New behind the scenes image from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes + interview with producer Nina Jacobson

Rachel Zegler, Luna Steeples, Nina Jacobson, Cooper Dillon, Lucas Wilson

There's a new behind the scenes image from the filming of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds And Snakes plus a great interview with producer Nina Jacobson in Polygon. Spoilers for The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes to follow. 

Jacobson says there was never a chance that Lionsgate would reboot the series or do endless sequels just to cash in. “You could have gone with a fan favorite — Let’s do Haymitch’s story! Or do Finnick’s games! — but that would be doing it to do it,” Jacobson tells Polygon. “If Suzanne Collins had a story in this world, with something she wanted to talk about, something to explore, then great. But if not, better to leave a franchise as something people feel fondly about rather than crank out a sequel for the sake of a sequel.”

 Jacobson never spoke to Collins while Songbirds and Snakes was in development, but after reading the book, she had no hesitation about making another. “Suzanne, the originator and North Star of everything that we try to do with these books, she doesn’t write just to make money,” Jacobson says. “She writes when she has something to say.”

Author Suzanne Collins

Jacobson talked at length with Collins about Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as she devised a modern cinematic spectacle that could still have a philosophical heart.

“Are we fundamentally good if left to our own devices? Are we fundamentally bad, and need the state to keep us in check or we’ll destroy each other? These ideas about how people perceive each other, and the government, and what they need based on those perceptions, felt so incredibly timely. And to do it through Coriolanus Snow, somebody we’ve all spent the last four movies hating, felt like a particularly interesting and original approach,” she says.

Jacobson admits the “original movies are very political, but they aren’t partisan or polarizing as far as our domestic politics [go].” Songbirds & Snakes, on the other hand, may feel more pointed in response to the ideological “roller coaster of the last decade.”

Jacobson says her formula is pretty simple: Adapt an actual book for what it is, then recruit a team well versed enough in the material to produce a full-blown Hunger Games period piece.

Nina Jacobson and Francis Lawrence with Jo Willems in the background

Joining Jacobson on her quest to do right by Collins’ novel are director Francis Lawrence, who helmed Catching Fire and both Mockingjay films; Catching Fire writer Michael Arndt, who teamed with playwright and screenwriter Michael Lesslie to adapt the book; cinematographer Jo Willems, who shot all of Lawrence’s Hunger Games installments; and James Newton Howard, who has composed all of the series’ scores since the 2012 original. Together, the reassembled creatives worked backward, starting with the visual and world-building elements of the original Hunger Games, then stripping away all the elements to design a Panem in flux.

The Corso in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

To illustrate an era Jacobson compares to Weimar Germany, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes crew recruited German production designer Uli Hanisch (Babylon Berlin, Cloud Atlas) to reimagine the Capitol. They shot on real locations around the globe to bring a spirit of the past to an even darker moment in The Hunger Games timeline. The producer says parts of the film were shot in Berlin’s Olympiastadion, the stadium where Jesse Owens famously won four gold medals in 1936, and the Centennial Hall in Poland, places that “make the humans feel small by design, relative to the architecture.”

Young Tigris and Coryo on set in Berlin via Sac Tributos

Jacobson says the movie opens on an image from when Coriolanus was a child “and people are literally starving and doing whatever they have to to survive during war (see an image from the set above). It’s an essential part of who he is and who he becomes.”

Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow

Tom Blyth plays the young version of Coriolanus, portrayed by Donald Sutherland in the original movies. “He has enormous self-control, composure,” Jacobson says of Blyth, who not only matched the look of a young “Coryo,” but had Sutherland’s “intrinsic qualities” of being a subtle showman.

Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray BairdLucy Gray, District 12’s chosen female tribute and Coriolanus’ mentee is played by Rachel Zegler. Lucy is a member of the Covey, a group of traveling musicians, and unlike Katniss, Lucy shows up ready to perform, capturing the attention of the Capitol crowd through show and song.

Lucy’s musical background plays a major role in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes book, and will in the film as well. Dave Cobb, a Nashville staple who’s produced for Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile, Sturgill Simpson, and Jason Isbell, among others, was hired early on to help translate Collins’ many lyrical moments for Lucy into mesmerizing songs performed by Zegler. And even at the scripting stage, the creative team was doing their own homework, mainlining Ken Burns’ 16-hour doc series Country Music to bring integrity to the Covey.

Hunter Schafer as Tigrs SnowHunter Schafer plays Tigris Snow, Coryo’s cousin and the closest person he has to a confidant. “For Hunter to represent hope and optimism about humanity, see people as human beings and not as representatives of an idea, I think that makes it a particularly interesting role for her to play,” Jacobson says of the casting. “People connect to her as a human being beyond all the vitriol and politics of this moment — people find her immensely relatable.”

On the ongoing WGA and  SAG-AFTRA strikes, Jacobson says, “It’s been very painful to watch. We’re going through a time of structural change, and we all need each other to get through it. We’re in this kind of civil war when the changes in the business are the bigger adversary.”

The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is a rare one-off. It’s not intended as a trilogy-starter or continuity revival, Jacobson says. While it’s easy to imagine Collins’ book being broken into a series of films, given its scope and segmentation, Lawrence, Arndt, and Lesslie fit the full structure into one movie. As for future one-off movies, the producer is hopeful. “Do I think she will write more books in the world? I do, and I hope she will. Do I have any idea what they’ll be? Not really!”

“When you are living in a polarizing time, it is so much easier to assume difference is hostility and demonize the other,” she says. “This [story] is about finding connections, and finding out that you might have enormous connections to the last person in the world that you think you’d have anything in common with.”