“Is it violent?” says director Gary Ross of his PG-13 film. “Yes. Do we back off from what it is? No, we don’t.”
The March 23 release of
The Hunger Games is nearly upon us. While we can’t make the clock turn any faster, we can offer fans of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling dystopian trilogy (and newcomers, too) a deep, behind-the-scenes look into the making of the film, from conception to casting, filming to marketing.
Perhaps no bit of casting news was met with greater surprise than Lenny Kravitz taking on the role of Cinna, hero Katniss Everdeen’s deeply cool and compassionate stylist. Kravitz was working on his album, living out of a trailer in the Bahamas and oblivious to
the Hunger Games phenomenon, when Ross first approached him to offer him the part. The director had been moved by the musician’s gentle grace in
Precious and was further intrigued by the fact that Kravitz already felt a nurturing bond with star Jennifer Lawrence, who had become close friends with his daughter Zoe during the filming of
X-Men: First Class. “I love that girl,” says Kravitz. “The minute I met her she became a part of the family.”
It took one sleepless night of reading a downloaded version of
The Hunger Games in his trailer for Kravitz to commit. But Woody Harrelson, who initially turned down the role of Katniss and Peeta’s sodden wreck of a mentor Haymitch, was a harder sell. “Listen, I’m nuts,” he explains. “It was just a stupid thing where I hadn’t read the books yet. I didn’t see that there was enough for me to do in the script. But then Gary called me back and said ‘You got to do this, I don’t have a second choice for the role.’ And of course flattery always gets the best of me so I read the books and really saw the depths of this guy. Holy s—, I would have been bummed to miss this.”
I love how much promotion they have done for the movie yet how at the same time it doesn't seem overwhelming because they are keeping the key scenes a secret rather then basically showing the whole movie in the trailer. I think we will have seen quite a lot of the first 10-30 mins of the movie but once they get to the Capitol that's where everything will be a surprise. I'm SO excited! 
). I have a lot of hope for this film because Katniss is such a strong character and she's a good character to look up too. I'd rather my little cousins (and quite frankly myself) look up to Katniss then Bella. Katniss save's herself (and Peeta too) unlike Bella who just's waits for a man to rescue her from a situation. And we need more female character's like Katniss on the theater screens.
