Director Francis Lawrence is no stranger to the Hunger Games franchise–he’s directed each of the movies in this series aside from the first one. But the prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a very different creature from those other films. This is a crueler and more primitive Hunger Games than the competitions you remember, and the protagonist this time isn’t a tribute, but rather Coriolanus Snow, the bad guy from the main series whose older form was played by Donald Sutherland.
So despite the returning director and the ongoing franchise, this movie is hardly more of the same. Centering the story on the younger version of the franchise villain is certainly unusual, and requires a balancing act that the Star Wars prequels, for example, didn’t manage with Anakin Skywalker. In an interview with GameSpot, Lawrence broke down the philosophical difficulties of having a character like Snow as your main character, the dramatic differences between this movie and his previous Hunger Games films, and how Jason Schwartzman put his stamp on the role of the original Hunger Games host, Lucky Flickerman.
“Honestly, the biggest challenge of this movie that we knew we were going to have, in the adaptation process primarily, was making sure that we could get the audience behind [Snow], to empathize with him, to root for him, even knowing that he’s the hated villain of the original stories,” Lawrence told me. “But what was even more difficult, once we got an audience behind him, is to make sure that we still have the right kind of breadcrumbs and the right layers of him–of his ambition, his greed, the darkness, so that when he turns, it’s feels believable and honest and truthful.”
Snow’s relationship with Lucy Gray Baird, the movie’s other protagonist, is likewise very different from the relationship between Katniss and Peeta, who were both Hunger Games tributes. Lucy Gray is a tribute herself, with Snow as her mentor–there’s an uneven power dynamic here from the start, and it’s exacerbated by the fact that Snow is primarily concerned with winning money through this situation. And Lucy Gray isn’t in the games for any kind of noble reason like Katniss–she was handpicked by the mayor, because the mayor’s daughter was dating Lucy Gray’s ex-boyfriend and wanted her out of the way for good. So she’s really on a whole other level of trouble.
“The other stories are about the consequences of war, and you’re following a girl who sacrifices herself for the sake of her younger sister, and then has to survive, and it’s just wildly different than just telling this origin story of a villain,” Lawrence said. “And also just in the relationships, right? If you look at Katniss and Peeta, because those movies are about the consequences of war, one of those elements is PTSD. And a lot of their relationship is built on trauma bonding. They go through these horrible things together, and that bonds them, and then you get home and you don’t want to be reminded of the trauma.”
Snow and Lucy Gray, by contrast, have a very different dynamic. Their relationship is never completely settled, because Lucy Gray can never be completely sure that she can trust him.
“Whereas here, you have this kind of relationship based on mutual need [where] he needs her to win and survive, so he can win the prize. And she, of course, needs him so she can ideally survive,” Lawrence said. “And they’re both mysterious people. You’re not quite sure of their motivations and whether or not their feelings for one another are true.”
But it’s neither Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray nor Tom Blyth as Snow who makes the biggest impression in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Rather, it’s Jason Schwartzman as Lucky Flickerman, ancestor to Stanley Tucci’s Caesar Flickerman and the very first host of the Hunger Games. While Caesar played the part of a seasoned TV host, Lucky isn’t quite so polished–it’s the first Hunger Games with a host here, and he’s trying to figure out what works while they try to get those ratings up.
The result is unhinged, with Schwartzman making all sorts of tasteless jokes at the expense of the tributes, even after their deaths. Lucky Flickerman is the film’s secret weapon, but it took some iteration to get there.
“So Jason signed on for the movie. and then he and I had a Zoom. And I told him I thought that his part was underwritten. And I actually asked if I could enlist him to work with me and with the writer on sort of fleshing him out,” Lawrence said, before describing the way Schwartzman jumped into the task with real gusto.
“Jason did a bunch of research looking at weathermen, news reporters, journalists, vaudevillian magicians, all this kind of stuff to sort of pull all the references for the character and building the origin of the Flickerman legacy. But also, every scene that he was in, he came up with tons and tons and tons of ideas with me, with the writer. He probably had about 50 pages of stuff that was outside of our scripts.
“And so basically any scene we did, if it’s a scene at the zoo, his intro, we had variations we would shoot. His outro, we’d have variations we’d shoot. In the auditorium a lot was improv’d. I might throw things to him, stuff that he came up with. Or we’d rehearse the night before and he’d say, ‘Here’s 10 ideas I have, which ones do you like?’ and we would bat it around. So a huge amount, probably 90% of what you see in the movie of Jason’s, is sort of created after the fact and was not in the book or the script.”
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes hits theaters everywhere November 17.
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