His first day on the “Hunger Games” set, Liam Hemsworth felt the nightmarish vibe. “It was quite horrific to think about,” says the 22-year-old Australian actor. Shooting the scene known as the Reaping — the selection of two teenagers for a televised fight to the death called the Hunger Games — he couldn’t help putting himself in the shoes of his character, Gale.
“It was very realistic,” Hemsworth says. “We’re in this warehouse district, in the middle of nowhere. Everyone’s in similar gray clothing. It felt like a prison camp. I looked at these 400 young adults and children, and I thought: What if you were one of these kids? What if your best friend or sister or brother was chosen?”
PHOTOS: ‘HUNGER GAMES’ FASHION
LENNY KRAVITZ’S ‘HUNGER GAMES’ PARTY PAD
This will be familiar psychological territory to any of the 30 million people who’ve read the “Hunger Games” saga, Suzanne Collins’ dystopian young-adult trilogy about a young girl who’s selected as one of the 24 participants in the bloody games — and who unexpectedly becomes a revolutionary icon. Part action thriller and part ominous social commentary, it’s a bleak portrait of a post-apocalyptic United States ruled by an obscenely wealthy minority, a world where life-and-death reality television — featuring fresh-faced teenagers impaling one another with spears and crossbows — has become the main distraction for an oppressed and hopeless population.
Series readers have been breathlessly waiting to see it realized on-screen since the first book’s release in 2008 (sequels came out in 2009 and 2010). Fans have scrutinized every scrap of news about the making of the film — particularly the contentious casting of the lead role, Katniss Everdeen, which eventually went to 21-year-old Jennifer Lawrence (“Winter’s Bone”).
Made on a sweeping scale (reportedly for $75 million) and featuring a star-studded cast — Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Donald Sutherland — the movie’s set to be box-office gold, and has in fact already broken the record for advance first-day ticket sales. But can it possibly surpass the “Games” of fans’ imaginations?
Producer Nina Jacobson (“One Day”) counts herself among the rabid readers. “The first book was such a page-turner, I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Jacobson recalls. “I felt there were so many ways the adaptation could go wrong. I didn’t want anybody to mess it up.”
She bought the rights to the first book in 2009, and began searching for others in the film industry who’d really get Collins’ world view. Director Gary Ross (“Seabiscuit,” “Pleasantville”) did.
“One of the brilliant things Suzanne did,” says Ross, “is understand how spectacle can be used as an instrument of political manipulation.” He envisioned the film as a visual feast befitting Collins’ sharply realized world, but also rife with metaphors and allusions to the real world, both past and present.
“It’s not like one has to study hard to find these things,” says Ross. “We can all extrapolate and imagine this future, in which society devolves to that.”
In Collins’ vision, centuries in the future following a global catastrophe, North America is now the country of Panem, divided into 12 districts whose iron-fisted government is based in an aristocratic city known as the Capitol. The annual Hunger Games require each district to select one boy and one girl as “tributes,” to fight to the death in a splashy, televised event set in a giant arena — a punishment designed to remind the populace of the consequences of an earlier failed uprising.
Katniss, the heroine, is a 16-year-old girl from a poor coal-mining district. A skilled hunter, she becomes a leading contender in the arena even as she tries not to play into the Capitol’s sensationalistic game plan.
“Jennifer [Lawrence] really understood from the beginning that this character isn’t born to be a badass,” says Ross. “She just wants to survive. She’s looking out for her family. She becomes a revolutionary unwittingly because she’s just trying to take care of her own.”
Sutherland, who plays Panem’s villainous President Snow, saw the potential for huge cultural impact in the Spartacus-like character of Katniss and in Collins’ story overall.
“I read the script,” he says, “and I said to my wife, ‘I have just read the most important script for a film since I can’t remember when.’ It was as if I had just come out of a screening of ‘The Battle of Algiers.’ It seemed to me that it had the possibility of changing things.”
And Lenny Kravitz, who plays Katniss’ stylist in the Capitol, says he quickly realized that the film was a bigger deal than the young-adult lark he’d signed on for. “When I showed up and Gary started talking to me about all his references, about his techniques, the costumes, the lens choices — everything! — I was like, ‘Ooh, this is going to be different than I thought. Really interesting.’ ”
The movie was shot in several expansive locations across North Carolina: A former Philip Morris plant in Concord was turned into the Capitol, and three forests became the setting for the initial scenes of Katniss and Gale hunting in District 12, and for the Hunger Games arena, which in the book is a giant, simulated wooded environment with a sky that can become a broadcast screen.
“We’d put on our hiking boots and our safari clothes and go work in the woods every day,” Ross says. “It has an intangible effect on you, working there.”
Lawrence agrees: “It’s helpful to really be dealing with the elements, not pretending like you’re dealing with the elements.”
The most challenging element was heat. “Katniss has always got her jacket on,” Lawrence says. “And she’s never walking! The cornucopia scene, that day was over 105 degrees. I had to sprint across a field with long grass like 20 times. I hated Gary that day. I was like, can I do it with no pants on?”
But heat — and the resulting sweatiness of the actors — is an asset when you’re depicting a sunny field full of petrified teenagers murdering one another. The cornucopia scene Lawrence references is the very start of the Hunger Games, a mad dash for weapons that sees the deaths of several tributes right off the bat.
“I was concerned they would water that scene down,” says Lawrence, “because we knew we had to get to a PG-13 rating. But this violence is so important. Because it’s the violence and the brutality that starts this uprising. It has to make you angry.”
Ross opted to shoot the scene from Katniss’ point of view, a shaky montage of horrific images glimpsed as she tries to get away. “She doesn’t have time to pause, or gawk,” says Ross.
“It makes it a lot more realistic,” Lawrence says. “Violence in real life is quick. You get shot with an arrow, you’re dead. There was no room for that gratuitous kind of blood gurgling out of the throat.”
Lawrence, who spent eight weeks prior to the shoot training, studied combat, agility, climbing, running and yoga. “Katniss is very catlike and agile,” she says. “Yoga helped with that.”
Josh Hutcherson, who plays Katniss’ fellow District 12 tribute (and initially secret admirer) Peeta Mellark, says having an almost soldier-like rapport with Lawrence helped make the physically challenging shoot easier. “We’re just very, like, brutally honest with each other,” he says. “Things like, ‘Wow, you smell like s – – t right now.’ ”
Meanwhile, the movie adds a dimension: It gives the audience a look at the outside world watching the events, as well as the master control room where white-suited staffers devise new ways to get tributes to kill one another (or die trying).
“From the beginning, what Suzanne thought was great about a movie was that we’ll be able to show things that she couldn’t,” says Jacobsen. “Things that Katniss can’t possibly know.”
Wes Bentley, who plays Seneca Crane, the “gamemaker,” saw his role expanded from its passing mention in the book.
“My mind went directly to reality TV producers, and where we are with entertainment nowadays,” he says. “What creeps me out about it is, the goal is just to pierce the viewer’s brain and get a result. Just to have the most extreme thing happen and not care about the consequences of it. And that’s what he does with Katniss — OK, let’s take this girl, she’s on fire. Let’s use her.”
Bentley’s character is the link between the games and the world of the Capitol, where couture-clad viewers watch the carnage on giant screens while stuffing their faces with ornate culinary concoctions and aquamarine-hued cocktails.
“It’s the one percent, not the 99 percent, right?” says Ross. “So obviously there’s a kind of indulgence, a decadence. It’s a sick carnival. But I wanted it to always feel real, to always feel like a threat. This is where excess goes unchecked.”
Jacobson sees the large-scale Capitol scenes, simultaneously Roman-retro and futuristic, as proof of excellent synergy between departments. “It’s a very successful collaboration of production design, costume, hair and makeup all working together,” she says. “You can see how all those colors and the visual palette of it is very orchestrated. It can’t feel like Disneyland — it has to feel terrifying. But for these kids coming from District 12, it has to blow their minds.”
The embodiment of Capitol excess is Elizabeth Banks’ peacock-like Effie Trinket, who selects District 12 tributes, and escorts Katniss and Peeta to the Capitol for the games. “When I shot Effie for the first time, I imagined Joel Grey in ‘Cabaret,’ ” Ross says. “There’s a horror to her. It’s not just entertainment.”
“Gary was like, ‘I’m going to get up close to your face with the camera. I want to see cracks in the veneer,’ ” says Banks, who conferred with Ross about her character’s look. “We talked a lot about not being able to tell how old she is. Looking 30 one minute and 110 the next. Because you imagine in the Capitol they have all these crazy ways of messing with their appearance.”
Effie’s hair, a cotton-candy-like wig that changes color in nearly every scene, had a historical precedent: “Marie Antoinette sits around and says, ‘Let them eat cake,’ ” Banks says. “And the 99 percent around her are all starving. And she’s oblivious in her little bubble. That’s why she has Marie Antoinette’s hair.”
Kravitz, whose character, Cinna, is the most understated of the Capitol team, says he could have gone in the opposite direction: “When you start thinking futuristic costumes, the first thing in my head was Chris Tucker in ‘The Fifth Element.’ Am I going to be sashaying around with crazy hair?” Ultimately, his character — who is sympathetic to Katniss — only shows a touch of flamboyance in his gold eyeliner.
The rocker says he found depressing relevance in the story. “We may not be killing ourselves on television yet, but in a lot of cases we’re killing our dignity and our class,” he says. “It’s so f – – ked up.”
Sutherland, claiming eldest cast member status at 76, says he’s eager to see what the film might do for its younger viewers. “Katniss Everdeen could motivate young people, who have been pretty dormant,” he says. “It was my hope that this would make them stand up and take some kind of action.”