CraveOnline: Is Jennifer Lawrence the right symbol for The Hunger Games? Is that an interesting parallel while you’re making it?
Francis Lawrence: I think she’s the right symbol for The Hunger Games. You know, The Hunger Games, the movies, are primarily entertainment. Ideally if we can get people and kids to think about things and talk about things and look at things a little different, that that’s a great thing too. But not promoting Jennifer Lawrence to lead us into a battle. [Laughs.]
I’d follow her.
Yeah. [Laughs.]
“There are scenes throughout Part 1 and Part 2 that are going to be new for the fans.”
Now I don’t know the books. I haven’t read the books, so I’m watching the movies fresh. But I know a lot of people really love the books so I was wondering if there was anything in particular that you’ve cut out of this movie, or even Mockingjay, Part 2, that maybe you want to warn people that you’ve changed?
No, not really. There’s always some adaptation. What I will say is kind of the opposite, in that one of the benefits of splitting into two [films] is that you actually get more story. I would say in general there’s a lot more lost from Catching Fire. There’s a good third of that book that we couldn’t put in because you just can’t when you’re adapting 450 pages into a two-hour movie. We get a lot more stories here, but we also get some room for story expansion.
So I think what I would say is, don’t expect something gone, but actually fans of the book can expect to be surprised because of the growth here, that there are scenes in it that are not in the book. We go to Districts and see moments that aren’t in the book, and it’s one of the things that we have fun creating with Suzanne Collins, because they’re things that could have been happening while the story of the book is playing out. But the books are so Katniss-centric that they never really break out of her point of view. But we’ve been allowed to a little bit.
Does that level of expansion affect the very end of the story? Were you able to add more to that as well?
No… I’d have to think about that. It’s throughout Part 1 and Part 2. We did some world expansion in Catching Fire too. Just a little bit, because all those Donald Sutherland/Philip Seymour Hoffman characters, their scenes together weren’t in the book, but that story was so antagonist-driven that we needed to have some of that. So we needed to engineer some of those scenes to help drive the movie. So we’ve done the same here with these two movies, so there are scenes throughout Part 1 and Part 2 that are going to be new for the fans.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
