The tributes run through the gauntlet in the Training Center.
Even the woods locations required a great deal of advance planning. Messina scouted in various state parks in January
and February. “I was scouting in the snow, with no leaves on any of the trees. I’m referring back to books about what
this place looks like in the summertime and there’s a little bit of a leap of faith, but ultimately it worked out well.
”
Ross adds, “The arena’s obviously in the forest and I wanted it to be different from a lot of forests you see in
movies. I wanted it to have hardwoods — I didn’t want it to be just coniferous. I wanted it to feel uniquely American.
”
Eventually they used the same woods for District 12 and the arena, but postproduction work changed the lighting and the
feel of the arena setting, so the woods didn’t look quite natural, but more like a creation of the Gamemakers. As
Messina describes it, “We just took out a little bit of the haphazardness of nature.”
Lawrence and Hutcherson begin a scene in the arena.
Creating the Cornucopia was a special challenge to the design team. “In the book it says that it’s a cornucopia like
the one that’s used at holiday time,” says director Gary Ross. “But we paused and wondered: What does that mean in
the future? I wanted to create a large metallic sculptural element that almost seemed like a knife-edge into the natural
world. We came up with this faceted, sculptural object that felt evocative of the Capitol: hard and cold.”
Messina explains, “We looked at some of Frank Gehry’s work such as Disney Hall and we looked at a lot of modern
architecture that’s taking place right now, with sort of folded planes. I think Suzanne described it as being painted
gold, but we ended up going with a gunmetal gray. It’s actually one of my favorite pieces in the movie. We built it in
Charlotte and trucked it out to Asheville, set it out with a crane on location.”
Set decorator Larry Dias was responsible for furniture, lighting, carpets — anything not a floor or a wall on a
location or a set. “I go into an empty shell of the set and then put everything inside of it,” he explains. Once Ross
and Messina had articulated their overall vision, and identified or created places for filming, Dias could get to work.
At first he thought it could be difficult to decorate the Everdeens’ house. The location was perfect, but where would
he find the furniture to flesh it out? “I’d never worked in North Carolina,” he says. “I wasn’t really sure what I
was going to be able to acquire here, so we’d done a lot of prep work in Los Angeles. But once I got here I realized,
it’s kind of a treasure trove for this type of a movie. The first day I got to North Carolina, Sara Gardner-Gail, my
assistant, and I did a little research, trying to find some antique stores. And we happened to find one that’s
literally less than a mile from the Philip Morris plant where we’re shooting — eighty-eight thousand square feet of
antiques. We hit the mother lode on day one.” They bought tables, chairs, photographs, all in keeping with the visual
tone of the film.
Even with such a rich source of materials, Dias had a harder time finding stuff to fill the Hob. He says, “The Hob was
difficult because you’re trying to create a marketplace with things that have no value except to the people that live
within the Seam.” Luckily, he found a man who was “sort of an antiques dealer, but his antiques are in an unfinished,
raw state. He has a yard, probably on forty acres, so there’s a lot of stuff outside that’s just in piles and heaps.
We were able to get lots of stuff there.”
Katniss barters in the Hob.
When it came time to decorate the town square, Dias says, “We sourced these giant glass balls that became the reaping
balls and rigged them onto some tables that we found here in North Carolina. We outfitted them to make them look like
they were a tool of the Capitol, sent out to all the districts. So all the districts, when we see the reapings, have the
same balls.”
Just as Messina had looked to the past to design the Capitol’s exteriors, Dias looked to the past to create its
interiors. In addition, he says, “There’s a coldness to it all, a sort of spare quality. The spaces lack anything
personal.” He special-ordered period pieces from the 1960s and 1970s, and mixed this furniture with light fixtures from
a North Carolina showroom.
The Capitol’s style extended even to the interior of the hovercraft, which Dias helped to design. “Inside the
hovercraft, we were going after a militaristic feel. There’s a coldness to it, too, obviously. They’re taking these
kids off to these Games, and they all know what’s going to happen next. I found the seats early on — they’re actually
NASCAR race-car seats. I found a North Carolina manufacturer less than a mile away, and we customized the seats. Made
them all have symmetry instead of asymmetry, because that’s what the Capitol would have.”
The tributes in the hovercraft that will bring them to the arena. Rue and Clove sit in the seats closest to the camera.
Trish Gallaher Glenn, the movie’s prop master, was responsible for everything the actors picked up and touched in the
movie. One of her greatest challenges was making sure that Katniss’s weapons were representative of the various places
she used them.
“Katniss has two bows in the movie,” says Glenn. “The first bow is the hunting bow that her father has made, that she
hides in the district. We wanted something very organic, very real, very simple. And we wanted the other bow for the
Games to reflect the Capitol, as if everything that was made for the Games was made by artisans in the Capitol. We went
black and silver, and we tried to do a lot of combinations of matte and shiny. And we wanted super-clean lines. Her
arrows for the Games are bright and shiny, silver aluminum rods with a really elongated tip. We did the fletching, which
would be the feathers on the arrow, in a clear plastic with silver Mylar on it. And we had Jennifer pull them, we had
her run with them, so that we could all see and make sure we had it right.”
Glenn also created the other tributes’ weapons, which had to look lethal but be practical during filming. She says,
“Some weapons are made of aluminum. It’s a super-high-quality aluminum that you can actually fight with, blade on
blade, metal on metal. Then we figure out if we need any rubber replicas, soft ones you can hit somebody over the head
with.”
A close-up of the backpack Katniss grabs at the start of the Games — with a knife protruding.
Careful thought went into designing the parachutes that deliver sponsors’ gifts to the tributes during the Hunger
Games. Glenn says, “When I read the book, it said ‘a tiny parachute’ and somehow in my mind it was something very,
very small. But when you get the reality that Katniss gets a roll, she gets soup, she gets all these different medicines
in the parachute and the container is beneath the parachute . . . it had to expand a lot. We kind of went into this
direction that it’s all being controlled anyway by the Capitol, that it didn’t really have to be working but it should
appear to be controllable.”
The Capitol’s cruelty even extended to the shocking color of the berries Glenn chose. “We started out thinking, well,
maybe we can take blueberries, those really big blueberries that you can find at a certain time of year, and dye them,”
she says. “And that didn’t work at all. So we came up with a wild berry that I ordered online, and this particular one
that I think is pretty amazing. The juice of it is red, bright red, almost like blood, which we thought was really cool.
We went with a frozen one and we have this technique for defrosting them very slowly with paper towels, and we try to
keep them as dry as possible so they don’t squish. Still, they were everywhere. Scott Hankins, the costumer, hated us
for a few days because of the berry juice that was all over the costumes.”
Gary Ross and Phil Messina hired Jack White, a food stylist, to design and create the food of Panem. “When we were at
District Twelve, there were a few scenes with Katniss and her mom where her mom is cooking. The beans and the greens
that we had for them to eat looked almost rotten. The thought was not to bring in beautiful food, but to pick stuff that
looked almost like it was about to decompose.”