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Visual Design
As the cast began to prepare for their adventure in
Panem, Gary Ross and his crew dove into bringing Suzanne Collin’s vision of the
futuristic world they inhabit fully alive on screen. It all started with Ross’
photographic concept – to navigates Panem through the subjective experience of
Katniss Everdeen, just as Collins had done on the page – which came to life in
a collaboration with Oscar®-nominated director of photography Tom Stern (who
recently shot Clint Eastwood’s J. EDGAR).
“One of the most important things to me and to Tom was
to convey the immediacy and first person point-of-view that makes the book so
irresistible,” says Ross. “This meant
shooting in an urgent, intensely personal way that I’ve always wanted to use,
but has never suited the subject matter of films I’ve done before.”
This first-person POV would imbue every detail of the
film and also become the cornerstone for the bold set pieces created by
production designer Philip Messina, who found himself in the position of
turning portions of modern-day North Carolina into futuristic District 12, the
Capitol and the arena where the Games unfold.
Messina calls the look he and Ross established for the
film “retro-futuristic.” He
explains: “It’s kind of as if you took
early Mid-Century, Depression-era America and suddenly brought it into the
distant future, with twists of high technology. The book created an alternative
universe where on the one hand, you have people scratching in the dirt to
survive; and on the other, you have flying hovercraft. So we wanted to stay very true to that
portrayal.”
It was something vital to all of the filmmakers. “Phil was really able to create the future in
a way that still felt rooted in the real history of North America,” notes Nina
Jacobson. “We all wanted it to feel like
this could be us in a few centuries. And
he did that, while creating a great range of sets from The Hob in District 12
to the Capitol to the amazing forests.”
Much like the actors, Messina knew he would be up
against readers’ high expectations and personal imaginings of Panem. But, like Ross, he drew his inspiration
directly from the book wherever possible. “Gary was determined to not only be
true to the spirit of the book but also to the details of the book,” notes
Messina. “This meant that we never
thought ‘let’s ditch this’ when things were complicated, but rather we asked
‘how can this be accomplished?’ We were
determined to design ourselves out of difficult situations in order to be as
faithful as possible to the novel.”
Messina and Ross shared illustrations with Collins to
get her input. “She would sometimes say
‘that’s exactly how I pictured it,’ Messina recalls. “Could there be a better comment from the
author who came up with this world?”
One of Messina’s first tasks was creating the Seam,
the poorest area of impoverished, mining-focused District 12, where Katniss and
her family live. Shooting in an
abandoned mill town in Henry River, North Carolina, he found a grouping of
1920s homes that closely matched the environment described by Collins in the
book. “This area was absolutely perfect for the Seam,” says Messina. “We couldn’t have imagined it falling in our
lap any better than that.”
For Ross, Messina’s work on the Seam pulls the
audience right into the harshness and seeming hopelessness of life in District
12. “The Seam had to have a feeling of
squalor and decay,” he describes. “It is
one thing to live in poverty, but it’s another to live in a place without any
individuality, where all the houses are cookie-cutter and feel like they’re
made by a company and not people. Phil
found the perfect location to bring out the regimented sameness surrounding
Katniss.”
For Reaping Day in the town square of District 12, the
production shot at an old cotton gin in Shelby, North Carolina, bringing in 400
extras for the shoot, as well as building the tracks for a train system that
carries the district’s precious coal to the Capitol. “It was a lot of work,” says Messina. “We brought in about 300 feet of railroad
track and then had trains craned onto it.”
Another intensive project was creating The Hob, the
derelict but teeming black market of District 12. “The Hob is the marketplace
and souk of District 12,” describes Ross, “where Peacekeepers turn a blind eye.
Phil brought to life an incredible marketplace where people sell all kinds of
junk and things they’ve found on the way.
It really evokes the deprivation of the District.”
All of this contrasted in the extreme with Messina’s
designs for the Capitol, which were primarily built in a former Phillip Morris
factory. “You see the Capitol through
Katniss’ eyes in the book and we wanted to reflect the opulence and vastness of
scale she sees,” he says. “I was
thinking of these buildings from the 1936 World Fair in New York that were kind
of temples of industry and we really riffed off that. The Capitol had to be imposing but also
outrageous because to the people who live there it’s like Marie Antoinette’s
decadent court.”
The colors in the Capitol are a mix of icy and acid
tones. “There’s color but it’s not
necessarily friendly,” set decorator Larry Dias comments. “There’s no warmth to
the colors. Everything is assaulting.”
Katniss’ own senses are assaulted as she rides into
the Capitol with the other Tributes on the customary horse-drawn chariots that
are part of the pomp and ceremony of the Games. Messina knew this would be
another key design. “I tackled the
chariots early on,” he says, “and we looked at zeppelin-style designs that
would echo the Capitol’s high-tech Maglev trains. We painted the chariots with
automotive paint in black and chrome and even though they are mean looking,
they also have the beautiful lines of sculpture. I think they hearken back just the right
amount to Rome.”
Shifting gears again, Messina designed the Games’
Training Center as a bastion of raw sweat and anxiety. “The training center had to be scary and
dark, with some Roman iconography but also very American, too. Gary and I thought of it as the scariest high
school gymnasium you could imagine,” laughs Messina. “The idea was to take the fear from gym class
and factor that by ten.”
“The Training Center is where all the Tributes start
to size each other up, as they start using their skills,” notes executive
producer Robin Bissell. “Phil did an amazing job of building a set that allows
that to happen.”
For the lush, perilous woods of the arena itself, Ross
had something very specific in mind and he found it in a pristine conservation
area. “I wanted the arena to be a
hardwood forest,” says the director. “I didn’t want it to just be coniferous. I wanted it to feel intrinsically American. In North Carolina, we were able to find an
amazingly verdant natural forest that was just right.”
The arena also contains one of the most challenging of
all of Philip Messina’s designs: the
Cornucopia, a giant gold horn containing a cache of Panem’s hybrid weapons and
valuable supplies that the Tributes must battle for as the Games kick off. “I was a bit scared of how the Cornucopia was
going to look, but in the end it is one of my favorite pieces in the whole movie
– a huge, nasty sculptural horn in the middle of a field,” says Messina. “We looked at Frank Gehry designs and a lot
of modern architecture with folded planes and fractalized surfaces and kind of
riffed on all of that. It looks like it
fell from the sky onto this field.”
Ross notes: “Phil
created exactly what I wanted to see: a
large, metallic, sculptural element that almost seemed like a knife’s edge
jutting into this natural world.”
Even in the woods, the attention to detail was
unwavering, right down to finding the right tree to house the infamous Tracker
Jacker nest. “The tree had to be just
right,” notes location manager Todd Christensen. “It had to be the right size and have the
right branches and it had to work for all the different angles of the scene as
Katniss has an important exchange with Rue.”
In the end, Messina was very satisfied by the way all
of Panem unfolded into something highly unusual but palpably real. “I’ve done bigger movies but I haven’t ever
done anything that was as creative and fun as this design-wise,” he concludes.
For the cast, the tactile feel of the sets translated
into more immediate performances. “The sets were so helpful to
creating the character of Katniss,” notes Jennifer Lawrence. “I’d never seen anything like them and I felt
like I was in some kind of wonderland for most of the shoot. From my house in District 12 to the woods,
everything was even better than I’d imagined it in the book.” " (Lionsgate)
