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Warning: This podcast comprises spoilers in regards to the ending of Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
“In 2015, we thought she was done.”
That’s what filmmaker Francis Lawrence thought in regards to the finale of the $3 billion-plus grossing The Hunger Games franchise with Mockingjay Part 2, that’s till writer Suzanne Collins gave him and sequence pic producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson a heads up in late 2019 {that a} prequel manuscript set 64 years earlier than the unique movie, and focusing in on the origin story of foremost baddie Coriolanus Snow, was coming their approach.
Director Francis Lawrence in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
Lionsgate
But slightly than simply extra bows and arrows and fierce enviornment battles, there was a complete different chic component to the prequel and that was in its nation music underpinnings, taking inspiration from the early turn-of-the-century Bluegrass and folksy sounds that draw their lineage from Scotland, England and Ireland. Such lyrics written within the guide assist paint the story of scrappy, District 12 member, Lucy Gray Baird, performed by Rachel Zegler, who’s a part of a touring musician group. She turns into a tribute within the first inaugural Hunger Games, and Snow her mentor. Opposites entice; the 2 turning one another’s worlds the wrong way up as the luxury scion realizes his objective on the earth following his father’s dying years in the past.
Similar to when it got here to placing the forged to the unique Hunger Games collectively, Lionsgate went with a recent face forged on Songbirds & Snakes, Zegler’s huge cinematic debut being Steven Spielberg’s 2021 function musical remake West Side Story as Maria.
But the lead position of Snow went to British Juilliard alum Tom Blyth, who “came out of the blue” says Lawrence. The filmmaker of Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and Mockingjay Part 1 & 2, caught the actor’s audition tape on a practice journey via Germany the place he was scouting to shoot the prequel. Lawrence tells us right here why Blyth was ripe for the position, and their selections to veer from doing a cutup of young Donald Sutherland. A key a part of Blyth’s prep: Literally getting in and walking round in his character’s footwear.
But with some critical romance scenes right here between Zegler and Blyth, rivaling the interludes of Love Story‘s Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw, the place and what’s it that makes Snow flip for the worst, particularly into a person who poisons his rivals to maneuver up the federal government ladder?
Explains Blyth: “If there’s a crux where it changes, it’s when he meets Lucy Gray. She challenges all of that. She represents freedom, liberty, and music and love and hope, and she challenges his notions and he starts to fall in love with her.”
He additionally tells, “And then in letting his guard down, he lets chaos in. And in letting chaos in, he learns that the capitol was right all along, and he was right to be fearful of chaos and he needs to control it.”
Blyth additionally chats about that mysterious ending in Songbirds & Snakes and what’s subsequent for Snow. In phrases of deciphering that enigma in his performing course of, the actor says “I’m way more interested in not knowing.”
Songbirds & Snakes opened to $99M on the world field workplace this previous weekend.
Listen to our dialog with Lawrence and Blyth under on the primary Crew Call of the 2022-23 awards season:
