Francis Lawrence recently chatted with MTV’s Josh Horowitz about all things Catching Fire such as stepping in for Gary Ross, Sam as Finnick , the Arena, and more (you can find the interview here). Well, lucky for us, there’s more! Check out some of the snippets that didn’t make it into the interview.
Lawrence on changes that occurred during the adaptation process:
“No, not really, I would say that it’s a really faithful adaptation. You know, whenever you’re adapting something that’s a 12- or 14-hour read down to something that has to be around two hours, there’s going to be some cuts. We definitely made some cuts. I don’t want to go into that, but we did it with Suzanne, and I would say that it’s very, very faithful. We tried to get as much as we could in there.”
Like he says, there’s bound to be cuts, but it’s great to know they were made by Suzanne Collins’ side!
Just what scene is Lawrence most proud of?
“It’s interesting because there’s a very small blur—I want to say it’s a paragraph long in the book—but the moment in the arena when the gamemaker starts to spin the cornucopia, and I’m very proud of that. We designed a very cool sequence and created a spinning island, and that’s going to be very, very cool. So that’s kind of fun and very unique. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s cool.
“You know one of the very first things we shot that I like quite a lot is, there is sort of a goodbye before she goes into the arena with Liam that I like a lot. And it was actually—we shot it because we needed summer foliage and summer flowers and things like that. We actually shot it while we were in prep. Very first thing we sort of went out into the meadow, out in the mountains in north Georgia and shot this sequence over three or four hours or so, and I really like it. I think it’s really nice. Jennifer and Liam are really good in it. It’s very nice.”
Tell me you’re not dying to see the rotating cornucopia scene!
And just how is Mockingjay coming along?
“Nina, John, Suzanne and I have gone through the book and created the beat sheets for it. And started going through all that and at least marking our initial ideas of what the moments would be and how it all breaks down. And Danny Strong, who’s writing the first one, is working now. So yeah, we’ve actually done a fair amount of work. We’re starting to think about where we could shoot it and all of that.”
There’s more where this came from so we highly recommend you go to MTV and read up! Get excited guys, we’re only 303 days away!