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| Donald Shutherland |
‘He’d get sick with nerves before the first day’s shoot – even after making 120 films’
Francis Lawrence, director of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015)
24 June 2024
I first met Donald in 2012, when I’d signed on to direct the second Hunger Games film. He wanted to meet on 4 July – a public holiday in the US, which I thought was strange. He chose a steakhouse at 9am, which I thought was stranger. I was intimidated because he had such gravitas. I remember he came into the Pacific Dining Car restaurant, sat down and instantly became conspiratorial: if I ever met his wife, he said, I was not to tell her we’d had giant New York steaks for breakfast, because he wasn’t supposed to eat them any more. That totally disarmed me and I instantly fell in love with him.
When we were on set, he’d call me “Governor” and sometimes hold on to me as we walked along. One day he seemed sad and I asked him why. He said: “Because this is almost over.” I was like: “No! We still have a few days and it’s not even the last movie.”
That evening, he wrote me this hilarious email blaming his sadness on a handful of bad grapes he’d eaten. As soon as he got back to his trailer after our walk, he wrote, he’d blown a hole in the lavatory. Now they’d need to burn down the trailer and he hoped that didn’t disrupt the shoot. It was great fun and it was written really beautifully. Now I’ll have to frame that email.
Donald was very politically engaged and that’s why he wanted to do The Hunger Games. He loved that we were smuggling these ideas about the consequences of war into a pop cultural phenomenon. He certainly didn’t give a shit about being a celebrity. It was all about the work and craft and collaborators.
A lot of people see the character he played, President Snow, as the villainous antagonist of those films. And he is – but we needed to find out what his belief system was. Snow believed in the Hobbesian idea that everybody in this world is savage and therefore needs to be ruled with an iron fist. So Donald and I talked a lot about that, on a core thematic level.
He was surprisingly fragile and vulnerable. He’d get very nervous – sick, even – before the first day of shooting, despite having made 120 movies. And yet he seemed so relaxed on screen. Anyone who rises to his level has a kind of magical charisma that’s hard to pinpoint. And Donald was full of complexities: a man of immense power, intelligence and dignity who also had a childish irreverence and a wicked sense of humour. He was very easy to love. But I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be on his bad side. I think those contradictions are what made him so interesting. A lot of people don’t have any of those attributes. He had all of them. CS
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