Hollywood Reporter: The High Stakes Behind ‘Hunger Games’

On Sept. 6, 2010, Gary Ross boarded a plane from Los Angeles for New York, carrying art boards and a seven-minute film he’d made with thousands of dollars of his own money.

Ross was nervous: He was about to meet with the top brass at Lionsgate and pitch himself as director of their most high-profile project, The Hunger Games. The then-53-year-old hadn’t made a film since Seabiscuit seven years earlier, and even though he was a four-time Oscar nominee, he was an unlikely candidate for what the independent studio hoped to be a major franchise.

“You wouldn’t look at a premise like Hunger Games and think Gary Ross,” he admits of the venture, based on Suzanne Collins’ best-selling young-adult novel set in a futuristic America where a bright 16-year-old girl is forced to take part in gladiator-like combat — kill or be killed.

So Ross came prepared. “I had seven or eight concept artists put boards together,” he recalls, “and I interviewed my kids and a lot of their friends to hear what they thought about the book.”

For two hours, he laid out his vision, helped by stacks of images from artists including Max Beckmann that he’d lined around the walls and by the short film featuring his teenage twins, Claudia and Jack, explaining why the book meant so much to them.

“You could really feel his passion,” says producer Nina Jacobson, “and it was channeled through the young people in his life.”

Read more!  The High Stakes Behind ‘Hunger Games’ – The Hollywood Reporter.

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