Read The Hunger Games: Official Illustrated Movie Companion for Free Online Page B

state parks in January and February. “I was scouting in the snow, with no leaves on any of the trees. I’m referring back to books about what this place looks like in the summertime and there’s a little bit of a leap of faith, but ultimately it worked out well.”
    Ross adds, “The arena’s obviously in the forest and I wanted it to be different from a lot of forests you see in movies. I wanted it to have hardwoods — I didn’t want it to be just coniferous. I wanted it to feel uniquely American.”
    Eventually they used the same woods for District 12 and the arena, but postproduction work changed the lighting and the feel of the arena setting, so the woods didn’t look quite natural, but more like a creation of the Gamemakers. As Messina describes it, “We just took out a little bit of the haphazardness of nature.”

    Lawrence and Hutcherson begin a scene in the arena.
     
    Creating the Cornucopia was a special challenge to the design team. “In the book it says that it’s a cornucopia like the one that’s used at holiday time,” says director Gary Ross. “But we paused and wondered: What does that mean in the future? I wanted to create a large metallic sculptural element that almost seemed like a knife-edge into the natural world. We came up with this faceted, sculptural object that felt evocative of the Capitol: hard and cold.”
    Messina explains, “We looked at some of Frank Gehry’s work such as Disney Hall and we looked at a lot of modern architecture that’s taking place right now, with sort of folded planes. I think Suzanne described it as being painted gold, but we ended up going with a gunmetal gray. It’s actually one of my favorite pieces in the movie. We built it in Charlotte and trucked it out to Asheville, set it out with a crane on location.”

    Set decorator Larry Dias was responsible for furniture, lighting, carpets — anything not a floor or a wall on a location or a set. “I go into an empty shell of the set and then put everything inside of it,” he explains. Once Ross and Messina had articulated their overall vision, and identified or created places for filming, Dias could get to work.
    At first he thought it could be difficult to decorate the Everdeens’ house. The location was perfect, but where would he find the furniture to flesh it out? “I’d never worked in North Carolina,” he says. “I wasn’t really sure what I was going to be able to acquire here, so we’d done a lot of prep work in Los Angeles. But once I got here I realized, it’s kind of a treasure trove for this type of a movie. The first day I got to North Carolina, Sara Gardner-Gail, my assistant, and I did a little research, trying to find some antique stores. And we happened to find one that’s literally less than a mile from the Philip Morris plant where we’re shooting — eighty-eight thousand square feet of antiques. We hit the mother lode on day one.” They bought tables, chairs, photographs, all in keeping with the visual tone of the film.

    Even with such a rich source of materials, Dias had a harder time finding stuff to fill the Hob. He says, “The Hob was difficult because you’re trying to create a marketplace with things that have no value except to the people that live within the Seam.” Luckily, he found a man who was “sort of an antiques dealer, but his antiques are in an unfinished, raw state. He has a yard, probably on forty acres, so there’s a lot of stuff outside that’s just in piles and heaps. We were able to get lots of stuff there.”

    Katniss barters in the Hob.
     
    When it came time to decorate the town square, Dias says, “We sourced these giant glass balls that became the reaping balls and rigged them onto some tables that we found here in North Carolina. We outfitted them to make them look like they were a tool of the Capitol, sent out to all the districts. So all the districts, when we see the reapings, have the same balls.”
    Just as Messina had looked to the