Meet Hunger Games director Gary Ross at the Barnes and Noble at The Grove at Farmers Market in Los Angeles, CA when he discusses and signs his first children’s book, Bartholomew Biddle and the Very Big Wind.

Saturday November 17, 2012 2:00 PM

The Grove at Farmers Market
189 The Grove Drive Suite K 30, Los Angeles, CA 90036, 323-525-0270

EW recently caught up with Director Gary Ross to talk about his first children’s book, Bartholomew Biddle and the Very Big Wind.

He also explained his decision about not returning to direct the Hunger Games sequel.

”I didn’t feel that I would have the time for the way that I work to do the movie justice,” he says. “I wear two hats. I don’t wear one hat. When you write and you direct that’s a linear process, it’s not a simultaneous process. I would’ve had to have written a script and prepped the whole movie in four months and on the first movie that’s a process that took me eight months. And I thought [Catching Fire] was a more difficult adaptation, not an easier one. I didn’t really feel I had the time I needed to live up to my own standards. And I haven’t had a moment’s regret. It was absolutely the right decision and I’m thrilled about new challenges.

Francis Lawrence is directing The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. He has also signed on to helm The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 and Part 2.

In the video, Gary Ross revealed that Jennifer Lawrence is his only choice to play the role of Katniss Everdeen.

There was no second choice for me. If I couldn’t make the movie with Jennifer, then I didn’t want to make it.

“I just knew there was no one who would come close. There was no one who had her strength, her directness, her integrity, her solidity, her bravery, her power or her nuance for emotional depth.”

After reading the Hunger Games trilogy, Donald Sutherland wrote a letter to director Gary Ross sharing his insight about President Snow, the character he played in the movie.

Dear Gary Ross: 

Power. That’s what this is about? Yes? Power and the forces that are manipulated by the powerful men and bureaucracies trying to maintain control and possession of that power? 

Power perpetrates war and oppression to maintain itself until it finally topples over with the bureaucratic weight of itself and sinks into the pages of history (except in Texas), leaving lessons that need to be learned unlearned.  

Power corrupts, and, in many cases, absolute power makes you really horny. Clinton, Chirac, Mao, Mitterrand. 

Not so, I think, with Coriolanus Snow. His obsession, his passion, is his rose garden. There’s a rose named Sterling Silver that’s lilac in colour with the most extraordinarily powerful fragrance – incredibly beautiful – I loved it in the seventies when it first appeared. They’ve made a lot of off shoots of it since then.  

I didn’t want to write to you until I’d read the trilogy and now I have so: roses are of great importance. And Coriolanus’s [sic] eyes. And his smile. Those three elements are vibrant and vital in Snow. Everything else is, by and large, perfectly still and ruthlessly contained. What delight she [Katniss] gives him. He knows her so perfectly. Nothing, absolutely nothing, surprises him. He sees and understands everything. he was, quite probably, a brilliant man who’s succumbed to the siren song of power. 

How will you dramatize the interior narrative running in Katniss’s head that describes and consistently updates her relationship with the President who is ubiquitous in her mind? With omniscient calm he knows her perfectly. She knows he does and she knows that he will go to any necessary end to maintain his power because she knows that he believes that she’s a real threat to his fragile hold on his control of that power. She’s more dangerous than Joan of Arc. 

Her interior dialogue/monologue defines Snow. It’s that old theatrical turnip: you can’t ‘play’ a king, you need everybody else on stage saying to each other, and therefore to the audience, stuff like “There goes the King, isn’t he a piece of work, how evil, how lovely, how benevolent, how cruel, how brilliant he is!” The idea of him, the definition of him, the audience’s perception of him, is primarily instilled by the observations of others and once that idea is set, the audience’s view of the character is pretty much unyielding. And in Snow’s case, that definition, of course, comes from Katniss. 

Evil looks like our understanding of the history of the men we’re looking at. It’s not what we see: it’s what we’ve been led to believe. Simple as that. Look at the face of Ted Bundy before you knew what he did and after you knew.  

Snow doesn’t look evil to the people in Panem’s Capitol. Bundy didn’t look evil to those girls. My wife and I were driving through Colorado when he escaped from jail there. The car radio’s warning was constant. ‘Don’t pick up any young men. The escapee looks like the nicest young man imaginable’. Snow’s evil shows up in the form of the complacently confident threat that’s ever present in his eyes. His resolute stillness. Have you seen a film I did years ago? ‘The Eye of the Needle’. That fellow had some of what I’m looking for.

The woman who lived up the street from us in Brentwood came over to ask my wife a question when my wife was dropping the kids off at school. This woman and her husband had seen that movie the night before and what she wanted to know was how my wife could live with anyone who could play such an evil man. It made for an amusing dinner or two but part of my wife’s still wondering.

I’d love to speak with you whenever you have a chance so I can be on the same page with you.

They all end up the same way. Welcome to Florida, have a nice day!

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