Like many blockbusters, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 is full of action and explosions. But Francis Lawrence’s new film is also about a series of complex ideas, particularly how advertising can be used to manipulate the masses into thinking whatever the individuals in charge want them to. In Catching Fire, that propaganda was used by the villains to quell a rebellion. In Mockingjay, the rebels use the exact same tactics to start one.
We got Francis Lawrence on the phone to talk about making a big budget action extravaganza with challenging themes, the influence of real-life propaganda on Mockingjay, Part 1 (including the advertising for the films themselves), the irony of mass marketing a film that criticizes mass marketing, and whether anything from the books has been excised in the last two movies.
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CraveOnline: This movie is very unusual, from a blockbuster perspective.
Francis Lawrence: Yeah. [Laughs.] Yes, it is.
What were your thoughts on approaching this particular material, adapting this half of the book with these unusual themes?
Well, I think quite honestly I was super excited. When we were making Catching Fire I think the struggle for me was that I was dealing with a structure, a narrative structure, that was very similar to the first movie. So there’s always a struggle to make these moments that we had experienced before in the first movie feel different and feel new. So it was really exciting for me to be asked to stay on for these movies, where I get to explore new narrative structures, right? But also we get to get into the themes and ideas that are there reason the books exist. So it was good meat for me to chew on.
Yes. Yes, yeah, absolutely. That’s one of the big facets of [The Hunger Games]. The entire series was written with the idea of trying to create a series of stories about the consequence of war, and so over the course of three books and four movies you can explore different facets of it. In this one one of the big things we explore is the manipulation of images and the use of propaganda and this battle over the airwaves, and we actually get to see some of the ways that imagery is manipulated. From the first attempt of Katniss to “act” in a stylized setting, and how that fails, and how you bring her out into the real world and you get footage of a really horrific event and a really emotional speech, but then how that’s manipulated through editing, through music, through special effects, through titles, right? To now inspire, deliver a message.
It was also kind of fun, and I wasn’t even expecting it at first and we sort of discovered it along the way, to use the same graphics and the same materials that were used in the marketing for the movie. So you’ve got this kind of thing where Tim [Palen], the marketing champion at Lionsgate, created these teasers that were propaganda, is now helping us create the other propaganda that’s within the movie itself too.
