Hunger Games Director Breaks Down Scenes from 'Mockingjay,' 'Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes' and More

What was actually just a relatively simple, closed arena

has been changed.

The landscape has been changed by a rebel bombing

earlier in the story.

So now you have the ceiling has caved in,

creating this big pile of rubble in the center,

which we like to think

is sort of the beginning of the inspiration

for all the cornucopias in the following years

that you can see in the first movie,

or you can see it in Catching Fire.

Hello, I'm Francis Lawrence.

I'm the director of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,

Mockingjay 1, Mockingjay 2,

and also The Hunger Games:

The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

This is Notes On Some Scenes.

[light tense music]

[Announcer] Enjoy the show.

[citizen whistling]

Fire is catching.

[gentle music]

Too gentle,

[gentle music]

and I couldn't save her.

So we actually shot a lot of Catching Fire in Atlanta.

A lot of people don't think about it, unless you live there,

is that it's actually a train town, a big train town.

So there were trains going by all the time.

So just as you would get into this big emotional scene

and she's, you know, about to sort of cry

and giving it her all,

this big, you know, loud train would go by

and we'd have to cut.

So we had to actually hire train scouts

to go sit on the tracks and tell us when trains were coming,

and give us warnings about trains

and how long the trains were gonna be,

and how long we'd have to wait.

So, that was definitely a big technical thing.

But also because we're in Atlanta, you know,

we had to sort of fake locations.

And so we found this part of an old train yard

where we sort of built the set

for this district's House of Justice

where she's giving the speech from.

But in the background, what we've done,

you can see here that we've kind of comped in back here,

is a fake background that sort of gives the idea

and the impression that we're actually

in a completely different district.

And so, we did a lot of that in this victory tour

where we're just truthfully moving around Atlanta,

shooting in slightly different places

with little pieces of sets we built,

and then kind of comping in different scenes

of countryside in the background.

We didn't really have this many people,

so we were utilizing probably a couple hundred people

and making it look like a lot more.

So all these people back here

are duplicated from the crowd

that you see like up in the front.

So I'm sure if you took a really close look,

you'd probably see some of the same people [chuckles]

peppered around in the background.

[gentle tense music]

I have a message for President Snow.

You can torture us and bomb us

and burn our districts to the ground,

but do you see that?

Fire is catching.

And if we burn, you burn with us!

One of the things that I always like to do

is to try to be as intimate with the characters as possible.

I like using wider lenses,

because you can be up closer to people

and you don't feel too distanced from everybody.

But at the same time, when you use a wider lens,

you still get a sense of geography and a sense of space.

Part of what's impactful, right,

is that she's surrounded by the fire

and the leftover explosion

and the wreckage of the hovercraft

and the wreckage of the hospital that's been bombed.

But really you want to feel sort of the emotion

and the anger that's pouring out of her,

while still feeling what it is that she's angry about.

We were in, I think it was a tire factory or something.

So these brick structures,

which we used as the exterior of the hospital,

we aged it down digitally.

And then when we got to the bombing here,

our special effects teams, our practical effects teams,

actually set up a bunch of rubble,

and a bunch of the real flames that were very, very intense

and very, very hot to be around,

which adds to the mood and the atmosphere.

Technically, if you look at a shot like this,

we had some of the wreckage that you can see

behind our group here.

We probably had, you know, maybe this much of the wreckage,

and a lot of these flames are real.

These are old buildings that actually existed.

Some of these holes and some of the damage was added.

But when as soon as you get up here

and you start to see a lot of this wreckage,

the flames, all the stuff higher,

that's all digitally added.

What I like about this kind of process

is it makes it really immersive for the actors

to be standing there to feel the heat,

for the smoke to be wafting around,

for there to be real rubble and all of that.

But then, digitally, we can build it much bigger

and make it even more intense, and increase the scope

that we would never be able to afford to build practically.

One small detail is here,

if you look at Pollux's gear,

the rigs that they wore in these little cameras,

those were all digital as well.

And so, often we'd put reflections of Katniss in his helmet,

'cause it has like a little heads up display.

And these little sort of operated cameras

were always digital so they could kind of move around

as if they were following the action.

Jen's definitely a very instinctual actor,

and so what typically I would do on a day like this

is I would just remind her,

especially because we were doing The Mockingjays

back-to-back, where she was in the story

of her sort of radicalization against Snow,

and becoming an active part of the rebellion

and embracing the idea of being the Mockingjay.

And so I would do that.

But then it's very easy as soon as, you know,

the smoke is going and the flames are up

for her to give this kind of a arousing speech.

Today, the greatest friend to the revolution

will fire the shot to end all wars.

May her arrow signify the end of tyranny.

This is the climactic scene sequence

in Mockingjay-Part 2.

They're going to execute President Snow.

But what's happened before this is that we've learned,

and this is part of the beauty of Suzanne's story,

is she's discovered that Coin could be just as,

if not more evil, than President Snow.

And so she's making the decision here to not sheet Snow,

but to sheet President Coin instead.

Most of what you're seeing is practical,

except for the ground.

I think if you look at all these kind of paving stones,

we couldn't cover everything here,

so the paving stones are actually CG.

And the other thing that we always did,

which was primarily for safety,

is this arrow that you see right here, that is digital.

So we never actually pointed any real arrows at anybody ever

because it was just too dangerous,

Whether it's for a camera person or for another actor,

we just always wanted to be safe,

so we always used digital arrows.

This shot here, there is definitely some trickiness,

but it's, I think, not where people would really suspect.

You really have Julianne,

because she's not gonna do her fall here,

she's gonna get hit by a digital arrow, fall to her knees,

and start to look like she's gonna fall off the edge.

But she doesn't in a shot like this.

The really tricky one, and the sad one here,

is that Phil Hoffman, who you can see here

standing in the back off to the right,

had died by the time that we shot this scene.

So, we had to find footage of him

from other parts of the movies,

have a stand-in stay there,

and then use and comp his face

from another scene onto him there.

Here, he's very small.

Most people don't even know that's Phil Hoffman.

But we had to comp Phil Hoffman in there.

[audience cheering] In my hand, an envelope,

sealed, my prediction, the winner,

to be opened by me upon the big shows end.

[objects thumping] Whoa, whoa, they're here.

We're getting more- alright, we're about to start.

We're starting, everyone, we're starting

In Berlin, we used the Olympic stadium

that the famous one that was used in the '30s Olympics

with Jesse Owens where he ran.

And this space, circular space that we used

as the auditorium for the mentors

and for academy students to be watching the games,

is actually the fencing arena in the Olympic Park.

[tense music]

A bunch of the tech, which was a big conversation

that we had with Suzanne Collins, the author,

and amongst ourselves, was that everything, again,

needed to be much more rudimentary.

And because we were looking at sort of

reconstruction era Berlin as a reference point

for the city of the Capitol of Panem in general,

we decided to sort of look at the '40s and the '50s

also for technology, and for some of the aesthetics

that this informs, you know,

hair and makeup and styling and some of the screens,

and all of that.

And you can really see that sort of

'40s, '50s influence throughout the movie.

Almost like a sort of a retro future kind of a feel.

What we have here is we actually had the screen

in this stage built, the control rooms,

and we had some interactive iPads

that you can see were on the screens,

on the mentor's desks.

So if you see here and here, those were actually iPads

that were programmed, were live.

We had screens built in here,

and so the elements of all the tributes

had been shot by my assistant, Hadie DeJesus,

who became the second unit director on this movie.

She shot all of these tributes.

And at various times throughout the shooting,

they were then comped into with these graphics,

and then actually projected on the screen.

So the truth is, here, almost everything you're seeing

is actually there and live.

And also because we shot the games ahead of time,

we could comp footage of games through the TV

for our actors to watch.

So when we were watching the tributes walk in,

they could literally see these shots

as if shot by TV cameras in the arena itself.

And one of the exciting things for me

about tackling this prequel

was all the New World building that I got to do.

And part of that is that we get to see the origins

of a lot of things that were used too

in the old stories and in the old movies.

[tense music]

One of them, which you can see in this scene, is the arena.

The first nine years of the games

have been in a very simplistic

and very rudimentary place.

They were in a walled-off arena,

weapons were in the middle, the kids are there.

It starts, and it's probably over very, very quickly.

What was actually just a relatively simple,

closed arena with a wall,

it used to have weapons in the center, has been changed.

The landscape has been changed

by a rebel bombing earlier in the story.

So now you have the ceiling has caved in,

creating this big pile of rubble in the center,

which we like to think is sort of the beginning

of the inspiration for all the cornucopias

in the following years

that you can see in the first movie,

or you can see it in Catching Fire.

But it also creates more sort of obstacles for people too.

Other pieces of rubble mean you can go up into the stands,

some holes have been knocked out in the floor

so you could go down into the tunnels below.

So, the 10th year of The Hunger Games,

is the first time that this simple arena

has opened up the landscape a little bit

and has kind of changed the environments,

and becomes kind of the catalyst for further games

to be more inventive in terms of the landscape.

Uli found this amazing place called Centennial Hall

in Western Poland in Wroclaw,

and we luckily found a six-week window

where they would sort of let us move in

and do what we wanted to do with it.

It clearly is not in as bad of shape

as it looks like it is here.

There are no holes in the ceiling,

and there certainly isn't this much rubble.

So what we did, which was great,

was we added our own big important pieces of rubble,

like pile in the center here

or off to the left leading up to the stands.

A lot of the stuff on the ground

was added in practical,

some of the banners were practical.

But what we had to do was we had

to digitally break open this hole.

We had to age and damage all of the sort of bleachers,

'cause they were bright orange and very clean.

We had to add more age and damage to all the walls.

So the truth is that even though we have the structure

that gives the basic shape and gives the actors

and the characters like the real immersion

they need to feel the scene, we have all that,

but almost every frame within the arena

was touched digitally somehow,

and augmented to look and feel

as damaged as it does in the movie.

[tense music]

[Soldier] Stand on your mark, or you will be shot.

Thank you for joining Notes On Some Scenes,

and I hope you enjoy it.

But I hope you enjoy the movie even more.

Thank you.