How The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes Makes You Root For The Bad Guy [Exclusive]
This post contains spoilers for "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes."
"The Hunger Games" prequel story "The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" flips the perspective of the original trilogy (or quadrilogy, in the case of the movies), this time looking outwards at the districts of Panem from the viewpoint of the Capitol. Specifically, it's the story of the future president and over-arching villain of "The Hunger Games," Coriolanus Snow — with Tom Blyth playing an 18-year-old version of the character portrayed by Donald Sutherland in the previous films.
Though President Snow was at the very height of the Capitol's privileged elite, "The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" reveals that Coriolanus is no stronger to hard times. In the film's opening sequence, set during the Rebellion, a five-year-old Coriolanus is scrounging for scraps of food in the street when he witnesses a starving neighbor cannibalizing a dead body to stay alive. And even a decade after the Capitol retakes control, Coriolanus still misses meals and relies on his cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer) to stitch up old clothes to make them look new.
"This is an unformed Snow," director Francis Lawrence explained in an interview with /Film. "He is young and he's struggling, and his goals are to put food on the family's table. And he's trying to win this prize, and he's hiding the fact that his family's fallen from grace, from around all the other entitled kids that he's at school with."
Yes, the once-wealthy Snow family has fallen on hard times — but one thing that steels Coriolanus' determination to secure their future is the family motto.
'Snow always lands on top'
"The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" isn't the first prequel in recent history to focus on the villain of the original movie; Disney got there first with "Maleficent" and "Cruella." But whereas those films got around the villain problem by (respectively) revealing that the villain was actually just misunderstood, or by introducing an even more villainous villain to make them more sympathetic, Lawrence said that what drew him to "Songbirds & Snakes" is how Suzanne Collins' novel challenged any adaptation to walk a more difficult tightrope:
"The biggest trick in getting this movie right, because people know that he's the villain from the other movies, is to sort of get him to a place in the beginning where we can get the audience behind him. Rooting for him, empathizing with him, while making sure that the elements of the need for ambition, some of the greed, some of maybe the genetic darkness that's in him from his father, that all those seeds are planted. So eventually, in his descent into darkness, you find it sort of truthful."
The antagonist of Coriolanus Snow's story isn't a character more evil than himself, but the depressed, drunken Dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage), who came up with the original idea for the Hunger Games as a joke, but despises their existence and wants them to end. For Coriolanus, who strives to help Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) survive the games but has no moral objections to the Hunger Games themselves, Dean Highbottom is merely the mean teacher who hates him for no reason and is trying to unfairly sabotage his career.
Meanwhile, the most outright evil character in the film — Viola Davis' Dr. Volumnia Gaul — ultimately becomes Coriolanus' personal mentor by the end of the movie.
'It's truly an origins story'
Though Coriolanus is the protagonist of the story, his relationship with Lucy Gray Baird — a citizen of District 12 by law, though she identifies as part of a nomadic group called the Covey — sheds light on why he takes such a particularly venomous interest in Katniss Everdeen decades later. "The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" even shows Coriolanus hearing the name "Katniss" for the first time, when Lucy Gray tells him it's the name for a plant with edible roots that grows in water. (Fortunately, there's no surprise reveal that Lucy Gray is related to Katniss; that theory exists purely in the realm of fan speculation.)
"It's truly an origins story," said Lawrence. "Not just about Snow, but it's origins of songs we know, origins of behavior that we've seen and know, origins of characters and character dynamics." It's those qualities that make it "vital for the series," rather than just being a cash-in sequel, along with the fact that it's "a very different story" — not about a girl rising to become the symbol of a revolution, but about "a young man's descent into darkness."
While the director agreed that it's very timely to tell a story about a likable, charismatic character who turns out to be a fascist, he also stresses the importance of Coriolanus's journey from a selfish-but-sympathetic protagonist into a baby villain: "We get to see him formed into [a fascist]. He doesn't start as one."
"The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" is in theaters now.