Though the Capitol may be remembered for its sartorially minded citizens’ fantastical fashions, what truly builds the futuristic world of the Hunger Games film series is its environment. The atmosphere and sets of the first four movies were the brainchild of production designer Philip Messina, who translated author Suzanne Collins’s best-selling books into a futurist dystopia for the silver screen. With the premiere of the series prequel, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, in theaters now, production designer Uli Hanisch introduces audiences to historic Panem, a country whose imaginative architecture finds its roots in real-life Europe. Employing the previous films’ signature jumble of design styles, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a period piece about an authoritarian world undergoing postwar reconstruction and its filming locations, visual references, and buildings conjure subliminal connotations about its brutality, and its fate.
With the film set 64 years before Katniss Everdeen’s first Hunger Games, “comparing the timeline of Panem with our real history 64 years ago…became a very vital reference point for us,” says Hanisch, known for his work on productions like The Queen’s Gambit and Cloud Atlas. “Even though Panem is fictional, we can use a combination of real historical architectural elements—fascist architecture from Germany’s Third Reich, from Italy and Mussolini, from the Soviet Union, and the newer East German GDR state—as the base for our thinking.” Shot between Germany and Poland, the prequel extends viewers’ conception of the physical transformation of a postwar Capitol using real, yet digitally modified, postwar monuments as sets.
In Katniss’s generation, the government city is an amalgamation of high-tech contemporary 1970s postmodernism, and American streamline moderne architecture, all set within a rigid urban plan that references Adolf Hitler’s 1930s vision for Germania, designed by his architect Albert Speer to be implemented on Berlin had the Nazis won World War II. In the prequel, an 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) is coming up in a nascent version of this world, where the imposing concrete massings of fascist, Soviet, and imperial structures reflect the supposed power of the state. Placemaking is provided by several wide shots of a CGI-transformed version of the socialist Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin, designed between 1952 and 1960, with a plethora of half-built towers and their construction cranes visible beyond uniform wedding-cake-style blocks. Inside the 1913 monument to the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig, Germany, a young Snow first becomes a mentor to District 12 tribute Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler). The interior of the 1911–1913 UNESCO-designated Centennial Hall by Max Berg in Wroclaw, Poland, is the in-city Games arena, while Hitler’s 1936 Olympic stadium in Berlin forms its exterior.
“Relocations from this very critical, tragic moment in history, where it’s all about the projection of power, felt like a perfect fit for a dystopian story,” says producer Nina Jacobson, who has worked with director Francis Lawrence (and previously Gary Ross) on every series film. Turning a critical eye to this architecture was an important conceit for its production team. “Looking at this architecture again, you have this balance between intimidation and seduction,” explains Hanisch. “For example, the Nazi architecture in the Third Reich was much more into seducing the people into believing in this new regime’s politics versus the Soviet Union, which was much more into intimidating the people and saying, ‘You are nothing, the system is everything.’”
As seen in the prior movies, at the center of all this monumental concrete are the colorful, luxurious, and more fancifully decorated spaces that Snow inhabits. The future president’s family home is a snowflake-shaped abode whose interior architecture is confused, designed with Art Deco, Czech cubist, and space-age furnishings. Snow’s school lectures are taught in a Federalist-style tempietto with a spiral series of benches. The television set where he and his pupils watch the Hunger Games is straight out of a 1960s game show.
In contrast, the laboratory of head gamemaker Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis) is a streamlined wunderkammern with Tadao Ando–esque bunker walls and columns. Perhaps the most surprising German location for the prequel is Landschaftspark, a former steel mill turned public park in Duisburg-Meiderich that serves as District 12, expanding the audience’s view of life, culture, and the Capitol’s iron-fist rule over its most impoverished citizens.
The film’s mismatch of architectural eras and styles allows Panem to pull its allusions from a selected version of true events. However, its overarching themes around the destructive propensity of ultimate power are obvious in the European structures chosen as highlights. “In the States, we have a tendency to erase our history and sins, and to not want to remember,” says Jacobson. “Living in Berlin, and throughout Germany, is an exercise in remembering.” The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a warning of what the future will look like, if we allow them to repeat.