‘Hunger Games’ Director on the ‘Challenge’ of Adapting the Ending of ‘Songbirds & Snakes’ (Exclusive)

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Francis Lawrence is an expert when it comes to bringing the Hunger Games books to the big screen, but there's a major challenge he faces each time he does so, and that was especially true for the grand finale of the new prequel The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

After Gary Ross directed the initial adaptation of author Suzanne Collins' best-selling dystopian YA trilogy, 2012's The Hunger Games, Lawrence stepped in to helm the subsequent films about Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), Catching Fire, Mockingjay — Part 1 and Mockingjay — Part 2, and the Coriolanus "Coryo" Snow (Tom Blyth taking over for Donald Sutherland) origin story, Songbirds & Snakes. Four movies and three books in, Lawrence still faces the same test.

"One of the biggest challenges in adapting any of Suzanne's books, even the Katniss ones, is that so much of the books are what the characters are thinking," Lawrence tells The Messenger. "And that's always the trick, trying to visualize and dramatize things that are thoughts in the book and put them on the screen."

And maybe the best example of that is the late twist and confrontation in the relationship between Coryo and Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler). The duo fell in love when Coryo was assigned as Lucy Gray's mentor for the 10th annual Hunger Games, an event she won thanks to the unsanctioned help of Coryo. As punishment, he's forced to join the Peacekeepers and is sent to District 12, where he's reunited with Lucy Gray. They soon flee together following Coryo's involvement in the killing of the mayor's daughter, with Coryo leaving behind his chance to attend officer's school in District 2.

But their happily ever after is suddenly jeopardized when they stop at a remote cabin, and, after Lucy Gray points him in the direction of the floorboards, he opens them to find the guns that implicate him in the murder. Lucy Gray says that he could get rid of them and be free, except for a single loose end, which just happens to be her. While he clearly struggles with this discovery and Lucy Gray's declaration, she steps outside under false pretenses. When he goes looking for her, he happens upon his mother's scarf that he gave Lucy Gray and is bitten by a snake trap that she left. He's furious and devastated, and believing he spots her running through the woods, he fires at her, but it's not shown whether he hit his target. The fate of Lucy Gray is unclear and Coryo returns to the Capitol, forever a changed man and now on the path to become the evil President Snow.

"I think the starting challenge was, knowing he's going to be the villain of the original series, to figure out how to create a young Snow that we could get the audience behind," Lawrence shares. "We need them empathizing with him and rooting for him, all while maintaining a sense of ambition, greed, some of the inherent darkness that's in him that might be genetic, feeling this pull from people like Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis), and the nature-nurture of what's going to make him change. But it was tracking all those kinds of moments leading to the end."

In the end, Lawrence points to the climactic sequence and Blyth's turn in it as "one of my favorite parts" of the film. "I remember shooting it in the forest, watching him, and there's very little dialogue and it's all just performance and you see it happening," he recalls. "You feel the fear, the betrayal, the sadness, the darkness, the change in mindset. It's a testament to Tom's performance, which I absolutely love."

For now, this is the conclusion of Coryo's journey, but Lawrence would "do another [film] again in a second, but it all has to come from Suzanne."

Read more of The Messenger's exclusive and expert Songbirds & Snakes content.