By Iain Blair
Director/producer Francis Lawrence saw his career go turbo-charged when he directed the last three of the four Hunger Game films and helped steer the sci-fi dystopian series into the record books as one of the most successful franchises of all time.
Director Francis Lawrence and DP Jo Willems. Photo Credit: Murray Close
Now Lawrence has returned to the franchise with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a prequel and origin story set 64 years before Katniss Everdeen volunteered as tribute and decades before Coriolanus Snow became the tyrannical president of Panem. The film follows a young Coriolanus (Tom Blyth), the last hope for his failing lineage, who is reluctantly assigned to mentor Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), a tribute from the impoverished District 12. It also stars Peter Dinklage and Viola Davis.
I spoke with Lawrence (I Am Legend, Red Sparrow, Water for Elephants), about making the Lionsgate film and collaborating with his go-to team of DP Jo Willems (ASC, SBC), editor Mark Yoshikawa, sound designer Jeremy Peirson, visual effects supervisor Adrian De Wet and colorist Dave Hussey. The film will premiere later this month.
The film is visually beautiful. What did you shoot it on?
We shot it on the large-format ARRI Alexas with the big 65mm sensor that I really, really like. It’s like shooting large-format film; you get the shallower depth of field. I tend to use wide lenses, and the wider lenses with that sensor also do less warping than normal, so you can get the camera really close to people, but still have a real sense of geography and space.
How tough was the shoot, considering it was all on location in Poland and Germany?
It was actually quite fun because we scheduled really well. It was not the most technical of shoots; I’ve done things that are far trickier technically than this movie. But primarily it was great to be in these locations, to have a plan in place, to know what we’re doing, to have the right amount of time to do what we wanted to do. We actually finished a day early, which I think is a rarity in our business.
Where did you do the post?
We edited on Sunset Boulevard and used the same building and offices where I did my last movie. I also used the same team that I’ve been working with a lot recently, which is really nice. Then the visual effects were actually sort of spread out. We discovered a lot of people in a lot of different countries. There are some Danish people and Swedish people and some amazing companies that do great work. And so we farmed out a lot of the visual effects to many companies (including Ghost VFX, Important Looking Pirates, Incessantrain VFX, Outpost VFX, Rise VFX, Crafty Apes and ReDefine VFX).
Your editor was Mark Yoshikawa, who has cut so many of your projects. Did he come on-set?
No. He worked entirely remotely. That started with my previous movie, Slumberland, because we were still in a COVID lockdown, and so there was no reason for him to be in Toronto when I was doing that movie. We got used to working remotely. I haven’t always been a fan of doing work remotely, but the pandemic forced me into doing it. So we continued with that when we were in Berlin and Poland. He worked from home, and I would work in Europe. Then he would send me scenes, and I might spend a day or two looking at scenes and then send him notes.
What were the main editing challenges on this?
I think the biggest challenge honestly was length. It was a very long book. We had a very long script and just getting it down [was hard]. I think the first assembly was maybe 4 hours and 10 minutes or something. That’s with everything in it. So it was really just getting it down to the length that it is now.
While the film features VFX, you tried to do much of it practically, yes?
The movies that I did before had a lot of visual effects and a lot of virtual environments where we were shooting a lot on greenscreen stages, and I knew I didn’t want to do that again. So I set out with production designer Uli Hanisch to figure out how to make this world as believable and as authentic as possible. Therefore, we wanted to shoot primarily on location.
We built just one set, which is the apartment, and everything else was shot on location. We knew that to make it feel the way we wanted it to feel, we were going to have to do some augmentation physically to those sets. But we were also going to have to do some digital augmentation. So a lot of my conversations with VFX supervisor Adrian De Wet were about that look and feel and adding cityscape in the background, extending buildings, creating damage where there was no damage and sometimes adding artistic, aesthetic, extra design to things.
From talking to you in the past about your other films, I know you aren’t big on storyboards, but I assume on this one you had to storyboard and previz a lot of the action scenes?
Yes, in general I don’t storyboard the whole movie. Typically, for anything that is very technical or is going to need a lot of visual effects, I will board and do previz and sometimes postviz. But in general, I don’t do storyboards front to back for an entire movie. I did a few technical sequences of previz, like the scene with the snakes in the arena. Another one is a scene with a drone attack in the arena, and there’s a big bombing that happens before the games starts, so we wanted to make sure we knew how we were going to tackle all those pieces
Was your visual effects supervisor, Adrian De Wet, on-set?
He was on-set for some of it, yes. We had a local guy that was with us there the whole time, and then sometimes Adrian’s visual effects producer, Eve Fizzinoglia, was also there. So during really big complicated moments, Adrian was around. He was there for the snakes and the bombing, and for some of the toughest stuff.
What were the toughest effects to pull off in the end?
I think the snakes were the toughest effects — not necessarily tough to shoot, but tough to make sure they looked like snakes. The environment is so dusty and dirty, so there’s all that dust interaction, the interaction with pebbles and rocks, the movement, the animation, the continuity and making sure they weren’t too anthropomorphized, that they feel like real snakes. All that kind of stuff was tricky to get just right.
Where did you do the color grade?
Company 3 with colorist Dave Hussey. We go way back to the music video days and have been working together since the late ‘90s. Then he did my first movie, Constantine. I’m pretty involved. I’ve always been involved with the color and the look of the things that I’m working on, even in my music video days.
Shooting digital has changed my process because I have so many conversations with DP Jo Willems ahead of time. Then, when we’re shooting, we have the DIT, and he’s showing me samples of color. We have discussions right there while he’s making the samples that inform what the dailies are so we have a direction already.
Because all those conversations with Jo funnel into him doing his first pass of the movie, sometimes that first pass, in terms of final color, ends up being a teaser or a trailer. You take that footage, it gets cut into the teaser trailer, and Jo goes in and works with Dave on that. I get to see the direction. I can maybe pull back or say, “This is a little too dark” or “Make the tunnels cooler.” When we shot it, it looked like the tunnels were lit more warmly. But now, in the final, it feels cooler and fluorescent. We had all those discussions. So it’s really Jo and Dave, and then I come in and supervise and make little adjustments and tweaks, like if I want Tom’s eyes to be bluer or the rose to be more neutral-white or whatever it is.
Fair to say the overall look is almost baked in when you’re shooting?
Yeah, it’s pretty close. What Jo did, which I really like now, was give it a grittier feel. This is a period piece to the other movies, and we wanted it to be a bit grittier. We’ve never really added grain. Instead we went for a slightly darker, slightly more contrasty look. Then Jo went in and added some grain, but he was restrained; he didn’t go too heavy. But we wanted the movie to have some bite, and Jo really added that. That was not actually part of our initial conversation.
Can you talk about the sound?
I started a process on my second movie, I Am Legend, with sound designer Jeremy Peirson. He actually worked on my first movie too, but he really became my primary sound design person starting with I Am Legend. We bring him in almost at the very beginning of editorial. Once I’m done shooting the movie, I give the editor two weeks to finish up the assembly and get everything together.
Around the time I start coming in, Jeremy sets up his room. As we make it through reels, 20-minute chunks of the movie, we start to feed it to him. So he gets a lot of time to develop the sound and do his first passes and develop ideas. It helps lead toward test screenings — showing people the movie — but it gets us away from this idea that we’re finishing the movie and then starting sound. The sound designer has four weeks or so to come up with what the sound of the movie is now, and then he has months and months to keep going over everything.
Did it turn out the way you envisioned it?
Yeah, it did. In fact, it looks better than I thought it would from the very beginning.
Director Francis Lawrence. Photo Credit Murray Close
Prequels and sequels to huge hits are notoriously tricky to pull off. How did you approach this, and what sort of film did you set out to make?
They are tricky. The thing that was exciting to me was that I didn’t think there were going to be any other books. Creator Suzanne Collins was not planning on writing them. She surprised both producer Nina Jacobson and me with a new book in 2019. When I read it, I loved the story. I loved that it was its own object. It helps inform the other movies. It sort of helps sell the origins of lots of things from the other movies and stories we love.
But the truth is, even for people who haven’t seen the other movies or read the other books, it’s just a big stand-alone piece. I fell in love with that, and I fell in love with telling the origin story of a villain because I love those kinds of stories. There are also challenges with dramatizing that in an appropriate way and getting an audience behind somebody they know is going to end up bad in the end. All of that was what really excited me.
What’s next for you? Is there going to be another prequel?
I don’t know. It’s up to Suzanne. If she writes another book, I would love to be a part of it.
Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.
