The Hunger Games: Official Illustrated Movie Companion

Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) stands in the crowd during the District 12 reaping.

A
n extraordinary girl is trapped inside a game of life and death. With no special training, no magic powers, she finds a way to survive — just like she always has. But now the world is watching, and she’s playing with forces bigger than she knows. Where some find inspiration, others see rebellion. And so the girl discovers: In these games, nobody really wins.

With its twisting plot and constant suspense, Suzanne Collins’s novel
The Hunger Games
is impossible to put down. It keeps you reading, breathless, until the final page. You’re not alone if you stayed up half the night to finish it, racing toward the end.

But it’s not just the storytelling that hooks you. It’s that the central character, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, is at once so brave and so real. What carries her through the grueling challenges of the arena? What’s her one goal, in this perverse place where violence leads to victory and love leads to defeat? She’s not after wealth or fame — she just wants to get back home.

Katniss has a focus, a raw power, that ordinary people can only dream of. And yet, like us, she’s not entirely in control of her own destiny. In our difficult times, Katniss is a heroine we can understand.

The Hunger Games and its sequels,
Catching Fire
and
Mockingjay
, have been on the top of bestseller lists for the last three years and counting. In the United States alone, there are sixteen million copies of these books in print. They’ve lured in readers young and old, become the basis for countless articles and fan sites, and inspired other artists. Now, for the first time, fans of the series will see
The Hunger Games
brought to life on film.

It’s a major motion picture in every sense of the word: major talent, major effort, major interest. This book will take you behind the scenes, from script to screen, casting to costumes, training to trees. Lots and lots of trees.

First, though, to the book’s beginnings, the soul of the film . . .

I
t all started when author Suzanne Collins was up way too late one night, sitting on her couch and watching TV. She was flipping channels, switching between a reality show and news coverage of the Iraq war, when suddenly the images began to blur in her mind.

On one channel, young people were testing their limits and going to extremes to entertain an audience. On another channel, young people were fighting for their country and risking their lives.

An idea began to form.

What if a group of kids was required to fight — and risk their lives — as entertainment? Who would be watching? What would this show look like? Could anybody win these games? And what would happen if they did? Suzanne Collins was in the middle of writing a different book, but these questions lingered in her imagination.

It had been five years since Collins had followed a friend’s advice and tried her hand at writing a children’s book. Her first novel,
Gregor the Overlander
, was about an eleven-year-old boy who falls through a grate in the laundry room of his apartment building. Suddenly he finds himself in a strange world populated by giant cockroaches, spiders, bats, and rats — all the creatures you might expect to find beneath New York City. These species have coexisted uneasily for years, but their world is on the brink of war. Gregor can’t wait to get out, until he discovers that his presence in this world, the Underland, has been foretold in a prophecy, and sticking around might just help him find his missing father. He embarks on a quest that will change both him and this strange land forever.

Suzanne’s first novel,
Gregor the Overlander
. Above: Author Suzanne Collins.

In 2003,
Gregor the Overlander
was published to wide acclaim, making Suzanne Collins an author to watch. Soon her publisher, Scholastic, signed up the next books in what she had always envisioned as a five-part series. By the time the third,
Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods
, was published, the series had found a loyal following of readers. The series finale,
Gregor and the Code of Claw
, was a
New York Times
bestseller. With a hungry audience and a growing reputation for fast-paced, thought-provoking stories, Collins was poised to take her next step as a writer.

Most of her career had been spent in children’s television, writing shows for Nickelodeon and PBS, like
Clarissa Explains It All, Oswald, Little Bear,
and
Clifford’s Puppy Days
. Collins loved writing for young children, and several of her shows had been nominated for Emmy Awards, but she’d long been fascinated by subjects more suitable for older kids.

In
The Underland Chronicles
(as the
Gregor
books came to be known), Collins had created a complex society that exploded into war. Her readers were mostly in middle school, but she had written genocide and biological weapons into these books. She had killed off beloved characters to explore the cost and the emotional fallout of war. Still, she had more to say about when and how — or whether — war could be justified. In a young adult novel, she might delve more deeply into the subject. While waiting for editorial comments on her final
Gregor
book, Collins wrote a short proposal for a young adult trilogy called
The Hunger Games
.

Collins found inspiration in several places beyond her TV set. First, in her childhood love of Greek mythology, particularly the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. As part of the surrender terms of a war, King Minos of Crete required that the city of Athens send tribute to him in the form of seven youths and seven maidens. These tributes went into a labyrinth to face the Minotaur — half man and half monster — who would then destroy them all. This savagery continued until the Athenian prince, Theseus, went as tribute to Crete, and killed the Minotaur instead.

As a child, Suzanne Collins was struck by the cruelty of the Cretan king, and it stayed in the back of her mind as she began to construct the country of Panem, the setting for
The Hunger Games
. Like King Minos, Panem’s cold and calculating President Snow sends a clear message to his people. As Collins puts it: “Mess with us and we’ll do something worse than kill you. We’ll kill your children.”

One of Collins’s favorite movies is the classic
Spartacus
, based on the true story of a Roman slave. While being trained in a gladiator school, Spartacus and his mates overthrew their guards and escaped to freedom. Led by Spartacus, they were joined by other slaves, and the rebellion built to the Third Servile War with the Roman Empire. Like Katniss, Spartacus followed a path from slave to gladiator, from gladiator to rebel, and from rebel to the face of a war.

Most important, all of Collins’s ideas for the trilogy were steeped in the war stories she heard as a child. Her father had spent his entire career in the Air Force, as a military specialist as well as a historian and a doctor of political science. He served in Vietnam when Collins was six, and moved the family between the US and Europe for his work after he returned. War was never far from his mind, and he had a unique gift for making the subject come alive for his four children.

The Collins family visited many battlefields, and Collins’s father never shied away from telling his kids what had happened there. He told them what led to the battle, what happened in the battle, and what its consequences were for the real people who fought in it and the citizens whose futures depended on its outcome. Other parents tried to shelter their kids from the idea of war, but Collins’s father challenged his kids to ask questions. What, if anything, made these bloody battles worth their cost? Collins knew only too well what it meant to wait and worry for a parent who might never come home.

All of these pieces went into the proposal, which she sent out in the summer of 2006. The three-and-a-half-page write-up included an overview of the Games and brief descriptions of each book. “Although set in the future,” Collins wrote, “
The Hunger Games
explores disturbing issues of modern warfare such as who fights our wars, how they are orchestrated, and the ever-increasing opportunities to observe them being played out.” She also noted that Katniss, though “distrustful,” has “a deep capacity to love and sacrifice for those few people she cares for.” The final books have hewn closely to the original outlines — except for the titles. The original working title for the first book in the trilogy was
The Tribute of District Twelve.