Costco Connection - August 2012

The odds are ever in their favor

IN ADDITION to strong adult characters played by Elizabeth Banks, Woody Harrelson, Lenny Kravitz, Stanley Tucci and Donald Sutherland, The Hunger Games hinges on three young characters played by relatively unknown actors.

Peeta. (Top left) Josh Hutcherson, 19, is best known for his work in The Kids Are All Right.

“He’s 1,000 percent Peeta,” Lawrence
says. “He’s nice. He’s charming. He’s not
afraid of anybody. There was no differ-
ence between him and the character.”
“I did no preparation to get the role,”
Hutcherson says. “I never read a character
I related more to than Peeta. I felt like it
was written for me, although I had to
gain 15 pounds and Liam had to lose 15
pounds. It may have been easier if we
had played each other’s roles.”

Gale. (Center left) Liam Hemsworth, 22, is the younger brother of Thor’s Chris Hemsworth.

“Gale is a protector, a very strong
character who provides for his family,”
Hemsworth tells The Connection. “He’s
similar to Katniss in many ways. I wanted
to lose weight for the role. I was eating
a lot less in the month leading up to the
shoot and training a lot. Gale is living in a
depression. He’s hunting for food. He’s
trying to keep himself and his family alive.
I wanted to know what it felt like to be
hungry, what it does to you, how it affects
you physically.”

Elizabeth Banks (far left), Josh Hutcherson (top), Liam Hemsworth (center) and Jennifer Lawrence (bottom and left) are integral pieces of The Hunger Games.

thing that we all care about: the grand scale of good and evil,” she says. “There is no fairy godmother for Katniss. She has no magic powers. She’s an underdog. When she triumphs, she does it on her own, and she really does it for love of her little sister.

“The violence troubles me,” Messner admits, “but I think it’s deeply important to the story. In real life you can’t forget there’s violence around. Kids have always brutalized other kids. Look at Lord of the Flies.

“Katniss is a real girl with real problems, and I think that speaks to kids. They love their siblings and their families, and The Hunger Games gives them a chance to think, ‘What if that were me? What if that were my challenge?’ It is a big story, and it’s inspiring.”

A story for the generations

Donald Sutherland, who plays President Snow, the country’s dictator, feels The Hunger Games can have a political impact. “It’s possible this film could catalyze whatever revolu-

tionary instincts the dormant younger
generation has,” he tells The Connection. “It
could make them stand up and change the
political structure they live in.”
Collins got the idea for the novels while
watching television with her children. “They
were switching back and forth between
American Idol and the Iraq war and looking at
the juxtaposition between the two,” Nina
Jacobson, the film’s producer, says. “Young
people were being remade into icons in
American culture. That was Suzanne’s source.”
Jacobson brought Collins on board to

“They’re popular
because they speak
to something that
we all care about:
the grand scale of
good and evil.”

—Melissa Messner

help produce the film and co-write the script with director Gary Ross. “From the beginning, Suzanne felt one of the advantages of the movie was that it could take us places Katniss couldn’t see,” she tells The Connection.

Ross, best known for writing and direct-
ing such films as Pleasantville and Seabiscuit,
fought hard to get the job of shepherding the
book into a film. “This movie has a lot on its
mind,” Ross tells The Connection. “It’s about
the haves and have-nots—the 99 percent ver-
sus the 1 percent. It’s about the preservation of
your humanity in the face of a system that
seeks to rob you of it.