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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.

    The tributes run through the gauntlet in the Training Center.
     
    Even the woods locations required a great deal of advance planning. Messina scouted in various