Get an exclusive first look at behind-the-scenes pics and audio commentary from the creators of The Hunger Games.
The film starts off with a period of time that didn't originally exist in the book.
"In the beginning of this adaptation, you'll see that we made a jump from the book. The book opens with Katniss walking through the ruins of District 12, and we kind of only hear in her thoughts the backstory of her time in District 13. Pretty quickly we knew that wasn't going to work and we were going to have to see Katniss getting acclimated to District 13 and meeting President Coin for the first time as opposed to jumping in the middle of the action." —Francis Lawrence, director
"Coming off of Catching Fire we had the question of, where do want this story to begin? And we made the choice to have it begin one or two weeks after she had been lifted out of the arena." —Nina Jacobson, producer
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Jennifer Lawrence and Philip Seymour Hoffman had a ton of fun improvising together.
"We had a lot of fun shooting this scene. Jen and Phil [Seymour Hoffman] had so much fun improvising and playing off of each other." —Jacobson
"We had a lot of different versions of this — very broad comedy versions and very serious versions. And it was a lot of fun to see Jen 'act' poorly." —Lawrence
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Not wanting to have a film without Effie Trinket, they replaced the character Fulvia in the book with Effie's character on film.
"For fans of the book, they know that Effie's role [in Mockingjay] was basically given to a character named Fulvia, who became Plutarch's assistant. It just seemed impossible when we were doing Catching Fire that we wouldn't have Effie Trinket here. There was a little convincing of Suzanne Collins, but after seeing Catching Fire she said... —Lawrence
"'Fulvia who?' (laughs). But it was a big decision what to do with Effie, and what we thought was most interesting was to see her forced into this role of rebel, forced to leave the Capitol and the things that she's held dear but that she's clearly questioning at the end of Catching Fire. —Jacobson
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The actors shot inside an actual replica of the hovercraft to make the scene as realistic as possible.
"We built the interior of a hovercraft that would be attached to a large crane with our actors inside, lifted up 60 feet in the air. It would actually land so you could see them get dropped down and walk into our location while the hovercraft lifts off, helping to create the reality that these hovercrafts really exist." —Lawrence
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