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The latest Hunger Games, set decades before the original, is grittier and “more authentic” in some ways but doesn’t waver from existential questions, as relevant now as they were when the first films came out, said the director and producer of Ballads of Songbirds And Snakes.
“Are we worthy of freedom? Are we unable to handle freedom? What is the allure of authoritarianism? Why are people drawn to surrendering control to the government? And what makes a person want to have that kind of control?” asked producer Nina Jacobson at a Q&A along with director Francis Laurence on sidelines of CinemaCon in Las Vegas. Lionsgate debuted the first trailer at its presentation today.
The films are based on the novels by Suzanne Collins. “The first books were really like during the Forever Wars, you know, the endless struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan and the consequences of those wars. [And] the ascendance of American Idol and reality television,” she said. The theme have “only became more pertinent and timely.”
The challenge was keeping the story – which unspools 64 years before the original — both familiar yet fresh. The look is gritter, modeled after post-war Berlin, Laurence said, where some of it was filmed. Panem here is still rebuilding from a brutal civil war, marred by endless construction sites, cranes and the remnants of destruction.
“One of the things that really interested me in the novel itself was just the scope of the story. And the fact that it’s an origin story not just of a character that we all know from the other series, but the origin of Panem and the origin of the Games. To be able to go back and kind of revisit what the capital might look like not long after a war in this sort of reconstruction era,” he said.
The character is Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), channeling a young Donald Sutherland but more conflicted at 18-years-old, well before he settled in as Panem’s tyrannical president. Snow is someone “we’ve spent so much time hating and loathing,” Jacobson said. So, while it’s “deeply steeped in the mythology of the original books and movies [Ballads] doesn’t feel like it’s trying to duplicate. It’s sort of striking out on really new ground, and also completely different visual language, because it’s a period movie.”
“It felt fresh, and it felt new, and the tone is a little different, and I think the tone is a little grittier and I would even say a little more somehow authentic,” said Laurence.
The film opens Nov. 17. Rachel Zegler is Snow’s foil, girl tribute Lucy Gray Baird. Peter Dinklage and Viola Davis also star.