Now that the overall look of the movie was in place, it was time to design the look of the characters. Costume designer
Judianna Makovsky spoke extensively with Gary Ross early on about a general look for the characters in The Hunger Games.
“Gary and I agreed that it had to be a recognizable world, not a foreign, futuristic world,” Makovsky says. “People
needed to be able to relate to it.” She smiles and adds, “But it was really fun for us, too. We could do outrageous
things that we don’t usually get to do in a movie.”
Rows of wigs for the Capitol cast members.
Makovsky worked with makeup artist Ve Neill and hair department head Linda Flowers. Between them, the three had designed
costumes, hair, and makeup for dozens of movies and garnered three Academy Awards? and eleven Academy Award?
nominations. “The way I work as a designer, I don’t just design a frock,” Makovsky says. “I’m designing a person. I
start from the head and go to the foot. I work very closely with makeup and hair and we design it all together. I have
the most collaborative team and I think it’s more successful that way.”
Shooting of The Hunger Games started on May 23, 2011, when director Gary Ross flew to North Carolina from Los Angeles.
Many of the actors were assembled there already, with more to come as larger scenes were filmed. Locations had been
identified, sets had been built. Training was finished, lines were memorized. Everything was ready to go.
Director Gary Ross on set.
Ross had a clear sense of the way he wanted to shoot the film, and it was different from any approach he’d taken in his
previous movies. “One of the things that’s most important here is to convey the immediacy, the first-person point of
view that the book has. The cinematic style has to reflect that. So in this movie I got to shoot in a way that I’d
never shot before — more urgent, more personal. I needed to give the audience that incredibly immediate sense that they
’re not watching this girl — they are this girl.”
Wherever possible, then, he kept to Katniss’s point of view. “I didn’t want the audience to know more than the
character knew. I wanted them to be in her shoes, to experience everything through her eyes,” Ross adds. Occasionally
the film cuts away to show developments in the Capitol that will affect Katniss, or reactions back home to her
performance in the Games, but for most of the movie the audience is with Katniss, filled with suspense and fear.
Ross used a handheld camera to shoot some of the pivotal scenes, giving them an intense you-are-there feeling. Nina
Jacobson explains, “It’s a big movie, and at the same time we didn’t want it to be a grandiose movie. We wanted it to
have a little bit of that guerrilla quality. It’s set in the future, but it’s not a movie that’s all about
technology.”
While many of the young actors were new to filmmaking, they couldn’t help but notice Ross’s unusual technique. Dayo
Okeniyi, who plays Thresh, says, “The fights are shot in a very gritty documentary-type style, almost like the Super
Bowl. The camera gets right in there with us, and audiences are gonna feel like they are right there on the field,
fighting for their lives.”
The film was shot between May and September, beginning with some of the District 12 scenes, skipping ahead to most of
the arena’s action, and then returning to the Capitol scenes before and after the Games.
As in most movies, the scenes were not shot in chronological order, which meant that the Hunger Games team had to keep
careful track of how the actors and backgrounds looked in each frame, to ensure continuity in the final film. It also
meant that the team was moving across North Carolina, shooting in place after place, all summer long.
Alli Shearmur of Lionsgate says, “I went to North Carolina every few weeks during the filming — it wasn’t a typical
situation. Gary had to make sure he had the footage he needed for every single scene, because there would be no time to
reshoot later if he missed something. The movie would be in theaters in March 2012, ten months after shooting began.
Because of this schedule, the production had to be unbelievably well choreographed and well rehearsed, and everybody
worked long days to get what they needed there and then. They were in the woods for a long time, because they weren’t
going back.”