Francis Lawrence
This was a nice little gag piece of furniture that Maria and her propmaker made. It's a little tough to light to see the black discs in the black drawer underneath. So, they gave Jo Willems quite a challenge. But worked out really well. You know, Jo and I have worked together for a really long time as well. I mean, we go back to the music video days, I think, you know, pre-2000, doing music videos and commercials. And then I went off to do movies, and he went off to do some movies, and so we went kinda separate ways for a while. And then started working together again on a couple of pilots. We did a couple of pilots together, and then I brought him in for the Hunger Games movies, and we really haven't stopped working together since. But we decided to do, really, a completely different approach to the movie, visually, this time. Again, we had done three Hunger Games movies over the course of five years, and there was sort of a similar feel to all of that. I mean, one of the things that I wanted to do was handheld, to sort of maintain some of the naturalism that was in the first one, but sort of more along the kind of style that I had done in something like I Am Legend where there's a hint of immediacy and naturalism, but it was actually still rather formal in terms of shot selection. The other thing that we did was use a lot of kind of medium-wide lenses up close on people, so we felt very intimate with people, but still maintained a little sense of geography in those movies. But a lot of those movies played in medium and close-up shots, or very wide, but a lot up close. And we wanted to be completely different with this movie. I mean, I wanted, quite honestly, for it to have a bit of a colder approach, a much more formal approach. I mean, the color palette was certainly gonna be different. The landscapes, and costumes, and characters were all gonna be completely different and much more grounded. But I wanted the cameras to be much more formal, too. So, locked down. So, either on dollies or Steadicam, or cranes, or Sticks. No handheld. But also to let things play a lot wider. I went in close much more rarely and let things play in wider shots for a lot longer. It was something that I'd wanted to do for a long time, but it was not an aesthetic that I had kicked off on the Hunger Games, and so I didn't want to kind of change that partway through. But it was an opportunity that I wanted to take advantage of here, and I'm really happy about it. You see it quite a lot in places like Sparrow School, and at the ballet, and things like that, that I really stay back and let things kind of play out in a much wider way. And also try not to cut quite as quickly as we may have. I wanted there to be, you know, an aspect of a slow burn to this movie. I wanted it to take its time a little bit, and not play just to the people who have attention deficit disorder.
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