De-cluttering the cutting-room floor — this time from my interview with Julianne Moore in the New York Observer that ended up concentrating on her race to the Best Actress Oscar.
Ms. Moore’s drive to be attached to quality material extends beyond the Oscar circuit. Regarding being cast in the box office hit The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, Ms. Moore confessed: “which I did call about.” She credited her children for the discovery five years ago. “I’m like here, Caleb, here’s the third volume in the series you like (because you always want 12-year-old boys to read.) And then a few years later my daughter, who’s now 12, was reading The Hunger Games. We were on vacation and I had nothing to read. I picked it up. I was like ‘this is great.’ I downloaded the other two and I read them really fast. Then in the last book there’s this character Alma Coin and I’m, like, go for that part. She was the only character I could play. And that’s how that happened. I met the director, Francis Lawrence. That was one of those projects I pursued because it was interesting.”
[Related: What Your Daughter (and You) Can Learn from the Hunger Games]
In the case of Mockingjay, the material was more attractive than the actual part of the severe President of District 13, a powerful figure that does not carry the narrative thread like Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen. The book interested Ms. Moore because “it’s political allegory with adolescent overtones whereas a lot of things that you read in YA are simply adolescent. There’s nothing wrong with that… but what the author Suzanne Collins did is she really wrote about political systems and ideology and rebellion turning into revolution and civil disobedience and what class systems do to people and what totalitarianism does. I read it and I was like, Jesus! And the character of Alma Coin is thin in the book. She’s not fully fleshed out in the movies either because the movie’s not about Alma Coin but she’s an interesting character with an interesting evolution.”