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

academics and everything else kind of slide. He is totally vicious. He doesn’t care what he’s cutting up — he just goes for it.”
    Alexander Ludwig began to see his character, Cato, as somebody even more brutal. “I like to think that Cato, before he gets into the Games, is kind of popular and charming, but he’s always had that violent anger inside of him. When he gets into the Games he gets lost in this whole sick game and he almost goes insane toward the end.”
    Amandla Stenberg says, “My character’s fighting style is to evade, because she knows that she can’t fight the big, tough guys. She knows that if she tries, she’ll lose. So what she does is she climbs in the trees and she eats eggs from birds, and that’s her style — to outlast everyone else.”
    And Dayo Okeniyi, who portrays Thresh, came to see his character as a sort of gentle giant. “There’s not too much of a backstory for my character, so that was great, because I got the chance to make it up. He’s very family-oriented and he’ll do anything to make it back to District Eleven to see his mom and his brother again. Thresh is a large character, and a presence to be reckoned with. But he doesn’t want to get in anybody’s way; he’s not out for blood. He just wants to survive.”
    The tributes, also, were changing their looks and sharpening their skills.
    Dayo Okeniyi says, “I was put on a rigorous diet of just protein, and a lot of chicken, a lot of vegetables, because I had to gain weight but I had to gain good weight.”
    Jack Quaid also had to bulk up for his role. “They got me a personal trainer and I put on about sixteen pounds of muscle. It’s good to do something you love for a living and then, at the same time, get in the best shape you’ve ever been in. That’s just nice.”
    Meanwhile, stunt coordinators Allan Poppleton and Chad Stahelski were preparing to teach the tributes the fight skills their characters would need to know for the scenes in the Training Center and in the arena. They’d had about eight weeks to put the sequences together, and were eager to see them in action.
    Jon Kilik notes, “Safety in a movie like this was a paramount concern for us. With all the stunts, action, fights and weapons, the welfare of the actors and crew was a big priority. Some of those swords and daggers are real, and we constantly had to be aware of the dangers.”
    Before teaching the cast each sequence, Stahelski and Poppleton tried to have a few days alone with the stunt performers. That way, when everyone trained together, some of the group was already familiar with the choreography.

    Chad Stahelski says, “We took them into the gym and kind of had
Romper Room
. We trained them to do certain things and to get certain performances out of them. Everybody was game to do everything, but some of the exercises were done with stunt tributes only, for time restraints and, of course, for safety reasons.”
    “We did some very intense fight training. That’s what I was focusing on the most, because that is what Cato is, really,” says Alexander Ludwig. “Cato’s weapon of choice is a giant steel sword. I like to think I’ve become very skilled with the sword. . . .”
    Isabelle Fuhrman, who plays Clove, adds, “I will say I do know how to throw a knife properly now, which is kind of creepy and a skill that I probably won’t use, but it’s just fun to say, you know? ‘What’d you learn this summer?’ ‘Oh, I learned how to throw knives.’ Just casually.”
    To prepare for the fight sequences, the stunt coordinators looked to the actors themselves. “It’s not like we took any of the tributes and started training them in karate or kickboxing or jujitsu or anything like that,” Stahelski points out. “We just took Isabelle or we took Zander [Alexander Ludwig] or we took any of the other ones and found out what they were good at, what character they had. We just kind of took that and ran with it during the big fight