The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, plus 10 real-life revolutionaries

The cast and creators of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes take us back 64 years before Katniss Everdeen volunteered as tribute in The Hunger Games – and decades before Coriolanus Snow became the tyrannical President of Panem.

As Panem’s Capitol struggles to its feet in the 10 years following an all-out war, 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth, Billy the Kid), the last hope of the once-proud Snow family, is assigned to mentor Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), a Tribute from District 12, for the 10th Hunger Games. But as Lucy charms the public, Coriolanus comes up with an idea that he believes could place the odds firmly in both their favour, and win the hearts and minds of Panem. “They both realise that the cameras are always on them during the Games, and that they can make each other look good to everyone watching. Their relationship is born in performance and they’re able to shift gears and put on the face they need when they need it,” says producer Nina Jacobson. 

While Coriolanus and Lucy seize their opportunities, they’re playing against the Hunger Games’ wily Head Gamemaker and architect, Dr Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis, Suicide Squad), and the Games’ co-creator, Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage, Game of Thrones) who’s now Dean of the Academy that trains Panem’s future leaders. Highbottom has an axe to grind with his student Coriolanus, whose powerful late father Crassus took Highbottom’s joking idea for the Games and transformed it into a nightmarish reality. “To Highbottom, Coriolanus represents his father; he looks and sounds and behaves like him, at least in my mind,” says Peter. “Highbottom has a feeling that history is going to repeat itself, and he doesn’t trust this young man and has an eye on him for good reason.”

Stream The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes now on Showmax. Also watch The Hunger Games, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1and Part 2 now. And scroll to the end for 10 revolutionary real-life movies and series.

Three architects of destruction

Author Suzanne Collins reached out to Francis Lawrence (director of The Hunger Games films since Catching Fire) and got him thinking about how Panem would have slid into authoritarianism while she was still writing her latest book in the series, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, in which she lays out the foundations for the early days of the Games. “We deconstruct the Games and go back in time to see how they evolved. We depict how the landscape of the arena has changed, how the Capitol starts to influence the games, and how the Panem audiences begin to participate in the Games, instead of just watching them,” says Francis. 

Playful and cruel Dr Volumnia Gaul, the mastermind behind the Capitol’s experimental weapons division and the driving force behind the genetically mutated animals that’ll become a deadly part of the Games, aims to get Panem not just watching, but financially invested in the 10th Hunger Games. With that in mind, she introduces betting, sponsorships and mentors like Coriolanus as the perfect tools to take the Games to the next level. Along with that, she brings in its first-ever host, Lucretius “Lucky” Flickerman (Jason Schwartzman, Bored To Death) – a weatherman and magician. “As a magician, his biggest trick is distracting everyone from what’s really occurring in the Games. That’s the illusion; Lucky is helping turn something barbaric into entertainment and spectacle,” says Jason. 

But for Casca Highbottom, the Games are a nightmare come to life – a drunken, rambling idea he shared with Crassus for a punishment so extreme that the Districts and rebellion would never be able to forget the consequences of “betraying” Panem. “I love the tragedy in Highbottom because he’s dealing with the guilt of the consequences of co-creating the Games, because it’s now out of his control. The genie has been uncorked and running mad,” says Peter. “Crassus and Gaul took advantage of Highbottom’s intelligence and used it for darker purposes.”

The rise of a dictator

“Coriolanus is such a complex character. We see him go from this young man who is troubled and fighting for his family, to someone with a driving and dark ambition,” says Tom. “The story opens with his family at the precipice of serious hunger. It’s the end of the war, and they’ve been trying to scrape back some semblance of life within this cityscape that is demolished. Coriolanus will do whatever it takes to get his Grandma’am (Fionnula Flanagan) and cousin, Tigris (Hunter Schafer, Euphoria), out of that place. But that gives way to him becoming someone who will do anything just to get to the top.”

Coriolanus’ determination to claw his family’s way back to glory, and his winner-takes-all philosophy, is challenged when he meets Lucy. “The moment Coriolanus meets Lucy, something clicks in him that he’s never felt before. His ambition of wanting Lucy Gray to win grows with his love for her, which he’s never experienced. Those things make him fight like hell to get her through the Hunger Games and out the other side,” says Tom.

A musical spanner in the works

Soon Panem is just as enchanted with Lucy’s talent and grace. “The words that come to my mind are ‘mercurial’ and ‘witty,’” says Rachel. “The way I approached Lucy Gray was that she’s only there for her family, her friends, and herself. That’s why her relationship with Coriolanus is so interesting. We’re led to believe, by the lyrics of her songs, that she’s been wronged by many people, particularly by men. So, she is hesitant to trust, and challenges Snow to rise to her level of intimidation. Lucy Gray starts to see what it’s like to put someone else’s needs before her own, and she’s living with her whole heart. But when she starts to see traits in Coriolanus that she may not find trustworthy, she must put herself first and make impossible decisions.”

Lucy is a singer with a touring group called The Covey, who perform folk-country Appalachian-style music. She sows one of the seeds for Katniss and her defiance when she writes her now-famous protest song targeted at the Capitol: The Hanging Tree. “The music ends up being this incredible focal point of the film, because it’s a sign of Lucy Gray’s revolutionary ideals,” explains Rachel. “In the novel, Suzanne Collins not only wrote the lyrics for Lucy Gray’s songs, but she also had an idea for the tempo and what the songs would sound like.” 

Raising Panem from the ashes

“When you consider that this film is set 64 years before the original films, this is very much a period piece for the series,” says Francis Lawrence. “It’s not long after the war, and that informs so much: what kind of architecture is there, how much is rebuilt, what starts to lean toward the brutalist architecture we know from the previous films, what’s classical, and what’s fallen apart from the war.” 

Production Designer Uli Hanisch turned to real life for inspiration, delving into the history of the film’s shooting locations across Poland and Germany. “Six decades ago, in our history, we were at the end of the 1950s, and the beginning of the 1960s. Berlin at that time is comparable to the film’s Capitol: you have a capital city fifteen years after a devastating war, and everything is different. I found that very inspiring in designing the Capitol of Panem,” he says.

1. The scenes set in the 10th Annual Hunger Games’ arena were filmed in Wroclaw’s Centennial Hall, designed by Max Berg, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site.
2. District 12’s scenes were filmed at the massive Landschaftspark, a former steel mill-turned-public park in Duisburg-Meiderich, Germany. “It was interesting to explore the working aspect of District 12 in more detail,” says Uli. “The coal mining part of District 12 is more important for Panem than it was 65 years later. It’s like in our real world, where our coal mines and steel factories used to be more important than they are now. We wanted to create the whole District 12 world, inside a factory.”
3. The Tributes are taken to and caged in the Capitol Zoo, which was filmed in a zoo enclosure in Berlin. “We found one of the most picturesque parks in Berlin, with an artificial lake and unusual turtle shell construction, and created our own zoo enclosure right in the middle of it,” says Uli.
4. Gaul’s terrifying lab was set up inside a crematorium. Set decorator Sabine Schaaf reveals, “From the beginning it was clear that this was a special kind of location, with stunning and modern architecture. We knew Gaul’s lab would be anything but ‘normal,’ because it’s where she invents evil, literally So, we made the lab a mixture of a natural science museum, an art installation, and a lab.” – complete with Gaul’s mutated creatures in glass cases. 
5. A train sequence in which Snow first meets Lucy Gray was shot in a train museum in Cologne, Germany.
6. Coriolanus’s apartment was constructed on a soundstage in Germany’s Babelsberg Studio. “I based much of its look from its descriptions in the novel. The meagreness of the environment reflects the hard times the family has fallen on, but it’s still their home,” says Uli. 

Now come see how it all plays out for yourself. Stream The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes now on Showmax. Also watch The Hunger Games, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and Part 2. 

10 real revolutionary tales

1. Mann v. Ford: This documentary follows Walter Mann’s efforts to get the legal system to hold car manufacturer Ford financially responsible for polluting residential land, leading to death and serious illness in his community.

2. George Bizos: Icon: Follow the life of the young Greek refugee who became a human-rights lawyer for Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, and many others during apartheid in this movie-length documentary.

3. King in the Wilderness: This documentary explores how Martin Luther King Jr battled to balance both the Black Power movement and the government in the final years before his assassination.

4. One Life: Biographical drama. Anthony Hopkins stars as London stockbroker Nicholas Winton, who helped to save hundreds of predominantly Jewish children from the Nazis just before the start of WWII.

5. Action Kommandant: This moving and intimate documentary looks at the life and death of South African youth activist Ashley Kriel.

6. Endangered: Welcome to a year in the life of four journalists reporting inside Mexico, Brazil and the United States, three democratic nations where the view of the press is rapidly deteriorating, in this 2022 documentary.

7. The Janes: This documentary offers first-hand accounts from the Jane Collective, an underground network of women’s rights and abortion activists who performed approximately 11 000 abortions in Chicago in the 1970s. Their story is also dramatised in the mini-series Call Jane, with Sigourney Weaver and Elizabeth Banks. 

8. John Lewis: Good Trouble: This fascinating documentary explores the life and times of US Congressman and long-time civil rights leader John Lewis.

9. Our Towns: Oscar-nominated filmmakers Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan explore how a sense of community and a common language of change can help people and towns find a different path to the future in this documentary.

10. Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas: Emmy-winning comedian and writer Wyatt Cenac (The Daily Show) stars in this two-season HBO series that takes a satirical look at a wide range of social and cultural issues from his unique perspective.