Producer of Hunger Games

Nina, the producer of Hunger Games, came to talk in my USC class today.

Her background story is really fascinating. She studied semiotics at Brown, then worked her way up to exec positions in Dreamworks, Universal Pictures, and Disney before making Color Force. She's always been conscious of issues of representation and that's a part of why she's a member of the Feminist Majority Foundation.

She talked about how, at first, every major studio rejected the Hunger Games movie idea, mainly because they were uncomfortable with the idea of a movie about kids killing other kids (some people thought it would be because the movie has a female protagonist, but not so). By hearing people complain about how the movie ruined the book, I was surprised by her description of how involved Suzanne Collins was with approving certain aspects of the movie. In fact, Suzanne was okay with changing some major aspects of the story in an earlier script which Nina rejected because Nina wanted to stick closer to the original story (such as changing Gale to be a more involved figure in the plot).

When asked why she wanted to do Hunger Games, Nina put a lot of emphasis on her fascination with the way the book talks about killing and death but manages to stay ethical. Suzanne's intent with writing the Hunger Games and also with the movie was to talk about the costs of war - that there is no innocent victory. Thus in making the movie, she was very conscious of keeping the story ethical, but also making it palatable (she talked about walking the line between two extremes). Thus, to keep her younger audience, the movie was a lot less violent/graphic than the book to satisfy the MPAA and get the desired rating. She says she chose Gary to be the director, to the surprise of many, because she wanted the movie to be about the characters, not the spectacle/events, and Gary does a good job with letting characters drive the movie instead of events.

In reaction to the race controversy, Nina said it was just a ridiculously small amount of people getting major publicity unnecessarily, since they are actually so few. She thinks the whole thing was blown way out of proportion because those few racist comments would have stayed unknown if it weren't for major sites writing articles about them.

As for the size controversy surrounding Jennifer, she emphasized that the character is able to hunt, and that Jennifer was cast because she's a "phenomenal actress."  Nina also pointed out that people weren't complaining about the sizes of Gale and Peta, even though they're also supposed to be malnourished.