The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) Special Feature ‘Welcome Back to Panem’
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 (thunder rumbling)
00:02 How tantalizing to see all your shining young faces
00:09 on this auspicious day.
00:10 I am Dr. Volumia Ghaul, your humble head game maker
00:16 in charge of the War Department
00:18 and all its affiliated concerns.
00:21 I am honored to introduce to you
00:24 the creator of the Hunger Games themselves,
00:28 Dean Casca Highbottom.
00:31 I have summoned you all here today
00:33 for the 10th annual reaping ceremony
00:36 in which we choose two children from each district
00:39 to throw into the capital arena
00:42 to fight to the death in the Hunger Games.
00:45 I am here to tell you that there has been a change this year.
00:49 One final assignment to prove your worth.
00:53 It's a story that takes place 64 years
00:54 before the first installment of the movies
00:57 and focuses on young Snow.
01:00 Look at you,
01:00 your makeshift shirt and your too tight shoes
01:04 trying desperately to fit in
01:07 when I know the Snows don't have a pot to piss in.
01:11 Snow is being groomed to become the man he becomes.
01:16 As a mentor, your role is to turn these children
01:19 into spectacles, not survivors.
01:22 Persuade them to perform for the camera.
01:27 Lucy Gray, the one who Snow becomes the mentor for
01:31 and also falls in love with,
01:32 there's a very naturalistic quality to her,
01:35 but she's a charmer, she's a musician,
01:37 she's a performer, she's kind of the anti-catniss.
01:40 She's part of the Covey,
01:41 this kind of roving band of musicians.
01:45 Snow's never met anybody like her.
01:47 That romance between them makes Snow question
01:51 everything he was raised to believe.
01:55 I think there's a natural goodness born into us all.
01:59 You know, really,
01:59 you can either cross that line into evil
02:03 or not.
02:06 And it's our life's work to stay
02:08 on the right side of that line.
02:09 Part of the love story starts to fall apart
02:12 and that is part of the creation of who he becomes.
02:17 It's the things we love most that destroy us.
02:22 Most everybody that I work with is coming back
02:25 Trish Somerville is doing the costumes for this movie.
02:28 Bill Willems who shot Catching Fire, The Mockingjays.
02:31 The one new person that I'm really excited about
02:33 is Uli Hanisch, who's the production designer.
02:36 We talked about the sort of look and the feel of the movie.
02:39 The visuals of this movie will be very different
02:41 than Mockingjay, but there's real consistency
02:44 in terms of the capital architecture.
02:47 We get to sort of reinvent the world of Panem,
02:50 to sort of deconstruct what the games are
02:52 that we're sort of used to and go back in time.
02:55 It wasn't until I read it that I saw how much music
02:58 was actually in here.
02:59 We met with Dave Cobb, he's a fantastic songwriter
03:02 and producer.
03:03 It's gonna be fun to take all this history
03:05 of British Isles music and Southern music
03:07 and mash it all together in this dystopian way
03:10 in this future.
03:11 James Newton Howard, it's my fourth
03:13 Hunger Games film with him.
03:15 The musical opportunity is great.
03:17 Relationships are very powerful in the movie.
03:22 The good and the bad are very clearly laid out.
03:25 For James and I, it was really fun to explore
03:28 a new sound for the Hunger Games.
03:30 Sometimes it's foot stomping and rousing
03:33 and sometimes it's haunting, mysterious,
03:36 and a lot of that is based on the kind of period
03:38 of the movie itself.
03:40 But there's gonna be some familiar elements as well.
03:43 - Hanging Tree is back in a completely different
03:47 iteration and treatment.
03:48 - Here we get to see Lucy Gray coming up with it
03:51 for the first time.
03:52 (dramatic music)
03:55 ♪ Are you ♪
04:00 ♪ Are you ♪
04:03 ♪ Coming to the tree ♪
04:06 ♪ Where I told you to run ♪
04:09 ♪ So we'd both be free ♪
04:13 ♪ Strange things did happen here ♪
04:15 ♪ Who's stranger would it be ♪
04:19 ♪ If you made up any night ♪
04:24 ♪ In the hanging tree ♪
04:32 (dramatic music)
04:38 (dramatic music)
04:41 (dramatic music)
04:44 [MUSIC PLAYING]