Director Francis Lawrence is no stranger to the Hunger Games franchise--he's directed each of the movies in this series aside from the first one. But the prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a very different creature from those other films. This is a crueler and more primitive Hunger Games than the competitions you remember, and the protagonist this time isn't a tribute, but rather Coriolanus Snow, the bad guy from the main series whose older form was played by Donald Sutherland.

So despite the returning director and the ongoing franchise, this movie is hardly more of the same. Centering the story on the younger version of the franchise villain is certainly unusual, and requires a balancing act that the Star Wars prequels, for example, didn't manage with Anakin Skywalker. In an interview with GameSpot, Lawrence broke down the philosophical difficulties of having a character like Snow as your main character, the dramatic differences between this movie and his previous Hunger Games films, and how Jason Schwartzman put his stamp on the role of the original Hunger Games host, Lucky Flickerman.

"Honestly, the biggest challenge of this movie that we knew we were going to have, in the adaptation process primarily, was making sure that we could get the audience behind [Snow], to empathize with him, to root for him, even knowing that he's the hated villain of the original stories," Lawrence told me. "But what was even more difficult, once we got an audience behind him, is to make sure that we still have the right kind of breadcrumbs and the right layers of him--of his ambition, his greed, the darkness, so that when he turns, it's feels believable and honest and truthful."