The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes Producer Reveals Lessons Learned Previous Hunger Games Films

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is heading to theaters this month, and it marks the fifth film of the franchise to be produced by Nina Jacobson. ComicBook.com recently had the chance to chat with Jacobson about the upcoming prequel, and she opened up about the casting process and the importance of finding the right people to play younger versions of known characters as well as new characters who are related to known characters. Jacobson also spoke about the lessons she learned from the previous films that she carried into this one. 

“Well, I think what we’ve learned from the beginning is that Suzanne [Collins] gives us an incredible blueprint as a storyteller,” Jacobson said of The Hunger Games author. “She writes from theme and character, and you know what is critical to her is always sort of critical to the movie, and so there’s that side of it, which is just knowing that if I keep turning to her and keep reading the book and looking deeper in the book, we’ll find the answers we need. And she’s also great… She’s not slavish in the adaptation. She knows that there are things that have to go, and so trying to make sure that even so, when you’re compressing an act, how do you make sure that these characters really have enough time together and that you’re not repeating a beat? Because there’s new information in different scenes.” 

Jacobson continued, “And so in the beginning of the book, there’s a lot more back and forth. You can’t kind of keep back and forthing in a movie, so how do you hold on to what really matters? Just for me, following Suzanne’s lead and also not being afraid of the themes, letting the themes really percolate, and also giving audiences a chance to not necessarily agree with each other, to kind of take different things from it, to have different ideas about the relationship of the characters and to hope that you’ve given people a complex enough movie that they might all have their own experience and not some unilateral intended experience.” 

Who Stars In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes? 

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes stars Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow, Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird, Viola Davis as Head Gamemaker Volumnia Gaul, Peter Dinklage as Casca Highbottom, Jason Schwartzman as Lucretius “Lucky” Flickerman, Hunter Schafer as Tigris Snow, and Josh Andrés Rivera as Sejanus Plinth.  

The movie will also include Fionnula Flanagan as Grandma’am, young Coriolanus Snow’s grandmother. Isobel Jesper Jones is playing Mayfair Lipp, the daughter of the mayor of District 12. Honor Gillies will be making her professional acting debut as Barb Azure. Eike Onyambu has been cast as Tam Amber, Konstantin Taffet will be playing Clerk Carmine, Burn Gorman is Commander Hoff, Scott Folan is Beanpole, Carl Spencer is Smiley, and Michael Greco and Daniela Grubert have been cast as Strabo Plinth and Mrs. Plinth, the wealthy parents to Sejanus Plinth, Coriolanus’s best friend. Nick Benson, Laurel Marsden, Lilly Cooper, Luna Steeples, and Hiroki Berrecboth are also a part of the cast. 

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