Hunger Games: Mockingjay Director 'Refused' To Use CGI To Recreate Philip Seymour Hoffman

Director Francis Lawrence has said that he was entirely against any suggestion of using CGI to fill in the gaps left by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman when he was finishing ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1’.

Hoffman died with a week left of production on the movie, and although much of his dialogue scenes were already in the can, his work was not complete.

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Speaking to the Huffington Post, Lawrence told of the ‘rough time’ the cast and crew experienced when one of their number was very suddenly gone.

“It was a horrible time for everybody involved,” he said. “He had two scenes left to shoot with us with dialogue, and a few other appearances in scenes with no dialogue.

“It was really quite rough. We had to shut down for a while to figure out what we were going to do, and also to let the cast and crew deal with it emotionally. Obviously, you associate being at work with being with him.

“We had to start pretty slowly, pretty quietly… short days and really eased back in. We gathered around on the first day back, and we talked about him, and started to try and move forward.”

Speaking about how Hoffman took on the role of Plutarch Heavensbee, the games-maker turned revolutionary, he said: “He was constantly sort of grinding away at a scene and was able to dig down and down and down, deeper and really find the dynamics of the relationships that he’s in,” he said.

“And then once you’ve done that process then you don’t really need many takes at all with him.”

But it was on the re-structuring of the movie to work without Hoffman, that Lawrence made a definitive decision not to fake it.

“We decided we didn’t want to do any digital trickery with him, so we re-wrote the scenes and gave his dialogue to other actors,” he said.

“He was one of the greatest actors, I think, of all time. And I think to try and fake a Philip Seymour Hoffman performance would have been catastrophic. I would never want to do that.

“This was the best way to get around such a horrible thing.”

The movie hits screens across the UK on November 20.

Image credits: Lionsgate

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