Director of 'The Hunger Games' franchise Francis Lawrence breaks down some iconic scenes from 'Catching Fire,' 'Mockingjay: Part 1,' 'Mockingjay: Part 2' and the newest film 'Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.' Get his full breakdown of how he brought the movies to life, from location to the intricacies of the sets and styling.
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00:00 What was actually just a relatively simple closed arena
00:04 has been changed.
00:06 The landscape has been changed by a rebel bombing
00:08 earlier in the story.
00:09 So now you have the ceiling has caved in,
00:12 creating this big pile of rubble in the center,
00:14 which we like to think is sort of the beginning
00:17 of the inspiration for all the cornucopias
00:20 in the following years,
00:21 whether you can see in the first movie
00:22 or you can see it in "Catching Fire."
00:24 Hello, I'm Francis Lawrence.
00:26 I'm the director of "The Hunger Games Catching Fire,"
00:28 "Mockingjay 1," "Mockingjay 2,"
00:31 and also "The Hunger Games,"
00:32 "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes."
00:34 This is notes on some scenes.
00:37 Enjoy the show.
00:40 Fire is catching.
00:46 Too gentle.
00:52 And I couldn't save her.
00:57 So we actually shot a lot of "Catching Fire" in Atlanta.
01:02 A lot of people don't think about it unless you live there
01:04 is that it's actually, it's a train town,
01:05 a big train town.
01:06 So there were trains going by all the time.
01:09 So just as you would get into this big emotional scene
01:11 and she's about to sort of cry
01:13 and giving it her all, this big, loud train would go by
01:16 and we'd have to cut.
01:17 So we had to actually hire train scouts
01:20 to go sit on the tracks and tell us when trains were coming
01:22 and give us warnings about trains
01:24 and how long the trains were gonna be
01:25 and how long we'd have to wait.
01:27 So that was definitely a big technical thing.
01:29 But also because we're in Atlanta,
01:32 we had to sort of fake locations.
01:34 And so we found this part of an old train yard
01:38 where we sort of built the set
01:40 for this district's House of Justice
01:42 where she's giving the speech from.
01:44 But in the background, what we've done,
01:47 you can see here that we've kind of comped in back here
01:50 is a fake background that sort of gives the idea
01:54 and the impression that we're actually
01:56 in a completely different district.
01:57 And so we did a lot of that in this Victory Tour
01:59 where we're just truthfully moving around Atlanta,
02:02 shooting in slightly different places
02:03 with little pieces of sets we built
02:05 and then kind of comping in different scenes of countryside
02:08 in the background.
02:09 We didn't really have this many people,
02:11 so we were utilizing probably a couple hundred people
02:13 and making it look like a lot more.
02:15 So all these people back here are duplicated
02:19 from the crowd that you see like up in the front.
02:22 So I'm sure if you took a really close look,
02:24 you'd probably see some of the same people
02:26 peppered around in the background.
02:29 - I have a message for President Snowe.
02:34 You can torture us and bomb us
02:37 and burn our districts to the ground.
02:40 But do you see that?
02:42 Fire is catching.
02:45 And if we burn, you burn with us.
02:51 - One of the things that I always like to do
02:52 is to try to be as intimate with the characters as possible.
02:56 I like using wider lenses
02:58 because you can be up closer to people
03:00 and you don't feel too distanced from everybody.
03:02 But at the same time, when you use a wider lens,
03:04 you still get a sense of geography and a sense of space.
03:07 Part of what's impactful, right,
03:09 is that she's surrounded by the fire
03:11 and the leftover explosion and the wreckage of the hovercraft
03:14 and the wreckage of the hospital that's been bombed.
03:16 But really you wanna feel the sort of the emotion
03:19 and the anger that's pouring out of her
03:21 while still feeling what it is that she's angry about.
03:23 We were in, I think it was a tire factory or something,
03:26 so this brick structures,
03:28 which we used as the exterior of the hospital.
03:31 We aged it down digitally.
03:33 And then when we got to the bombing here,
03:35 our special effects teams, our practical effects teams,
03:38 actually set up a bunch of rubble
03:40 and a bunch of the real flames.
03:41 They were very, very intense and very, very hot to be around
03:44 which adds to the mood in the atmosphere.
03:46 Technically, if you look at a shot like this,
03:49 we had some of the wreckage that you can see
03:52 behind our group here.
03:53 We probably had maybe this much of the wreckage
03:57 and a lot of these flames are real.
03:59 These are old buildings that actually existed.
04:01 Some of these holes and some of the damage was added.
04:03 But when as soon as you get up here
04:05 and you start to see a lot of this wreckage,
04:07 the flames, all the stuff higher,
04:09 that's all digitally added.
04:12 What I like about this kind of process
04:14 is it makes it really immersive
04:15 for the actors to be standing there,
04:17 to feel the heat, for the smoke to be wafting around,
04:20 for there to be real rubble and all of that.
04:22 But then digitally, we can build it much bigger
04:25 and make it even more intense and increase the scope
04:28 that we would never be able to afford to build practically.
04:31 One small detail is here, if you look at Pollux's gear,
04:36 the rigs that they wore and these little cameras,
04:39 those were all digital as well.
04:41 And so often we'd put reflections of Katniss in his helmet
04:44 'cause it has like a little heads up display
04:46 and these little sort of operated cameras
04:48 were always digital so they could kind of move around
04:50 as if they were following the action.
04:52 Jen's definitely a very instinctual actor.
04:54 And so what typically I would do on a day like this
04:57 is I would just remind her,
04:58 especially because we were doing
04:59 the Mockingjays back to back,
05:00 where she was in the story of her sort of radicalization
05:04 against Snow and becoming an active part of the rebellion
05:09 and embracing the idea of being the Mockingjay.
05:12 And so I would do that, but then it's very easy
05:14 as soon as the smoke is going and the flames are up
05:17 for her to give this kind of a rousing speech.
05:20 - Today, the greatest friend of revolution
05:25 will fire the shot to end all wars.
05:29 May her arrow signify the end of tyranny.
05:34 - This is the climactic scene sequence in "Mockingjay Part II"
05:40 they're going to execute President Snow,
05:43 but what's happened before this is that we've learned,
05:46 and this is part of the beauty of Suzanne's story,
05:48 she's discovered that Coyne could be just as,
05:51 if not more evil than President Snow.
05:54 And so she's making the decision here to not shoot Snow,
05:56 but to shoot President Coyne instead.
05:58 Most of what you're seeing is practical,
06:00 except for the ground.
06:02 I think if you look at all these kinds of paving stones,
06:04 we couldn't cover everything here.
06:06 So the paving stones are actually CG.
06:08 And the other thing that we always did,
06:10 which was primarily for safety,
06:12 is this arrow that you see right here, that is digital.
06:15 So we never actually pointed any real arrows at anybody ever
06:19 because it was just too dangerous,
06:20 whether it's for a camera person or for another actor,
06:24 we just always wanted to be safe.
06:25 So we always use digital arrows.
06:27 This shot here, there is definitely some trickiness,
06:30 but it's, I think, not where people would really suspect.
06:33 You really have Julianne,
06:35 because she's not going to do her fall here,
06:36 she's going to get hit by a digital arrow,
06:38 fall to her knees and start to look like
06:40 she's going to fall off the edge,
06:42 but she doesn't in a shot like this.
06:43 The really tricky one and the sad one here
06:45 is that Phil Hoffman, who you can see here
06:48 standing in the back off to the right,
06:50 had died by the time that we shot this scene.
06:53 So we had to find footage of him
06:55 from other parts of the movies,
06:57 have a stand and stay there,
06:59 and then use and comp his face
07:01 from another scene onto him there.
07:03 Here, he's very small.
07:04 Most people don't even know that's Phil Hoffman,
07:06 but we had to comp Phil Hoffman there.
07:09 - In my hand an envelope, sealed,
07:12 my prediction, the winner,
07:14 to be opened by me upon the big show's end.
07:17 [dramatic music]
07:18 Whoa, whoa.
07:19 They're here.
07:20 We're getting, all right, we're about to start.
07:21 We're starting, everyone, we're starting.
07:22 - In Berlin, we used the Olympic Stadium,
07:25 the famous one that was used in the '30s Olympics
07:27 with Jesse Owens, where he ran.
07:29 And this space, circular space,
07:32 that we used as the auditorium for the mentors
07:34 and for Academy students to be watching the games
07:37 is actually the fencing arena in the Olympic Park.
07:41 [dramatic music]
07:44 A bunch of the tech, which was a big conversation
07:47 that we had with Suzanne Collins, the author,
07:48 and amongst ourselves, was that everything, again,
07:51 needed to be much more rudimentary.
07:53 And because we were looking at sort of Reconstruction Era
07:56 Berlin as a reference point for the city
07:59 of the capital of Pennam in general,
08:01 we decided to sort of look at the '40s and the '50s
08:05 also for technology and for some of the aesthetics.
08:08 So this informs hair and makeup and styling
08:11 and some of the screens and all of that.
08:14 And you can really see that sort of '40s, '50s influence
08:16 throughout the movie, almost like a sort of a retro future
08:19 kind of a feel.
08:21 What we have here is we actually had the screens
08:23 in this stage built, the control rooms.
08:26 We had some interactive iPads that you can see
08:28 were on the screens on the mentors' desks.
08:31 So if you see here and here,
08:33 those were actually iPads that were programmed, were live.
08:36 We had screens built in here.
08:39 And so the elements of all the tributes
08:41 had been shot by my assistant, Hedy de Jesus,
08:44 who became the second unit director on this movie.
08:46 She shot all of these tributes at various times
08:50 throughout the shooting.
08:50 They were then comped into with these graphics
08:55 and then actually projected on the screen.
08:57 So the truth is, is here, almost everything you're seeing
09:01 is actually there and live.
09:04 And also because we shot the games ahead of time,
09:07 we could pump footage of games through the TV
09:11 for our actors to watch.
09:13 So when we were watching the tributes walk in,
09:15 they could literally see these shots
09:17 as if shot by TV cameras in the arena itself.
09:19 One of the exciting things for me
09:21 about tackling this prequel was all the new world building
09:25 that I got to do.
09:26 And part of that is that we get to see the origins
09:28 of a lot of things that we're used to
09:31 in the old stories and the old movies.
09:33 One of them, which you can see in this scene, is the arena.
09:40 The first nine years of the games
09:43 have been in a very simplistic and very rudimentary place.
09:46 They were in a walled off arena,
09:47 weapons were in the middle, the kids are there.
09:50 It starts and it's probably over very, very quickly.
09:53 What was actually just a relatively simple,
09:56 closed arena with a wall,
09:59 and it used to have weapons in the center, has been changed.
10:02 The landscape has been changed
10:03 by a rebel bombing earlier in the story.
10:06 So now you have the ceiling has caved in,
10:08 creating this big pile of rubble in the center,
10:10 which we like to think is sort of the beginning
10:14 of the inspiration for all the cornucopias
10:16 in the following years,
10:17 where you can see in the first movie
10:18 or you can see it in "Catching Fire."
10:20 But it also creates more sort of obstacles for people too.
10:22 Other pieces of rubble mean you can go up into the stands,
10:25 some holes have been knocked out in the floor
10:27 so you could go down into the tunnels below.
10:29 So this, the 10th year of the "Hunger Games"
10:32 is the first time that this simple arena
10:34 has opened up the landscape a little bit
10:36 and has kind of changed the environment
10:38 and becomes kind of the catalyst for further games
10:42 to be more inventive in terms of the landscape.
10:45 Uli found this amazing place called Centennial Hall
10:48 in Western Poland in Wrocław.
10:50 And we luckily found a six week window
10:52 where they would sort of let us move in
10:54 and do what we wanted to do with it.
10:56 It clearly is not in as bad of shape
10:59 as it looks like it is here.
11:01 There are no holes in the ceiling
11:03 and there certainly isn't this much rubble.
11:06 So what we did, which was great,
11:07 was we added our own big important pieces of rubble,
11:10 like piling the center here
11:11 or off to the left leading up to the stands.
11:13 A lot of the stuff on the ground has been added,
11:16 was added in practical.
11:18 Some of the banners were practical.
11:20 But what we had to do
11:21 was we had to digitally break open this hole.
11:23 We had to age and damage all of the sort of bleachers
11:30 'cause they were bright orange and very clean.
11:32 We had to add more age and damage to all the walls.
11:35 So the truth is, is that even though we have the structure
11:38 that gives the basic shape
11:40 and gives the actors and the characters
11:43 like the real immersion they need to feel the scene,
11:45 we have all that.
11:46 But almost every frame within the arena
11:48 was touched digitally somehow
11:50 and augmented to look and feel
11:53 as damaged as it does in the movie.
11:55 - Stand on your mark or you will be shot.
12:01 - Thank you for joining Notes on some Scenes
12:05 and I hope you enjoy it,
12:06 but I hope you enjoy the movie even more.
12:09 Thank you.
12:10 [BLANK_AUDIO]