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.’”
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.
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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