The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes Director Francis Lawrence Shouts Out Stunt Team

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is heading to theaters this month, and the first reactions to the film are praising the cast. Of course, it takes a lot of people to make a film work, so we recently asked director Francis Lawrence if he wanted to shout out any unsung heroes from the production. The new prequel marks the fourth film in the franchise helmed by Lawrence, who previously directed Catching Fire, Mockingjay – Part 1, and Mockingjay – Part 2. 

"Unsung heroes. Geez. Well, I shout out Dave Cobb a lot," Lawrence said of the film's music producer. "The actors are so great. I'm trying to think. The stunt team, I guess, sometimes they get buried, but the stunt team is great. Scott Ateah is somebody that I met when I did See for Apple and a Vancouver-based stunt coordinator that brought him and his team to Germany to work with us, and they did a great job." 

Francis Lawrence Talks Bringing The Hunger Games To Life:

During our chat with Lawrence, the director talked about working with author Suzanne Collins and creating the look of the fictional time period and the "fun" of bringing the 10th Annual Hunger Games to life.  

"I think part of what was fun about this... I mean, maybe I did [learn lessons] just because I've done some of the Games before on the other ones. And so, when you come back to these Games, and even though the arena is very different and it's much more rudimentary, you want to make sure that you're approaching the Games in very different ways, and that the beginning of the Games and the way the Games start and all of that has really specific emotional values that differ from the ones we've seen before," Lawrence explained.

"More of what she and I would talk about is maintaining the rudimentary nature of the Games themselves," he continued. "And we had talked a lot about the sort of level of technology. And then, really, I worked with Uli Hanisch to kind of create the look of this. And I think Suzanne always gives me the freedom to go where I want to go with that. And we really just looked at reconstruction-era Berlin, 1945, the end of the war. How do you sort of rebuild from all that damage after the dark days of war? And that's kind of what we looked at and why we ended up really shooting in Berlin for most of the movie.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is set to open in theaters on November 17th. You can watch our interview with Lawrence at the top of the page.