Nina Jacobson Games Quotations

You're not doing the scene exactly the way it is in the book [The Hunger Games], but the intention of the scene is there.

In the evolution of the [The Hunger Games] movie, Gary [Ross] and I talked a lot about tonal bandwidth and making sure that the look and feel and style and choices of the movie stayed within a certain consistent bandwidth.

I felt that there were so many things that could go wrong, in adapting The Hunger Games , and I had this fierce desire to protect this book that she had written. At that time, I read the second book, in manuscript form, and so I saw where she was going with the series. I was able to convince Suzanne [Collins] to trust me with the books.

Little decisions were made, every day. In this movie [The Hunger Games], we really focused on Cinna and we didn't get time to focus on the other stylist.

I was focused on The Hunger Games movie with my director, with the studio, and with the cast and crew. We all just focused on making the best possible movie we could, and earning the right to do more.

I love the Hunger Games books. Certainly, the fans are there. They're grown enormously since the beginning. When I first brought the books to Lionsgate, they had sold about 150,000 copies, which is a very good result for a YA book. And to their credit, Lionsgate was very excited and committed to the movie, from the beginning.

I've always tried to really focus on The Hunger Games movie, knowing that, yes, these are amazing books and I would feel like a failure, if I didn't get all three of them made.

If the movie [The Hunger Games] were stylized violence that was pretty and fun and cool, which is great when you go see 300 or The Matrix, it would just be out of sync with the fact that they're kids.

We both [with Suzanne Collins ] felt strongly that you wouldn't want to age up the characters, no matter the age of the actors playing the roles. They should be playing the age that they are in the [Hunger Games] books. It would let people off the hook, if you said, "Well, instead of 12 to 18, why don't you make them 18 to 25 or 16 to 21?" If you don't stay true to the horror of the fact that they are 12 to 18, you're not doing justice to the book.

We didn't want to dilute or soften the material because that would really be irresponsible, in its own way. The [Hunger Games] books are very intense and very demanding of the reader, and the movie should be that too.

We knew that we wanted TheHunger Games to be PG-13 because she wrote the book for readers 12 and up, and we wanted them to be able to see the movie. It's a movie that is meant to be relevant to young people, and not exclude them, in any way.

Being able to just stick to our instincts and honor the [Hunger Games] books and find a way to stay the course of trying to make the best possible decisions that you would make creatively on any movie, without having your head turned too much by all of the interest, has been a great challenge. It's the best challenge you could ask for, but that was a big challenge.

[On The Hunger Games success]: "It hit on the zeitgeist of the disparity b/w the haves and have nots.

Deb Zane, our casting director on the Hunger Games was very sanguine, from the beginning, about just blocking out what everybody else says that they want.

[On the racial backlash about Hunger Games casting]: "People should have ignored the five racist idiots.

I can't imagine Hunger Games, even with its very popular books, being nearly a success that it's been without Jen Lawrence being the perfect person to play that role - a very modern celebrity, a very down-to-earth, accessible, celebrity.

Suzanna Collins was very supportive, but we very much wanted her blessing on casting. In production, she visited us once, but she really was not involved in the production process. She's seen the Hunger Games movie twice, in the post-production process, once as an early cut and then once when it was finished.