The Hunger Games: Official Illustrated Movie Companion (2 page)

Tributes pay close attention to Atala (Karan Kendrick) during their first day in the Training Center.

On the strength of those few pages, Scholastic snapped up the right to publish the
Hunger Games
trilogy.

“When I sat down to write this series, I assumed it would be like
The Underland Chronicles
,” Collins told the
New York Times
later. “Written in the third person and the past tense. I began writing, and the words came out not only in the first person, in the present tense, in Katniss’s voice. It was almost as if the character was insisting on telling the story herself. So I never really make a concentrated effort to get inside her head; she was already very much alive in mine.”

The publisher knew it had something special on its hands as soon as Collins turned in her first draft. Editorial director David Levithan says, “I remember that the manuscript came in on a Friday, and I read it over the weekend. Two other people read it — Kate Egan, Suzanne’s longtime editor, and Jennifer Rees, an editor who was also working on the books. On Monday morning, we were dying to talk to each other — it was simply one of the most astonishing things we’d ever read. Our editorial conversation pretty much consisted of one word:
Wow
.”

Everyone involved knew the best way to sell the book was to get people to read it. First up were the people in Scholastic’s sales, marketing, and publicity departments, who were blown away and started off the buzzstorm. Advance reader’s copies went out and were devoured in one sitting by booksellers and librarians. Scholastic announced a first printing of 50,000 copies . . . and then doubled it . . . and then doubled it again, as the buzz got louder and louder. Suzanne’s literary agent, Rosemary Stimola, began selling foreign rights to publishers across the world. To date, it has sold in 45 territories. When
The Hunger Games
was published in October 2008, it met with resounding praise.

The first reviews came from book-industry magazines like
Publishers Weekly
and
Booklist
, and every one of them was a rave.
Horn Book
said, “Collins has written a compulsively readable blend of science fiction, survival story, unlikely romance, and social commentary.”

School Library Journal
agreed, writing, “Collins’s characters are completely realistic and sympathetic as they form alliances and friendships in the face of overwhelming odds; the plot is tense, dramatic, and engrossing. This book will definitely resonate with the generation raised on reality shows like
Survivor
and
American Gladiator
.”

As
The Hunger Games
began to climb to the top of bestseller lists, other bestselling authors began to weigh in.

In
Entertainment Weekly
, Stephen King reviewed
The Hunger Games
, calling it, “A violent, jarring, speed-rap of a novel that generates nearly constant suspense. . . . I couldn’t stop reading. . . . Collins is an efficient no-nonsense prose stylist with a pleasantly dry sense of humor. Reading
The Hunger Games
is as addictive (and as violently simple) as playing one of those shoot-it-if-it-moves videogames in the lobby of the local eightplex; you know it’s not real, but you keep plugging in quarters anyway . . .”

Producer Nina Jacobson on set in North Carolina.

Stephenie Meyer loved it, too, and as the author of the
Twilight
series, she knew what it was like to be a sensation. She wrote, “I was so obsessed with this book I had to take it with me out to dinner and hide it under the edge of the table so I wouldn’t have to stop reading. The story kept me up for several nights in a row, because even after I was finished, I just lay in bed wide awake thinking about it. . . .
The Hunger Games
is amazing.”

The response to the book was more than anyone involved had dared to hope for.

Two months after it was published,
The Hunger Games
was on several best-of-the-year book lists. It was catching on with teens and adults alike — it was even being taught in schools. Collins visited a middle school in Plainfield, Illinois, soon after
The Hunger Games
was published. Its students created a tribute parade in the gym, and Collins did her presentation in front of a large inflatable Cornucopia. Later, a silver parachute was lowered by pulley from the ceiling — containing the mockingjay necklace that Collins wears to this day. The enthusiasm at the school was as contagious as the enthusiasm in newspapers, magazines, and online.

Katniss and Gale relax in the woods outside District 12.

N
aturally,
The Hunger Games
had begun to capture the attention of Hollywood.

Film producer Nina Jacobson, of Color Force Productions, had overseen movies like
The Princess Diaries, The Chronicles of Narnia,
and the
Pirates of the Caribbean
series. She describes her first encounter with
The Hunger Games
: “A smart guy who works for me, named Bryan Unkeless, read the book and fell in love with it. Just the first book had been published — the sequels hadn’t come out yet. He read it, and he gave it to me and said, ‘It’s a really great book. You should check it out.’ I just picked it up, couldn’t put it down, and spent a lot of the time that I was reading it thinking,
How can you make a movie that has violence between young people?
And yet, as I saw the way that Suzanne had walked that line, by staying inside Katniss’s character and managing to comment on the violence without ever exploiting it, I became more convinced there was a way that a movie could do the same.”

Many production companies were vying for a chance to make the movie version of her story. Collins put off making any decision until she had finished promoting
The Hunger Games
and writing its sequel,
Catching Fire
, but eventually she had a series of phone meetings with interested producers. “It’s the major choice you make as an author,” Collins says. “I was looking to get a feel for who they were, how they operated, what their priorities and game plan might be for a movie.”

Jacobson knew that other producers were approaching Collins, which made her even more determined to make the movie herself. “I became pretty much obsessed with the book and then couldn’t bear the thought that anybody else would produce the film.”

Her pitch to Collins hit a nerve. “I made a very passionate case to Suzanne that there were versions of her book, as a movie, that she could really hate and that would end up being sort of guilty of the crimes of the Capitol. There could be a version of the movie which stylized and glamorized the violence, where the movie became, say, the Hunger Games. I felt that an ethical version of the movie needed to be made and needed to be safeguarded. And I felt very passionately about doing that and felt very confident that I could do that. And so I was able to win her over.”

Collins says, “There were so many great choices, but ultimately I felt that Nina had the greatest connection to the work. I believed her when she said she would do everything she could to protect its integrity. And the fact that we had a mutual friend [novelist and screenwriter Peter Hedges] — who spoke so highly of her — tipped the scales in her favor.”

The next step was to find a movie studio, and again there were many competing for the option.

Alli Shearmur, president of production at Lionsgate, recalls, “When Nina Jacobson got the opportunity to produce
The Hunger Games
, she called me and I read the book right away. I knew it would be worthwhile because it was from Nina — I have known her for a long time and always admired her. I read the book soon after it was published, before it was so well-known, so I was responding to the central story of Katniss, not to the cultural phenomenon that it has become. Of course I loved it, from beginning to end.”

She shared the book with Joe Drake, president of Lionsgate’s motion picture group, and Tim Palen, the company’s president of marketing. They had questions about how the book would translate into film, but by the time they spoke to Suzanne Collins, they shared a clear vision.

Drake, who runs the motion picture group at the studio, explains that “Lionsgate is known for fearlessness — we have never shied away from bold projects that stir up conversation. But we don’t make projects simply because they’re edgy — whatever the genre, first and foremost we are always looking for quality stories that are character driven. So it wasn’t anything controversial that drew us to
The Hunger Games
— it was the irresistible character of Katniss. Early on, we had a clear sense of what our priorities would be when telling the story . . . it was about her character and our connection to her story.”

While Collins was finishing her first draft of
Mockingjay
, Jacobson met with many studios — including Lionsgate — and eventually came to feel that Lionsgate was the best choice for
The Hunger Games
.

Jacobson says, “I felt that Lionsgate really understood the material and that they would let us make a faithful adaptation; that they wouldn’t soften it, they wouldn’t age up the characters, to make them older so that it would be more palatable. I felt that the power of the book was in the youth of these protagonists and that you couldn’t cheat on that in terms of their age in the story. Lionsgate was on board for, of course, the PG-13 version of the movie, not something full of blood and guts, but something more thematically driven.”

The intense interest in her book still felt slightly unreal to Collins, and she had some practical reasons for feeling comfortable with Lionsgate. “Everyone we needed to get the movie going was right there on the phone,” she remembers. “The studio was small enough for that to be possible. I agreed with Nina that this was probably the best home for the story, our best chance of seeing it made into a film.”

At that point — with
Mockingjay
finished but not yet published — Collins began to develop the first draft of a script. She’d been writing scripts since she was twenty years old, and making a living as a writer since she was twenty-eight, so in some respects adapting her own work brought her back into familar territory. It also meant making some difficult choices.