‘Hunger Games’ Director Was ‘Surprised’ to Learn of Prequel Book: ‘We Thought It Was Done’ (Exclusive)

After releasing three Hunger Games films in three consecutive years, director Francis Lawrence thought that 2015's Mockingjay — Part 2 was the end of the road for him and the franchise based on the bestselling book series by Suzanne Collins. And yet, eight years later, to his complete surprise, he and the The Hunger Games are back.

"We thought it was done," Lawrence told The Messenger. "In 2015, there were no more plans for books. Suzanne was like, 'I've been working on these books and movies for 10 years — I'm done. I got to do something else.' She was tired, she wanted to write some plays, hang with her family. And then we got surprised. Four years later, the end of 2019, she hadn't told us she was inspired, she hadn't told us she was starting anything, and she called [producer] Nina [Jacobson] and I and said, 'I'm almost done with a new book.' Obviously we had to read the book, but it was just super exciting that there was something new that we were going to be able to read and hopefully dive into together again."

Collins' latest turned out to be The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, a prequel set decades before the author's first trilogy. Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is nowhere to be found. Instead we discover the origin story for big bad President Snow (Donald Sutherland in the original movies), who is introduced as Coriolanus "Coryo" Snow (Tom Blyth), an 18-year-old struggling to return his family to respectability and prominence. During the 10th annual Hunger Games, he finds a chance at redemption and love in the form of tribute Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler).

"Suzanne always starts from a thematic place, and the themes and relevance and reason for it to exist really excited me," Lawrence said. "We're very much in a Hunger Games movie but telling a very different kind of story. It's not just a rehash or another games with another character. There was a real, new story to tell, and the idea of doing a young man's descent into darkness was something that I hadn't done before."

Having picked up the baton from original Hunger Games filmmaker Gary Ross, Lawrence directed the second, third and fourth installments, and was now intrigued by the possibility of exploring the "origin aspect" with a new film.

"Not just the origin of the character, but the origin of all of the stories," he explained. "You get the origin of the songs, characters, behaviors, the games. You feel a lot of addition to the mythology, as well as a lot of tweaking and changing of the mythology to sort of upend things that you might've thought about in the other movies and books, and I found that really fascinating."

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes opens Friday in theaters.