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Lawrence returns for the upcoming origin storyThe Ballad of Songbirds & Snakesafter directing 2013’sCatching Fireand the twoMockingjaymovies.
The director (no relation to starJennifer Lawrence, who played protagonist Katniss Everdeen) tells PEOPLE he wouldn’t split the book into two if he had a redo.
“I totally regret it. I totally do. I’m not sure everybody does, but I definitely do,” he says.
It was in July 2012 that it wasconfirmedauthor Suzanne Collins’s trilogy-concluder would be adapted across two movies.Mockingjay - Part 1arrived in theaters in November 2014, andMockingjay - Part 2in November 2015.
While Lawrence says the team agreed the “two halves ofMockingjayhad their own separate dramatic questions” and, therefore, complete arcs, he gets why some fans were upset about the wait between films.
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“What I realized in retrospect — and after hearing all the reactions and feeling the kind of wrath of fans, critics and people at the split — is that I realized it was frustrating,” says Lawrence. “And I can understand it.”
“In an episode of television, if you have a cliffhanger, you have to wait a week or you could just binge it and then you can see the next episode. But making people wait a year, I think, came across as disingenuous, even though it wasn’t,” he adds. “Our intentions were not to be disingenuous.”
Lawrence notes that on the plus side, they were able to adapt more from the book across two films.
“In truth, we got more on the screen out of the book than we would’ve in any of the other movies because you’re getting close to four hours of screen time for the final book. But,” he says, “I see and understand how it frustrated people.”
And it hasn’t fully disappeared: Denis Villeneuve is squeezing multipleDunemovies from one book, Peter Jackson managed three movies from a singleHobbitbook, and the upcomingWickedmovie adaptation will be two films.
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“I would never let them split the book in two,” says Lawrence. “There was never a real conversation about it. It’s a long book, but we got so much s— for splittingMockingjayinto two — from fans, from critics, from everybody — that I was like, ‘No way. I’ll just make a longer movie.’ "
source: people.com
