What excited 'Songbirds and Snakes' director Francis Lawrence the most about returning to Panem?
The Panem we see in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a far cry from the nation Katniss and Peeta called home in the original Hunger Games movies. Gone are the flashy costumes and high-tech glitz of the Capitol, replaced by post-war rubble and a retro-futuristic aesthetic.
The change makes sense, since The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes takes place 64 years before Katniss Everdeen sets foot in the arena. As far as Panem goes, we're in a whole new world — and exploring that world became one of the most exciting parts of the filmmaking process for director Francis Lawrence and producer Nina Jacobson.
Building an older Capitol was an inspiring creative endeavor.
"What I was really excited about was getting to reinvent the world a little bit," Lawrence told Mashable in a video interview. The director has spent no shortage of time in this world over the years. In addition to The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, he also directed Catching Fire and both Mockingjay films.
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Lawrence continued: "This is not the Panem that we're used to; this is the Panem that's just coming out of a war and is in a reconstruction era."
That sense of reconstruction is present throughout The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, especially in its Capitol sequences. Most shots of the skyline feature cranes working to rebuild the city after the war, hinting at the bustling metropolis to come.
"This is a more rudimentary version of Panem," Lawrence added. "The Games are more rudimentary, the technology is more rudimentary." Here, the Games always play out in the same dilapidated arena, and the broadcast room looks more like a mid-century TV studio than a futuristic command deck.
Still, the limitations of an older Panem provided Lawrence with some tantalizing world-building opportunities. "It was really exciting to me to take what felt like old Panem, bring it down to rubble, then start to build up a little bit of the hints of the Panem that we're used to," he said. Some of these hints include the beginning of the sponsorship program, which sees rickety droids flying into the arena to drop off supplies to tributes. Meanwhile, the extravagant fashion of characters like Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis) and Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) hints at the colorful designs to come in the future.
Highlighting the effects of war helped build Coriolanus Snow's character.
The timeline of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes also allowed for a deeper exploration of the Dark Days, the war between the Capitol and the Districts that resulted in the creation of the Hunger Games. The devastation of the war especially comes through in the film's opening scene, a flashback to the Dark Days. In the scene, a young Coriolanus and Tigris Snow run from the wartime destruction, fending off a rabid dog and watching a man chop the leg off a corpse for food. It's the most ruined we've ever seen the Capitol, even beyond the Mockingjay films.
For Jacobson, who has produced every Hunger Games film, the shocking difference between the Capitol in this scene and the Capitol of the other films makes for one of the most fascinating elements of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. "We've always heard about the war, the Dark Days — they're referenced in the other movies," Jacobson told Mashable in a video interview. "But we are culturally prone to amnesia, and the war is very much in the past tense in the original movies. It was important to us to show that the Capitol is still literally and figuratively scarred by war in that very opening sequence. We wanted to show what the cost and effect of that was is not just on the place, but on the people who are raised in war, and how much it shapes character and your worldview."
That focus on character was necessary when it came to shaping the film's protagonist, Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth). We are aware of his future as Panem's tyrannical president, but as the film opens, he's just a student trying to help his family get by following the damage done by the war. Because of this motivation, we get the sense that there is potential for good in him — but is it enough to change his path?
"We don't want to excuse Coriolanus Snow his trespasses. He does some terrible things, and we know who he becomes," said Jacobson. "But part of what I've loved about the book [by Suzanne Collins] and working on this adaptation is how we hold on to this belief that he somehow might break good."
The destruction wrought by the Dark Days lessens some of the polarization between District and Capitol. Here, we see that not every Capitol citizen revels in the Games or hatred of the Districts: Tigris (Hunter Schafer) cautions Coriolanus against hate, while Dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage) clearly regrets creating the Games in the first place. So not only does the post-Dark Days timing of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes afford the film a rich new period to examine, it also emphasizes the film's core examinations of good, evil, and the gray area in between.
"There is no easy way to categorize Snow or Lucy Gray," Jacobson said. "Nobody is all songbird or all snake."
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is now in theaters.
Topics Film
Belen Edwards is an Entertainment Reporter at Mashable. She covers movies and TV with a focus on fantasy and science fiction, adaptations, animation, and more nerdy goodness. She is a member of the Critics Choice Association and the Television Critics Association, as well as a Tomatometer-approved critic.
