The Hunger Games: Official Illustrated Movie Companion by Scholastic, Kate Egan Page A

the Games, the actors were exhausted at the end of every shooting day. And then they had to deal with the elements.

    Amandla Stenberg perches in a tree with the help of a few crew members.
     
    Summers in North Carolina are hot and humid — and wet. “We shot the arena section in state forests in North Carolina during the rainy season,” Jon Kilik says. “It rained almost every afternoon but we rarely stopped. It was a very physically challenging film.”

    The crew shelters from the rain.
     

    The crew preps for a scene in the DuPont State Forest.
     
    Alli Shearmur remembers: “Joe Drake and I were there the day that Gary shot the aftermath of the tracker-jacker scene, when Katniss thinks she sees Peeta, then hallucinates that she sees Caesar Flickerman. They were doing a tremendous amount of work — and then the skies opened up. There was a torrential downpour. Everyone just stood around in their rain ponchos, cheerful as could be, because this was happening to them every day, and they knew it would stop soon. After the rain stopped, the mud was ankle-deep, and then it was like, ‘Everybody! Take your places!’ like it was no big deal at all.”
    Jennifer Lawrence comments on the heat: “My Games costume was great in the fitting. It was perfect. As soon as we took it out in the hundred-and-something-degree weather, though, the leather jacket and the pants and the boots were quite different.” Still, the team kept to a strict schedule, shooting through the rain and the heat and the mud — and watching out for other potential obstacles, too.
    “We had a snake wrangler — a full-time snake wrangler — on set,” Nina Jacobson points out. “We had a lot of bears. One place we shot in — North Fork, North Carolina — has one of the highest per-acre bear populations of any place in the United States.”
    Not all of the animals were dangerous, but most of them were a nuisance — especially the wild turkeys. “We had wild turkeys on the set where the Cornucopia was,” recalls Isabelle Fuhrman, who plays Clove. “We’d be in the middle of a shot and the turkeys would come in and they’d send the ADs and PAs to chase them away. One day after work, we were driving home and we saw the turkeys on the pedestals on the Cornucopia — like they were having their own Hunger Games!”

    Alli Shearmur remembers the experience of watching Ross shoot at night. “The woods where they shot the arena scenes were pristine. Untouched. They hadn’t been used for a movie since
The Last of the Mohicans
. The crew would bring in equipment on ATVs, sometimes put a scene together overnight. It appeared to be spontaneous, but there was an enormous amount of effort behind the scenes. I was there the night they shot the scene with the mutts. In the woods . . . in the dark . . . it was unbelievable.”

    R oss spent time with each of the actors, digging to the core of their characters. As Ross knew, an actor who understood his or her character could more easily be that person in front of the camera. The young actors, especially, were grateful for his careful approach.
    “We did the scene where I was dying,” says Amandla Stenberg, “and I was talking to Gary about it, because I thought I’d be sobbing my eyes out. But he decided I shouldn’t be crying so much because my character was trying to be brave for Katniss, and that was really the start of the rebellion.”

    Jennifer Lawrence prepares to practice snares in the Training Center.
     
    Wes Bentley plays Seneca Crane in the movie. He says, “When you’re playing a character that’s not as defined as the others, you really look to your director. Gary and I talked about Seneca being this sort of cocky kid who’s never had anything bad happen to him in his life. He’s just had success after success, climbing the ladder.”
    After their conversations, Ross watched Bentley closely, trying to remind him of what they’d discussed without destroying the momentum of any