Yahoo Movies Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes director insisted Tom Blyth didn't copy Donald Sutherland
Francis Lawrence felt the Coriolanus Snow in the prequel is "not fully formed" and so shouldn't have been similar to the original
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes director Francis Lawrence didn't want Tom Blyth to be anything like his Hunger Games counterpart Donald Sutherland in the prequel because Coriolanus Snow is not the same man viewers know him as, he tells Yahoo UK.
Blyth portrays the iconic villain in his teen years, in the period before he became the ruthless leader of Panem that would be an adversary to Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) in the original films. The film finds the character tasked with becoming a mentor during the 10th Hunger Games to District 12 tribute Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) and his quest to help her survive.
Because of this, Lawrence insisted on Blyth not basing his performance on anything that Sutherland had done before him, because he didn't want it to influence how he portrayed the character.
"The truth is I did not want Tom at all to try to act like Donald Sutherland. I didn't want him to try and move like him, or sound like him, or anything," Lawrence says.
"We're seeing a guy who isn't [the same], he's a young man, he's not fully formed. He doesn't have his philosophies yet, he's not that guy yet. So I wanted him to own his role."Francis Lawrence
"What we mostly talked about was the character journey, the simplest versions of 'what do you want and what are you afraid of?' But then how are you going to go about getting what you want?"
Lawrence and Blyth discussed many aspects of the character so the actor could better understand him, such as his need to not be seen as different to his other entitled classmates or let on that he and his family have no money or food, or the extreme measures he'll take in order to survive.
The filmmaker goes on: "We would map out the moments that make him become the person he's going to be... what do all those self-preservation things mean and how do they tie into Dr Gaul's grooming of 'look at you with your manners and high society' and how all that stuff falls away in the blink of an eye.
"But he's a super talented actor and he's Juilliard trained, he's really good at his craft. He's really thoughtful, he has such control. So he was a real joy to work with."
The 'tricky' challenge of playing villain Coriolanus Snow
Nina Jacobson, the film's executive producer who has been working on the franchise since it began in 2012, tells Yahoo UK that the creative team were focused on finding a way to make Snow a character that viewers could support despite what they know of what he becomes.
"We wanted to make sure that we got an audience to be behind him, rooting for him and empathising with him," Jacobson explains.
"And I think that was what we worked the hardest on, and it's tricky. If you look at something like The Joker you just feel so bad for him, people are beating him up and people are making fun of him, and he's getting humiliated all the time. You sort of understand that.
"But here you have a once rich kid in high society and you have stuff to work against to get audiences behind [him].
"The trick is he still maintains an ambition and this need for power, and some darkness, so that when he descends into darkness it's truthful."Nina Jacobson
Jacobson adds that Snow is a "great vessel to explore the world" created by Suzanne Collins, because he brings a different point of view compared to the previous films.
"To see this story through his eyes and to see how instrumental he was in transforming the games from what they were at this point to what we recognise them to be in the original movies was a great thing to explore and it was exciting to find an actor in Tom who could pull that off.
"It's really demanding to play neither hero nor villain, both hero and villain, and to play all of that push and pull with as much nuance and subtlety as he does."
The adaptation process
The creative team were "nervous" about returning to the franchise because of fears that fans wouldn't be interested in a "Hunger Games movie with no Katniss" when Collins first came to them with the story, prior to it being released to the public.
"We thought we were done in 2015," Lawrence says, referencing the release of Mockingjay part two.
"Suzanne was like, 'I've been on these things for 10 years I've got to do something else' and Nina and I both understood, Nina had also been on him for a while, I've been on them for a while and we wanted to do something different.
"And then she surprised us, in 2019 she said, 'hey, guys, I'm almost done with the book'. I'm like, 'OK, wow, that's exciting' and I was a little nervous: 'Do people want a Hunger Games movie with no Katniss?'
"This is before I read the story, then we got a manuscript in the beginning of 2020... and I totally fell in love.
"I loved what she did, I loved period, I loved the origin aspect of the whole story — and not just the origin of Snow, but the origin of the hanging tree, the origin of the game— and so I was super excited and ready."Francis Lawrence
As exciting as it was, the creative team had the challenge of adapting the book for the big screen. While they were familiar with doing so the difficulty came in condensing the story —which is the longest of all Collins' Hunger Games books— into one film.
Jacobson explains that they planned from the get go to make one movie, saying: "I think audiences would find it cynical to split it, I think that audience feel frustrated often when you leave them hanging.
"And, besides that, we have been given this amazing three act structure so breaking them up thought counterintuitive. That said, it's the longest of all the books, so we knew we had to make choices and compressing within acts, so we knew, first and foremost, we have to stay on point with the themes of the book [and] the characters.
"How can we compress without losing the essence of it and without steering away from the intentions of the book? So that mean[t] making some painful choices."
Collins is there every step of the way, though: "We have daily phone calls for hours on end every day until we crack it. Francis and Suzanne usually get together and they do a big cheat sheet of everything from the book that has to be in the movie, then from there a writer comes in and produces an outline.
"We all go through the outline and then once we have the draft we literally just get together every day, page by page talk about the scene, talk about the dialogue, so she's wildly involved in a great way."Nina Jacobson
"Once we have a script then she gives an enormous amount of latitude during production for Francis to be the incredible director that he is, for our department heads to shine, so she's our North star," the producer goes on.
"It's essential to have her on the script stage, but I also really respect how much freedom she gives creatively once she knows that the script is right."
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is released in cinemas on Friday, 17 November.
Read more:
Hunger Games prequel review: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes marks triumphant return to Panem
Everything you need to know about The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
watch the trailer for The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes:
