writes from theme and she writes when she has ideas that she wants to explore and a character through which she can explore the themes. So we never know if she’s writing a book! I remember at the premiere of Ballad, I saw her literary agent, who kind of gave a wink and a nod, like, she’s working. And I was like, Oh my God, she’s working on a book. So we had an idea that she was working on one but I did not think we would get it nearly as early as we got it. I thought it was years away. And then you just get a call. This one we got much earlier in the lifespan of the book than we ever had.
Right, they announced the book and almost the movie at the same time.
Lawrence: They did. We were under massive secrecy because we were reading a manuscript and the book wasn’t even announced. We were coming here to New York to work with Suzanne and couldn’t tell people why. I couldn’t tell my family.
Jacobson: What I loved when I read it… it really made me appreciate the order of the books. Because when she first gave us Ballad, we loved the book, but to come back to the series and everybody’s gonna be like, “Oh, which of my favorite characters will it be?” And you’re like, “It’s actually the guy you hate.” And, “Oh, what are these games gonna be like?” You’re like, “Well, it’s the 10th Games. They’re basically really brutal and upsetting.”
Francis Lawrence: “And our protagonist/antagonist is hardly in them. He’s kind of watching them.”
Nina Jacobson: Exactly, and so it was totally different than the other movies. But then when you read this book and see this movie, you could come to it with no foreknowledge, or when you look at this in the order, you understand so much more about Snow, his relationship to District 12, what it says about his relationship to Katniss. The spectacle of the games, you understand that in a whole different way, having gone through Ballad with him as a young man, and this notion that it is not enough for the games to punish the districts. They have to tell a story, a story that keeps people in place, and Snow’s realization is that they have to entertain.
And when you see what he’s brought to the games and how very different these games are 40 years after the ones where he was a mentor, and how much what he learned there infuses all of this… there’s so much emotion that goes into his relationship with those pesky District 12 tributes and those crazy Covey girls.
The expectations for Haymitch’s story were very high. Suzanne delivered on that front, now you’re translating it. When do you listen to fans and when do you have to trust your gut?
Lawrence: I don’t think we really listen to fans because I think we are fans. I think we’ve just always felt aligned with the fans. It’s really fascinating that fans have all these dream castings once they’ve started to read the books. But usually the dream castings just align with the people we’re going after. We don’t have to look to the fans and go, “Oh, who do they want?” And so I think the things that fans love about the books are things we love about the books, and so that we want to maintain and keep.
So what did you need to nail in this movie to do right by fans, as a fan?
Lawrence: Every once in a while, I will say, when you’re in the edit room and the cut is three and a half hours long and you have to trim things down, you sort of go like, “Oh, the fans are gonna be bummed about that moment.”
Jacobson: We’re very fortunate. Honestly, I think Hunger Games fans — and I say this with total sincerity — I think we have the best fans of any series because they’re smart and they want what we want. We’re very aligned with them. I feel what they feel. They are so respectful of Suzanne’s intentions with the book. We don’t have that kind of rabid, “You can’t do this!” “You can’t do that!” “You can’t reimagine this!” the way I think some people in comic books or in the Star Wars world are, where you can’t ever deliver for them because they all have their obsessions.
Because of how the movies jump around in time and reflect traditions and eras of our real world, Hunger Games might be one of the most dynamically designed franchises of all time. What were your inspirations for Sunrise? In the footage, we saw everything from 1970s paranoia thriller sets in the capital to the prismatic battlefield.
Francis Lawrence: The late ’60s, early ’70s became the kind of touchpoint but that was all because of the arena. When we started talking about the arena… it had this kind of Alice in Wonderland quality, which made me think of the Jefferson Airplane song [“White Rabbit”]. So I started thinking about the ’70s, and how that would work for characters and for clothing. I started thinking of Snow as the sort of early-’70s Yves Saint Laurent in terms of style, and the Studio 54 crowd and the Warhol crowd as the kind of Capitol people, and super-young Stevie Nicks and Bruce Springsteen as sort of District 12.
Then we also had this kind of ’70s influence with architecture. The incredible thing is, we went back to our production designer, Uli Hanisch, and based out of Berlin there’s this incredible space called the ICC, which is this convention center that has been closed since the early ’90s, but it is still standing and in pretty decent shape. It was built in the early ’70s, and it’s like being in Logan’s Run or something. That’s what it looks like. It’s just pure ’70s brutalist architecture, and we sort of used it as our sound stages, but everything is location-based. I think we built one set inside, which is the Tributes’ Apartment, actually inside that building, so you can go in and out of it. But Caesar Flickerman’s orientation room is there, the interview stages are there, the training rooms are there.
Germany served you well on Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes too.
Jacobson: The conversation between the locations and the storytelling — to be shooting that sequence with the chariots in the Olympic Stadium where Jesse Owens ran in front of the Nazis and Hitler and the world, and you’re literally in that location while you’re shooting the Hunger Games. The conversation between the architecture in Germany, and especially that world from World War II through the post-World War to Cold War architecture, the scale of it, the scope of it, and the conversation it is able to have with the material has just been a gift.
It’s hard to remember what we were all talking about in 2013 when Catching Fire came out, but I think it’s fair to say times — and the culture — have changed. Between the politics and kids slaughtering each other in Fortnite, do you think you’re having a different conversation with “young adults” today than you were in 2013? How does that inform you and Suzanne’s thinking?
Lawrence: It’s a different world, and that’s definitely one of the messages here. I think the original series was really about the consequence of war, and I think they kind of always will be. I don’t think you’ll ever get rid of that. But I think this one definitely has a lot to do with activism and activating people to stand up for what they believe in. I think, in general, people are so apathetic. “Oh, my vote’s not gonna count. It’s not gonna make a difference. If I say something, it’s not gonna make a difference.” And the truth is, you have to stand up. You have to say what you believe in, and you have to vote.
The change may not be tomorrow. That’s the other thing. Maybe that’s part of the difference, the instant gratification, this idea that people are so used to things happening immediately because of phones and video games and all of that — but sometimes change takes a really long time.
Nina Jacobson: [Suzanne] does an incredible job in the book of nodding to the fact that what you’re watching, what you’re consuming, whether it’s on TikTok or television or YouTube, it’s a construct. It’s storytelling with a purpose. This book and the movie really acknowledge how sophisticated young people actually are about what they consume, and remind you that the story you’re watching is not necessarily the story of what happened.
This premise is always terrifying, and opening of the games in Sunrise, watching a bunch of little kids swing axes at teenagers and that opening, still hits hard. At this point, is a Hunger Games the best way to make R-rated movies in a PG-13 setting? How do you get away with it?
Lawrence: Yeah, they are. [laughs] It’s always really tricky. I will say there were probably three moments in this book where I read it and I was like, “Suzanne, what are you doing? This is gonna have to be PG-13!!” There’s a moment in the book where one of the villainous characters has a child’s head in her hand that she’s just beheaded. I’m like…
Jacobson: Yeah, sorry. They can always read the book!
Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping arrives to theaters on Nov. 20.
for informational purposes only. We do not claim ownership, accuracy, or liability for the content provided. All rights belong to the original publisher.