Suzanne Collins has already admitted that it was reality shows that first brought the idea of The Hunger Games to her, but it was the Greek myths that formed the basic plot of the film. She is obsessed with Greek myths, and one of her favourite ones is about Theseus. The myth sees the city of Athens forced to send young men and women to Crete to be devoured by the mighty Minotaur. She said: ‘Crete was sending a very clear message: mess with us and we’ll do something worse than kill you. We’ll kill your children’.
Collins has already admitted that Katniss is a futuristic Theseus. She explains: ‘It’s very much based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, which I read when I was eight. I was a huge fan of Greek and Roman mythology. As punishment for displeasing Crete, Athens periodically had to send seven youths and seven maidens to Crete, where they were thrown into the labyrinth and devoured by the Minotaur, a monster that’s half man and half bull. Even when I was a little kid, the story took my breath away, because it was so cruel, and Crete was so ruthless, and the parents sat by apparently powerless to stop it. The cycle doesn’t end until Theseus volunteers to go, and he kills the Minotaur. In her own way, Katniss is a futuristic Theseus. But I didn’t want to do a labyrinth story. So I decided to write basically an updated version of the Roman Gladiator games.’
She added: ‘In keeping with the classical roots, I send my Tributes into an updated version of the Roman Gladiator games, which entails a ruthless government forcing people to fight to the death as popular entertainment. The world of Panem, particularly the Capitol, is loaded with Roman references. Panem itself comes from the expression “Panem et Circenses”, which translates into “Bread and Circuses”. The audiences for both the Roman games and reality TV are almost characters in themselves. They can respond with great enthusiasm or play a role in your elimination.’
If Winter’s Bone was Jennifer Lawrence’s calling card to Hollywood bosses, The Kids Are All Right was Josh Hutcherson’s. The ensemble-led drama is an astute and keenly aware piece about the conflicts and tensions that can arise in a modern family.
The production notes stated the synopsis as thus: ‘In this funny, vibrant, and richly drawn portrait of a modern family, Nic and Jules (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) are two mothers who share a cozy suburban craftsman bungalow with their respective teenage children, Joni and Laser (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson). As Joni prepares to leave for college, her younger brother presses her for a big favour. He wants Joni, now 18, to help him find their biological father. Against her better judgement, Joni honours her brother’s request and manages to make contact with ‘bio-dad’ Paul (Mark Ruffalo), an easy-going restaurateur. As Paul comes into the lives of this straight-shooting family, an unexpected new chapter begins for the group as family ties are defined, re-defined, and then re-re-defined.’
‘The script was incredible,’ Hutcherson said. ‘It was unlike anything that I had read before. It was such a full adaptation of what a family means. I think that the characters are so well written and the dialogue was so incredibly realistic that I knew that I wanted to be a part of it.
‘I met with Lisa Cholodenko, the director. I’d been a fan of hers for a while from Laurel Canyon, and I think she did an amazing job with writing it, directing it, and everything and just to be part of the film was an honour and it was awesome.’
He also added: ‘It’s actually a very similar dynamic to my family. We’re very, very close, not only as a family, but as friends. I practically am with my mum 24/7 because she’s been on set with me since I was nine years old and so, I’m around her a lot. I just feel like I have a good friendship with my family. I think that’s very important because Laser’s family has a very strong mutual respect for one another. Laser definitely does things sometimes and needs some parenting.’
He added: ‘A lot of it was the writing. Lisa and Stuart did a great job of capturing these characters and the essence of who they were. They worked on it for almost five years. For me I just played the part that was on the page. Laser is a teen who’s trying to figure out who he is and how he fits into the world, and I know I identified with that. I’m pretty sure that most teenagers out there, and adults who have ever been teenagers, can identify with that as well.’
Mark Ruffalo said about agreeing to appear in the movie: ‘I’d just directed my film and was in post when I got the call for this film. It didn’t look like it was going to work out with my schedule to do this. I was literally shooting when I had to deliver my movie and I had been away from my family. It was a tough year. So, I was thinking I needed a break. They couldn’t move their dates around, so it sort of looked like it wasn’t going to happen, which was really heart-breaking to me. I was telling my wife about it all the time. In fact, finally she was texting [Julianne Moore] – they’re friends – and she said: “What’s up with that movie? I love that movie. Mark loved that movie. What’s going on with it?”. They said the part was still open and asked if I would do it and my wife said: “Yeah, he won’t talk about anything else.” So it kind of all came together.’
Ruffalo added: ‘I thought it was a really interesting turn on kind of an American iconic life character – a kind of Peter Pan bachelor who lives his life purely for his own pleasure. A lot of us have looked up to people like that and wanted to be one. Then he has this really nice turn in it, when he meets his biological kids. They make him a pile of mush.’
Julianne Moore said: ‘The whole cast is tremendous, and it’s the strength of the script that attracted them to The Kids Are All Right. I first met Lisa years ago at a Women In Film event. I’d seen High Art, and thought it was brilliant. I actually said to her: “Why didn’t I see that script?!” I think she’s a wonderful writer and director, and we stayed in touch and were looking for things to do. She sent me the script that she and Stuart had written, I said yes, and then it was a long process of actually bringing the film to fruition. I stuck with it because I believed in Lisa as a filmmaker, and I believed in the beautiful script as a movie.’
Stuart Blumberg said: ‘Mia Wasikowska may seem to be one of those “it girls” who’s exploded onto the scene, but she’s incredibly level-headed and calm. She brought a real centeredness to playing Joni, a real gravitas to this 18 year old. Josh Hutcherson did a wonderful job; he’s not at all like Laser in real life. We’d see him go from his own extroverted self to playing someone very internal and almost imploding.’
While the script appealed to Hutcherson, he was carving out a successful mainstream career. This was indie fare, and several of those films, however acclaimed, get rarely seen. But Hutcherson is canny enough to know that if he wants a fulfilling career he needs to grow as an actor.
‘Ever since I first started acting I’ve wanted to have a long career,’ he explained. ‘This is just a step in the direction of becoming more of an adult actor. The story was so real and it encapsulated the family and depicted it in a way that has never been done before, and it definitely is a genre and a type of movie I haven’t been in before, and I loved it. As an actor, I feel like a lot of times your job is to portray real life or the complete opposite, a fantastical world. I’ve done a lot of fantastical crazy stuff that doesn’t exist, so to break it down into something that was so real and genuine and fun like this was really fun and different.’
When asked about the differences between this and his usual fare, he replied: ‘It’s very different. Zathura was a 93-day shoot, and this was 23. I loved it. The intimacy that you get with an independent film like this is unlike a studio film. The collaboration and the creative freedom that you have is really nice. I love doing giant studio pictures, they’re a lot of fun, big budgets and a lot of action and long shoots. But I also love breaking it down and doing character pieces – it sounds really actor-y to call them pieces, but I like changing it up like that.’
The film became a huge critical and box office success, winning two Golden Globes and receiving four Oscar nominations – including Best Film. Annette Bening said: ‘This was something that we did have a hard time getting financing. Now it’s nominated as best picture. It’s part of what people are talking about. It’s become part of our contemporary pop culture world.’
The Guardian wrote: ‘Lisa Cholodenko’s sparkling picture is an easygoing comedy of emotional difficulty, a witty portrait of postmodern family life in which script, casting, direction and location all just float together without any apparent effort at all.
‘The Kids Are All Right shrewdly foregrounds and isolates the choices made in creating a family: choices which are usually unexamined. Couples generally get together, get pregnant, maybe stay together, or not: things happen too gradually to be noticeable. But the story of this ready-made bio-step-family is constructed in such a way that things happen suddenly and the choices are thrown into vivid, pin-sharp relief. Ruffalo’s Paul himself starts to appear less sympathetic and less comic, and his interest in the family more parasitic, more that of an insidiously groovy emotional vampire. But at the same time, he shows himself poignantly, even tragically unprepared for the burdens of fatherhood thrust upon him. He can never go back to what he was before, and yet being absorbed into this family isn’t easy. It is the hardest possible juggling act for director and performers alike: and yet Cholodenko and her cast carry it off with sensitivity, wit and warmth.’