How Josh Hutcherson Helped Jennifer Lawrence Even When He Wasn’t on the Mockingjay Set
Mockingjay director Francis Lawrence talks us through the film’s key scenes and how hovercrafts are less fun to work with than they seem.
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District 13 was sort of a tough thing to figure out how to build because obviously we were never
going to find an underground, you know, civilization. At least one that worked
for everything we needed and so we had to sort of piece together all these various locations.
Some were set, some were locations and we primarily were shooting in Atlanta and we ended
up shooting in a lot of parking garages and the cafeteria set was one of our parking garage sets.
Before the shoot we had Josh come in. Stanley wasn't available but we had a stand-in for Stanley
and we just shot quickly over the course of a couple hours the three interviews that Josh does
as PETA as we see him deteriorate through the movie. We had the editors cut that together and
so we could play the test footage for Jen and Liam during the scene so we actually had sound
and had picture and she could see Josh. He was just kind of popping in and out which was
was tough for Jen because she's so attached to and loves Josh so much. Because of that sort of
absence when we had him up on the screen it actually worked for us because it was, you know,
she was really missing Josh and not having Josh around and then suddenly seeing him up on the
screen and, you know, in pain and sort of tortured was, I think it worked well for her emotionally.
You only get one wish. It's very costly. You're alive.
One of my goals with the hovercraft, I wanted the hovercraft to feel as real as the helicopters
would in a movie today so we actually built sets that we could lift up on cranes and we could put
the actors in and then we could film the sets getting dropped down, have them actually walk off,
have them lift away so it would just feel like, you know, you had a live helicopter there on the
day. It sounds really fun and then when you get into the technical side of it you realize how hard
and expensive it is and then, you know, you build a set and you discover that your set is 18,000
pounds and so the kind of crane needed to lift an 18,000 pound set and the fact that for safety
reasons all the actors have to be clipped in and so you're figuring ways of unclipping them
when it lands and, you know, it becomes a real hassle. I'm really happy with the way it turned
out but it sounds like a really cool idea and then it gets to become really problematic.