Four years after he completed work with the last big-screen adjustment of the zeitgeist-y Hunger Games publication trilogy, supervisor Francis Lawrence obtained a telephone call from manufacturer Nina Jacobson, an additional professional of the collection. And she wasn’t wanting to think back.

Suzanne Collins – the mind and pen behind the dystopian sci-fi collection – had actually simply phoned Jacobson with some information: “Hey, surprise! I’m almost finished with a new book.” Lawrence summarize their response: “Wow…. Okay!”

The Hunger Games scribe didn’t use much details regarding her upcoming story, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, apart from that it was an innovator — and it bundled “a big musical element,” Lawrence remembers.

After checking out guide in very early 2020, not long prior to it showed up on racks, Lawrence was formally in. “I love a villain origin story,” he claims of Songbirds, which tracks the surge of trilogy villain Coriolanus Snow. The exact same chose Jacobson. “Suzanne trusting me with this series, we’ve had an incredible rapport and bond,” she claims. “I was all in.”

Returning to the supervisor’s chair for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes – which strikes movie theaters Nov. 17 – acted as a twin homecoming for Lawrence. Not just was he going back to the Hunger Games sector, yet to the job of pairing tracks with distinct visuals. After all, he initially reduced his chops as a video supervisor, helming clips for Destiny’s Child (“Independent Women Part I”), Shakira (“Whenever, Wherever/Suerta”), Justin Timberlake (“Cry Me a River”), Britney Spears (“I’m a Slave 4 U”) and Beyoncé (“Run the World (Girls)”), also winning the very best video Grammy for routing Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” An excellent resume to make sure, yet not a specific suit for the music scene Collins envisioned for this tale.

Songbirds presents us to Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), a travelling people vocalist tossed right into the titular kill-or-be-killed fight – along with a not likely love with Snow (Tom Blyth). “[Collins] informed me regarding the background of Appalachian songs of the ‘20s and ‘30s and how often they were based on songs or ballads or poems that had been passed down for generations and collected over time,” Lawrence says of the music that inspired the character of Baird. Collins advised the director to check out Ken Burns’ 16-hour docudrama Country Music (“this was during the pandemic, so I had time,” he includes) for context, yet both of them recognized that discovering the appropriate music partner for the film – somebody that lived and breathed this songs — would certainly be important to ensuring Baird seemed like a dirty, rugged rough diamond.

Enter Dave Cobb. A Nashville essential that’s created cds for Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson (i.e., nation vocalists that value grit over workshop gloss), Cobb’s payments for 2018’s A Star Is Born and 2022’s Elvis showed he can function within the Hollywood system without compromising his music principles.

When his name turned up throughout pre-production, the group hopped on the phone to really feel out his passion degree. The link was instant.

“Talking to him, he’s an incredible historian of music and has such a passion that rivals Suzanne’s for the origins of what we think of as American music,” Jacobson remembers of their preliminary discussion. Lawrence concurs: “It was his resume but also just the chat. He’s such a great, smart guy and has such knowledge of the country music genre; he fit the family and is supremely talented.”

As for the nine-time Grammy champion, Cobb informs Billboard that Collins’ substantial expertise of background – songs, political and or else – made him thrilled to get on board and create tracks to accompany her verses from guide.

“One of the things that was so attractive about working on this film [is that] I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a more intelligent person in my life than Suzanne Collins. She’s an absolute genius, by any measure,” Cobb claims. “Suzanne telling me the impetus of the story had me captivated. I’m a history buff, and everything in this film — everything she’s written for Hunger Games — is derived from real history.”

That, nevertheless, provided an extra obstacle: “I had to make [the songs] feel like turn-of-the-century, timeless classics. That’s a very hard thing to do,” Cobb confesses with a laugh. But it wasn’t completely outside his round of experience, either. “My grandmother was a Pentecostal minister, so I grew up with hymnals my whole life,” he claims. “I’m very familiar with this sound growing up in the South and it was really fun to exercise that muscle of things I’d heard growing up, and put it into melodies.”

Collins’ music acumen was a property, also. “Dave had long conversations with Suzanne, and she’d give him the history of where the song came from,” Lawrence claims, including that Collins also “had some time signatures in mind” for sure tracks prior to Cobb started composing.

“They have a shared love of the same music and the history of music,” Jacobson claims. “She was present virtually for a lot of the recordings and had a lot of conversations with Dave, but gave him latitude, too. She always gives artists an enormous amount of freedom to interpret her work.” Lawrence secs that: “He wrote the full songs, and we barely did changes.”

When it came time to discuss those tracks with a band, Cobb with ease recognized a recording workshop wouldn’t suffice.

“The big thing for me was to get the ability to be completely unorthodox,” he claims. “We had this crazy idea to come down to my hometown of Savannah, Georgia, and rent an old mansion and record in that.” Using the critical recordings of 20th century people archivist Alan Lomax as a leading light, Cobb located a “200-plus-year-old house” and brought along a couple of ringers — consisting of bluegrass marvel Molly Tuttle — to videotape the overview tracks.

“With all the creaks in the walls, you can hear the history in the recording — it wasn’t like a clinical studio,” Cobb claims. “The old microphones we utilized resembled they’d been under a bed for 75 years. Molly Tuttle played a huge component – she played the guitar of Lucy Gray, and I located this old ’30s Gibson that she used. It wasn’t simply a routine guitar – it has personality.

“That was a big part of making this come to life. There’s bleed between the bass going into the fiddle going into the banjo — it’s just absolute chaos in a way that makes things dangerous.”

Making it audio harmful was just fifty percent of the formula, nevertheless. Ironically, to locate a real-life place that looked Appalachian, the movie team decamped to Duisburg, Germany, shooting a crucial scene at a deserted manufacturing facility to stimulate District 12’s underground market area. “It’s something they would never do in the States – they turned [the factory] into a publicly accessible park and let nature take over,” Jacobson claims. “There’s all these places where you can go into gritty, grubby basements with the equipment still there.”

With that as the background, Zegler supplies among the movie’s finest music minutes, compeling our psychological financial investment in her enchanting connection with a personality we understand matures to be a beast – all while singing the heck out of an awesome track that can masquerade a long-lost Carter Family traditional.

“Rachel is such an incredible talent that she ended up singing everything live [on set],” Cobb claims of Zegler. “She’s so naturally gifted – it was effortless for her.”

Despite being just one of the initial individuals in talks for the function (and a follower of the franchise business), Zegler at first wasn’t able to do the movie due to busy organizing problems. As the look for Lucy Gray Baird dragged out, Jacobson expanded worried. “We auditioned a zillion people and there are a lot of wildly talented people out there, but this is such a specific character. When she sings, it has to be jaw-dropping; anything short of that won’t deliver.”

Kismet concerned the rescue, nevertheless, when Josh Andrés Rivera (that collaborated with Zegler on West Side Story) landed the function of Sejanus, Snow’s buddy. “He had this amazing audition,” claims Jacobson. “I didn’t realize he was Rachel’s boyfriend – I just thought he was the guy who came in and gave us a great audition.” With Rivera established for a prolonged lockdown remain in Europe while shooting the motion picture, Zegler and her group reassessed the organizing problems. “We got the call [from her team]: ‘Is it too late?’”

A chemistry examination in between Zegler and Blyth secured the offer – also over Zoom, it was apparent. “We all wanted to be mindful of her musical theater background and make sure we got that authenticity in her singing,” Lawrence claims. “As soon as she came on the Zoom test with her and Tom, I had her sing an a cappella version of ‘Wildwood Flower’ to Tom. And she just nailed it. It was slow, emotional and she had a little dialect happening. It was so, so good.”

“Rachel has this beautiful, almost ‘30s American pure voice,” Cobb muses. “She can sing anything.”

Her efficiency is just as revelatory. In Songbirds, Zegler probably represents a hard, charming survivor that thoroughly safeguards her internal life and values; as we see her ended up being at risk with a personality “people have already decided they hate,” as Jacobson claims of Snow, it’s difficult to withstand obtaining captured up in this dramatic, gripping thrill of a movie. While Collins’ expressive verses and Cobb’s acquainted yet fresh tunes do a great deal of hefty training, it’s tough to envision anybody yet Zegler managing the stabilizing act required by the tale.

“We knew it would be a challenge to adapt this book,” Jacobson confesses. “But it’s also a sort of homecoming, having made so many of these with Francis and this creative team. It’s a rare gift.”

“[Collins] writes from a thematic foundation that gives [Songbirds] relevance and importance,” Lawrence claims. And though he has no understanding right into whether the collection finishes right here, he’s definitely up for an additional one. “If she came up with another book — whether a direct sequel or a standalone or a new series in this world — I would be really into doing it again.”

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