For 23 years, Haymitch Abernathy lived alone in District 12’s vacant Victors’ Village, drink in hand and a sarcastic quip at the ready. While the Quarter Quell winner is best known as a cynical drunk and mentor to Katniss Everdeen, his story didn’t begin with the archer.
Based on Suzanne Collins’ best-selling novel, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, the film follows teenage Haymitch, a lover boy wrapped up in a romance with Lenora Dove, a Covey girl. On his 16th birthday, Haymitch risks everything to protect that love, setting him on a path to the Capitol that will forever change his life and set a budding rebellion in motion.
This sixth installment of The Hunger Games series stars Jesse Plemons, Glenn Close, Kieran Culkin, Elle Fanning, Mckenna Grace, Maya Hawke, Whitney Peak and Kelvin Harrison Jr.
Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate
Credit: Courtesy of LionsgateBudding actor Joseph Zada is stepping into the titular role of Haymitch with a familiar swagger but a fresh take on the beloved character.
No stranger to Panem, acclaimed director Francis Lawrence is once again leading the charge, directing his fifth Hunger Games film and taking the world to new heights. Lawrence, along with producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, assembled an impressive ensemble of both new and seasoned actors, bringing fresh energy to the dystopian world and its familiar characters.
Lawrence’s work spans a variety of genres, including his adaptation of Stephen King’s The Long Walk and the spy thriller Red Sparrow.
The director delivers both the harrowing intensity that comes with the violence of the annual games and a beautiful balance of the love and camaraderie that emerge within the story, keeping what drives each character’s journey at the forefront. The film juggles complex themes, including humanity and grief in a world resisting oppression.
Lawrence spoke with Los Angeles, offering insight into revisiting the dystopian world of Panem for a fifth time, what it was like working with the new cast of characters and the little details that set Haymitch’s story apart from previous adaptations.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The first thing I read was actually the manuscript of the book. Basically, this is my fifth Hunger Games movie. The original ones, all the books were out already when we were working on them. Now, basically, Suzanne doesn’t tell us when she’s writing, and so we’ll get a call, and then there’ll be a manuscript. We’ll usually have to go to a locked room in her agent’s office or home and read the manuscript there, but she also doesn’t tell us what it’s about.
So I went to her house, sat in the backyard and there was a manuscript. I jumped in and realized very quickly it was a Haymitch story, which was really exciting. Quite honestly, I love Haymitch as a character, and so I was very intrigued to see how she was going to treat his story and how it fits into the whole world. It ended up being one of, if not my favorite, books in the series.
It’s a tricky one because we knew it was going to be really different, right? This is the origin story of the Haymitch that we know. When we start with him, he’s a very different version of Haymitch. He’s young, he’s optimistic, he’s happy, he’s in love, he doesn’t drink. It’s like all the opposite elements. We also knew that we needed somebody who was going to be able to tackle the kind of emotional toll of what happens within the story, and then come out the back end and see the beginnings of the Haymitch that we’re familiar with.
I knew that I did not want somebody trying to do an imitation of Woody, and so it was really like playing around, and we did a lot of this in rehearsal and in the casting tests of like how much or how little do we invoke Woody in the performance. Joe really found a great balance where there’s kind of this weird, almost eerie sense of feeling Woody in the performance, without it feeling like he’s just doing this imitation of Woody.
I think fans really were voting for her, but Nina [Jacobson] and I, we’re always aligned with the fans, so we actually do not go and look at who the fans want and then cast them. We’re also fans, so I think there’s alignment.
Elle is one of the few new people, I’d say, in this cast that I had worked with before, so I already knew her as a performer and as a person. We worked together when she was about 19, I think, and so I thought she would just be amazing and perfect. Luckily, she was a fan of the movies and the books and wanted to be a part of it.
When she comes in, we definitely make a moment of her. But I will give a lot of that credit to Elle… She’s really beautiful, she has amazing charisma, but there is an effervescence that she has and an energy that she brings that just comes through the screen. Honestly, especially in a movie as emotional and as tough as this one, she’s like a breath of fresh air. So yes, we’re focusing on her because here comes this person that we all have a nostalgia for because of the original series, but I think that’s also just Elle’s presence. That’s why I wanted her so badly for this is because I knew she would just have that naturally.
I’ve been around it for so long, and I work so closely with Suzanne that I’m pretty familiar with all the kind of canon and mythology and all of those elements. Part of the fun, and especially for me, and especially because Suzanne keeps coming out now bouncing around in time, is it gives me an opportunity to really work on world building. What does Panem look like? What does District 12 look like? What do the costumes look like? And the hair and the makeup, and what’s the state of things?
On the last one, Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, it was so close to the dark days and the wars that created all of this – that drove a lot of decision making in terms of aesthetics. And here you are 40 years after that, but 24 years before the original series. It’s actually kind of a relatively stable time in Panem, and so that says something. Finding an era to lean into; There are late ‘60s, early ‘70s vibe, which I would say was also partially informed by the aesthetic of Ballad and starting to lean into what the original series was. There’s lots of choices there, but I think that’s part of the fun for me is I get to kind of change things up a little bit because we’re bouncing around in time and not having to just revisit the same kind of locations, places and elements. We’re always trying to find new ways into the stories.
That’s actually the key, and I think it all is driven by the fact that Suzanne started this series for young adults, for teenagers, and she wanted to write a story about the consequences of war for teenagers. Even though the thematic foundations have changed a little bit, each time out she has different thematic foundational reasons for writing a story. In this one, it’s the implicit submission and propaganda and all of that, but it’s always aimed at teenagers.
Because that’s the core audience, even though it has broadened out into people over 17, they can never be rated R because you can’t alienate the original intended crowd from the movies. It helps give me a set of parameters in how I approached the storytelling. I will say, when I was reading this manuscript … there were a couple of moments where I would be like, “Oh my God, Suzanne, seriously? You’re going to have somebody holding the head of a child? You know I can’t do this in the movie.”
What I focus on is exactly what you said: I tend to focus on the emotional consequence of the violence. It implies things. In the case of this movie, more on Haymitch than on the other person. We certainly aren’t glorifying bloodshed and gore – It’s usually we’re trying to deal with what the emotional value is. Is it the loss of a best friend? Is it the feeling of guilt or shame or whatever the specificity is to the emotion of the moment? It’s really focusing on that.
Credit: Murray Close
Credit: Murray Close
Credit: Murray CloseThere’s something about this cast that is really remarkable. Head to toe, we have an amazing group from the young ones, up and coming actors to the veteran actors. Everybody came in and just really, really, really brought it. I think the performances are on another level, and that’s part of what’s fantastic about it.
I’m also really happy about the color too, and so happy that people are talking about the color in the movie. A lot of this came from my initial meetings with Suzanne. We started talking about the arena, and weirdly it started to remind me of Alice in Wonderland. That sort of broke open the aesthetic of the movie for me.
I thought, “Oh wow, this will fit perfectly between Ballad and the originals, both in terms of architecture, but it can drive color, it can drive costumes, hair, makeup, everything.” It was great because I started thinking, Lenore Dove and Stevie Nicks and Haymitch and a young Springsteen or young Mick Jagger. People in the Capitol being like the Warhols and Studio 54 kind of crowd and Snow being ‘70s Yves Saint Laurent with sophistication and gravitas.I think that element is really fun here. There’s lots of little details and some little Easter eggs.
The post Inside the World of ‘The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping’ with Francis Lawrence appeared first on LAmag.
