LOS ANGELES —“It’s the things we love the most that destroy us,” said Donald Sutherland's villainous President Coriolanus Snow in 2014's “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1.”
This year's "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" stars Tom Blyth as a much younger Snow, bringing viewers back to the world of Panem as he becomes a mentor to District 12’s Lucy Gray Baird, played by Rachel Zegler.
It takes place 64 years before Katniss Everdeen — memorably played throughout the franchise by Jennifer Lawrence — volunteers as tribute.
Francis Lawrence, who directed the film and the three previous films (no relation to Jennifer), told Spectrum News he was excited to make “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” because it tells the origin story of the villain of the original series.
“It was a challenge … the idea that we have to get an audience to be behind and root for and empathize with the person they know is going to be the antagonist of the other stories,” he said. “We have to be careful. We have to get people to root for him, but we have to seed in all the elements that make his turn into darkness believable.”
Lawrence is confident that readers who loved the book will love the movie. He says production worked closely with Suzanne Collins, who has written all four Hunger Games books.
“It is a very faithful adaptation of the book,” he said.
Because “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” is the longest book in the series, Lawrence said there was a combining of scenes and mini sub-plots were excised, but in the end, they stayed true to the spirit of the book.
The film is long with a running time over two-and-a-half hours, but Nina Jacobson, one of the film’s producers, told Spectrum News there was never any consideration to split the film into two films.
“We always felt it needed to be one movie. It is about seeing the journey of this character and interrupting, I think, would have been really frustrating,” she said.
While there are still unanswered questions about the world of Panem and many stories that could be told, both Jacobson and Lawrence agree they would wait for Collins to write a new book before returning to the world of “The Hunger Games.”
“I can’t imagine doing it without her work as our backbone, our beating heart — the soul of it all. We follow her lead,” said Jacobson.
And if you haven’t seen any of the previous movies, Lawrence says you’ll be entertained and satisfied by watching the new film.
“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” opens in theaters Nov. 17.
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