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sequences, like at the Cornucopia. When you see the struggles between them on film, they’re wild and emotional — they feel like kids fighting on the playground. That’s the concept Gary wanted, and we took that to the next level when we added the weapons.”
    All of these preparations were about to come together with the vision of the design team to create one unforgettable film.



E arly 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in the Depression era — there was an allusion to that, but we added more modern elements, too,” like appliances and outdated cars.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