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.
Naturally, 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.