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In the first shot we see of Rachel Zegler’s Lucy Gray Baird in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes first trailer, she curtseys sarcastically - a stark parallel of Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss in both The Hunger Games and Catching Fire.
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“It is such a completely original Lucy moment,” producer Nina Jacobson says to Variety. “She’s such a different character from Katniss. She’s such a performer. Katniss is the opposite. This is a woman who loves and lives to perform. To see the connection there, the history that she represents, and to think that Katniss Everdeen grew up knowing about Lucy Gray and this moment, it was just a great kind of microcosm of both how much of a new ground it is and how rooted it is in what we’ve seen, but in this backward-looking way.”
“I just thought it’d be really interesting if we create a history of it so that maybe [Katniss] didn’t come up with it on her own. Maybe she’d heard about this girl from a long time ago having done the same thing,” director Francis Lawrence says. “We’re also trying to find ways of linking it to the other movies and into the things that people love.”
But that’s where the similarities end. “One of the least Katniss things ever is to get up there and sing a song,” Jacobson says. “It’s a far cry from ‘I volunteer as tribute’ to ‘I’m gonna get up there, grab the mic and sing a song.’”
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Jacobson and Lawrence say fans should expect something extraordinary when they finally hear those songs.
“Dave Cobb did the music and he is incredible. His songs are earworms. They stick in your head. They’re beautiful,” Jacobson says. “Rachel often would opt not to do playback, and just sing it live. Often, after they would call cut, people would just go bananas clapping!”
Those live on-set vocals will be included in the final product. “The big finale moment…un-fucking-believable. Her voice is jaw-dropping.”
“Suzanne Collins is a country music aficionado and she has a vast knowledge of country music. Because District 12 is West Virginia, we sort of leaned toward the Appalachian sound,” adds Lawrence of the musical style for the film.
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Jason Schwartzman plays Hunger Games Host Lucky Flickerman, an ancestor of Stanley Tucci’s Caesar Flickerman. As we know, resemblance is striking, but Jacobson says “He’s not impersonating [Stanley Tucci] any way - but there are moments with his laugh or his flair.”
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“He was much more developed in the script than he was in the screenplay,” director Francis Lawrence adds. “He and I had a chat and I said, ‘Listen, I think that the character is under-written right now. But we have a lot of opportunity to flesh him out. I would love your help if you’re game.’”
Schwartzman was up for the challenge. “I spent a lot of time talking to him about who this guy is, what he becomes and what he wants,” Lawrence continues. “I think he had, at the end of the day, 50 pages of new ideas and dialogue for all of his scenes. He had so much fun.”
“He spent a ton of time with Mike Leslie, the writer, coming up with some of his ad libs,” Jacobson adds. “Some of the stuff that was never scripted just slayed me.”
“The idea of seeing the Games at a time when the ratings were down and people weren’t wanting to watch them, and they tasked these kids with making them entertaining…it’s so modern,” Jacobson says. “Snow was tasked with getting people to watch. You know, I can relate,” she says with a laugh.
“I was amazed, with it being on Netflix, at how many people are either just discovering or rediscovering the movies,” Jacobson says. “It’s been so exciting to see it in the bloodstream again.”
The Hunger Games:The Ballad of Songbirds And Snakes hits theaters November 17th.