The Hunger Games: Official Illustrated Movie Companion Read Online Free PDF

movie made of it, and I actually spent a whole day with my friends looking up those possible casts on YouTube. I was looking at people, being like, ‘Oh, Emma Stone would make a great Foxface’ — and now it’s me!”
    She continues, “I came in and I did an interview for Gary, because he was interviewing kids that had read the books. And I did that probably in the fall, and that was taped. And then, a couple of weeks later, he asked me if I wanted to come in and read for the role. I just completely freaked out!”

    W hile the cast was still coming together, the central actors had already begun training — and training hard.
    Nina Jacobson gives an overview of what Lawrence needed to do: “Obviously Katniss is a hunter. She’s an archer, she has to be agile. You have to believe that this person could win the Hunger Games, and so we wanted her to have the skills, we wanted her to feel at home doing all of the things that Katniss does.”

    Katniss runs through the woods outside District 12.
     
    Lawrence grins, describing her regimen. “I did every kind of training you can possibly imagine for this role. I had a running coach and I did stunt training so, you know, I did wall climbs and vaults and jumps and all sorts of stuff. I had archery for many weeks . . . it was rough, but it was fun. Archery is such a mind game. You have to just focus on one thing and if you get it wrong you get whipped with a string going over a hundred miles an hour. And it is painful, believe me.” Before filming began, she was driving some fifty or sixty miles around Los Angeles every day, from stunt training to wardrobe fitting to archery practice, getting in shape for the movie.
    Once her physical training was over, there was still more. Lawrence admiringly recalls working with T-Bone Burnett, the twelve-time Grammy Award winning musician who has worked on movies such as
Crazy Heart
and
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
“T-Bone Burnett is producing the music, which is still unbelievable to me. So he trained me a little bit with the singing. I have the worst voice in the world, so that was probably one of the hardest things he’s had to do, but I sang the melody, the lullaby, in my big scene with Rue.”
    Josh Hutcherson remembers, “Everyone else was learning how to do the weapons and things like that. And in this film, Peeta doesn’t do a whole lot with the weapons. So for me it was all about getting to the right physical condition, which was bigger than I was. They wanted me to put on about fifteen pounds of pure muscle for the role, so I had to eat a lot of food and I was working out five days a week — it was very rigorous.”

Liam Hemsworth had the opposite challenge. “I’m not in the Games, so I didn’t have to do any fight training. But it was more just not eating as much as what I was eating. I wanted to look hungry.”

    Filming in the arena. Left to right: Clove (Isabelle Fuhrman), Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), Marvel (Jack Quaid), Cato (Alexander Ludwig), and Allan Poppleton, the co-stunt coordinator
     
    The Hunger Games
book became the actors’ guide to the interior life of the characters they were about to play. Jennifer Lawrence recalls, “After I got the part, I read the first book over and over. It’s great when you have a movie based on a book, because you can read the inner monologue of the character and that’s incredibly helpful.”

    Gary Ross gives feedback to Jennifer Lawrence (Katniss)
and Liam Hemsworth (Gale) while working on the District 12 scenes.
     
    The actors playing the tributes had some further exploration to do. Gary Ross was instrumental in asking probing questions to figure out who these characters really were.

    From left to right: Clove (Isabelle Fuhrman), Cato (Alexander Ludwig),
Thresh (Dayo Okeniyi), Rue (Amandla Stenberg)
     
    For instance, Jack Quaid came to understand Marvel like this: “I’d say if he were in high school, he would be good at one thing and one thing only, and he’d let