Early in the process of making a movie, the director works with his or her design team to formulate the film’s look.
For The Hunger Games, there would need to be many looks to capture the spectrum of life in Panem. There would be the
look of the districts first, and later the look of the Capitol — it would be essential to set them apart from one
another, to underscore the injustices that Collins had set up in her novel. On top of that, there would be the look of
the arena itself. It would be a formidable challenge for Gary Ross to make these different pieces appear to be part of
one whole.
Katniss walks along the fence that surrounds District 12.
Phil Messina, production designer for movies in the Ocean’s Eleven series, as well as many others, explains his role
like this: “I design the physical environment that the actors act in. I select locations and design a lot of the
virtual environment, too.” Before sets were built or costumes were designed, Messina was working with Ross to set the
overall tone.
Messina first encountered The Hunger Games when Gary Ross urged him to read the book. Messina remembers: “Gary said, ‘
Read the book and tell me what you think.’ He texted me probably three or four times when I was reading. ‘You done
yet? What part are you on?’ And it was great — I literally read it overnight. Visually, it was striking.”
Messina and Ross began to conceive what the different places in the movie would look like, from the Seam to the Capitol
to the arena. They found photos that might guide these looks, and presented their ideas to Lionsgate.
An early digital rendering of what a street in District 12 might look like.
“We went with sort of an Appalachian coal- mining vibe for the Seam,” says Messina. “But then we added little bits
and pieces, things that would have survived through the decades. We were careful not to make it feel like they were
living in the Depression era — there was an allusion to that, but we added more modern elements, too,” like appliances
and outdated cars.
An artist’s digital rendering of miners in District 12.
He continues: “There wasn’t a very specific description of the Capitol in the book. As I was doing research, I found
these buildings from the World’s Fair in New York, when General Motors built a giant complex. And it just seemed to
vibe with what we had been talking about, so we riffed off of that for the Capitol. The buildings are pure
advertisements of industry. They have a scalelessness, like you can’t tell if they’re ten feet tall or a thousand feet
tall.”
Director Ross was thinking the same way. “It was important to me that the Capitol evoke a sense of power and might and
authority. Well, that’s not spires going up to the sky — that’s too fanciful. That’s light. So we started to see the
Capitol’s power reflected in vast horizontal open space punctuated by buildings that are incredibly solid, heavy in
mass.”
What the images had in common were deep American roots: Some were from the American past, and some were past American
ideas of what the future might look like. The American references made great sense to Nina Jacobson, who points out,
“You don’t want the audience to be let off the hook in this movie. This is us in the future, if we’re not careful.”
Once this base was established, everything else grew out of it.
The next step was to decide where to do the filming.
What comes to mind when you think of North Carolina? Lush forests, perhaps. Mist rising over the Great Smoky Mountains.
An All-American road trip down the Blue Ridge Parkway. The haunting sound of a banjo. It’s not the first place you’d
think to locate an arena where two dozen teenagers fight to the death, or a city full of foolish spectators who cannot
look away. Yet Gary Ross saw its possibilities from the beginning. A state with thousands of acres of forests — but
also a modern city, Charlotte — might manage to serve his multiple needs.
“What we’ve been able to do,” Messina explains, “is use a lot of actual locations and amend them and bring them into
the world of the movie, so it’s not all created from the ground up.” In other words, Ross and Messina tackled two
tasks simultaneously: scouting locations and building sets in North Carolina.
For the Seam in District 12, they had an incredible stroke of luck. Messina says, “Through the North Carolina Film
Commission, we ended up finding an abandoned mill town. There were thirty-five almost identical factory homes for the
workers — they lived on the premises, right where they worked — it was absolutely perfect.”
It appealed to Gary Ross because, as he puts it, “It’s one thing to live in squalor, but it’s another thing to live
in squalor without any individuality, where the houses are cookie-cutter and manufactured by the company, not the
people.”
Messina’s team built an interior in one of the houses — for the Everdeen family — and added details to the others to
make it appear as if people were living in them. The only problem, really, was that Messina had first seen the town in
winter, months before the filming began. “Without leaves and brown grass, it looked the right sort of dismal,” he
remembers. “As spring took hold, though, it started getting greener and more lush. It looked sort of like a golf
course.” Before the cast arrived, the crew plucked leaves off trees and covered patches of grass so it would turn
brown.
In Shelby, North Carolina, Messina’s location manager, Todd Christensen, found an old warehouse complex where the
people of District 12 might gather for the reaping. “Phil wanted a big enough square to do our scenes, which meant we
had to cut one of the buildings in half,” he remembers. “I had to negotiate that. And then the building was filled
with junk, so we had to find the guy who owned it to get the junk out — so we could cut the building in half. It’s one
of those things that people don’t know about that happens in order to make a look.”
The crew sets up for a shot in District 12.
On one of the warehouse walls the team built a Hall of Justice, the Capitol’s headquarters in the district. And the
Capitol’s shadow was also visible in the railroad cars Messina had painted with Capitol Coal and lowered onto the site
with cranes. Just to emphasize, says Messina, “that the district’s raw material was not going to them — it was going
to the Capitol.”
Near Charlotte, a former Philip Morris plant was sitting empty. Todd Christensen says, “When I got here in February
they were toward the end of cutting up every piece of machinery for scrap and they had cleared out this building in
order to sell it.” It was a two-thousand-acre campus, with three million square feet of manufacturing and office space.
Messina and Ross had talked about building a Training Center for the tributes, but because it was in the Capitol it
would have to be enormous. “I suggested to Gary that he come and look at this Philip Morris plant because there were
some huge spaces.” It had high ceilings, no pillars, and just the scale the production needed. Rather than build a
Training Center from scratch, the team decided to construct one within the plant. There was plenty of room to create
multiple training stations for the tributes, as well as a balcony for the Gamemakers.