During promotional interviews for his new film Jack the Giant Slayer, Stanley Tucci spoke with Digital Spy briefly about the Hunger Games : Catching Fire and the differences between directors Gary Ross and Francis Lawrence.  Watch the video below:

The Hunger Games has been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Best Screenplay by the Horror Writers Association!

SCREENPLAY

Goldman, Jane – The Woman in Black (Cross Creek Pictures)
Kim, Sang Kyu – The Walking Dead, “Killer Within” (AMC TV)
Minear, Tim – American Horror Story: Asylum, “Dark Cousin” (Brad Falchuk Teley-Vision, Ryan Murphy Productions)
Ross, Gary, Suzanne Collins, and Billy Ray – The Hunger Games (Lionsgate, Color Force)
Whedon, Joss, and Drew Goddard – The Cabin in the Woods (Mutant Enemy Productions, Lionsgate)

The winners will be announced on June 15, 2013. For a full list of nominees, visit the Bram Stoker Awards official site.

Source: Bram Stoker Awards Via The Hob

HG director Gary Ross may not have earned a degree from Penn state, but he earned the community that comes with it. The Daily Pennsylvanian talked with Gary Ross on how working on The Hunger Games with other Penn state alumni was a homecoming and how his time there cultivated his film career.

As Ross was filming “The Hunger Games” in North Carolina last year, he paused to take a moment to glance around the set.

Standing in front of him was 1996 College graduate Elizabeth Banks, who played the role of Effie Trinket in the film. Near Banks, he saw 1985 College graduate Allison Shearmur, who was then serving as president of production and development at Lionsgate — the company that put out the movie.

For Ross, working on “The Hunger Games” — one of the top-grossing films of 2012 — was largely a homecoming of sorts.

“I’d say that was the happiest I’ve ever been working on a project, and it was certainly nice to be able to share it with some Penn people,” he said.

Ross first learned of the story behind the movie after reading “The Hunger Games,” a 2008 science fiction novel by Suzanne Collins. His two children had shared the book with him, and he was immediately taken by some of its themes.

Although the screenplay Ross produced for the film was adapted from Collins’ writing, he felt from the beginning like the project was his own.

In particular, he developed a special relationship with the character of Katniss Everdeen, the film’s protagonist.

“I was really able to connect to someone who’d been raised in such a brutal world and had never been able to trust anybody,” he said. “Throughout the story, Katniss discovers her humanity in the face of an inhuman process, and that was a very clear arc and path for me to write.”

While Ross acknowledged that the task of adapting a popular novel for the screen was challenging, he was never shy about making on-the-go changes to the storyline.

He recalled one scene between the characters played by Wes Bentley and Donald Sutherland that was initially slated to appear during the first half of the movie. During the editing process, Ross and his team decided that the film’s narrative would flow better if the scene were cut down slightly and moved to the end of the movie.

“You can’t be locked down in something that’s a preconception of how you initially saw the scene in your head,” he said. “Each step of the process has to have its own freedom and spontaneity, and that’s what I love about it.”

Gary Ross talked with NPR’s Guy Ross recently where he talked about his 15 year journey to write Bartholomew Biddle and the very Big Wind.

From NPR:

Gary Ross has penned and directed some big Hollywood hits like Big, Pleasantvilleand The Hunger Games. But for the past 15 years, his obsession has been something much more personal: a Dr. Seuss-ian children’s book calledBartholomew Biddle and the Very Big Wind.

It started when Ross got a call in 1996 from fellow screenwriter David Koepp. Koepp was up against a tight budget and approaching deadline with his debut directorial effort, The Trigger Effect. Its heroine had to read an as-yet-unwritten bedtime story to her child.

Koepp wanted Ross to write that story. “The only thing is, I don’t have any money,” he told Ross. “So it has to be for free, and I’ve got to shoot the day after tomorrow.”

“It was just such a fabulous offer,” Ross tells NPR’s Guy Raz.

Yet the first few lines of that bedtime story consumed Ross. Over the course of the next 15 years, he added to it and refined it. Now illustrated, it’s become the epic tale of a 10-year-old boy with a taste for adventure.

In the book, Bartholomew Biddle opens his bedroom window one day. He spreads out his bedsheet, catches a mighty wind and takes to the air. “Bart basically invents the hang glider on his own,” Ross says. “He sails to three different adventures. It’s a little Gulliver-ish in that way.”

In the process, Biddle discovers a lot about himself and takes the first few tentative steps toward adulthood. It’s a theme Ross touches on in his many of his films.

“It isn’t just growing up,” Ross says, “but breaking free enough to be who you are and to sort of find and celebrate the essence of yourself.”

Listen to the entire audio HERE 

HitFix has created a list of the films that are most likely to get the nominations for Best Adapted and Best Original Screenplay. One of the films they mention is The Hunger Games. Check out their pros and cons below.

‘The Hunger Games’ – Gary Ross and Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray – Adapted Screenplay

Pro: Director Gary Ross worked with novelist Suzanne Collins and screenwriter Billy Ray in adapting Collins’ blockbuster novel. The result was a rare teen novelization that received strong reviews and mammoth box office.

Con: While it’s a fine adaptation, it’s hard to imagine the trio being able to crack arguably the most competitive category of them all. If it was completely original? Slam dunk.

Do you think Hunger Games could be nominated? Or is the competition too fierce?

Gary Ross’ children’s book Bartholomew Biddle and the very big wind is now available in stores or online for purchase.  If you live in the Los Angeles, CA area, Gary will be signing copies of is book at Barnes and Noble at the Grove on 11/17/12.

Order your copy of Bartholomew Biddle and the Very Big Wind HERE

Via : The Examiner

Gary Ross spoke with Amazon recently where he talked about his children’s book Bartholomew Biddle  and read an excerpt from the book.

Via : The Hob 

EW recently caught up with Gary Ross who talked about his first children’s book, and how he feels leaving the Hunger Games franchise.

According to EW :

Back when Gary Ross’ twin son and daughter were just a year old The Hunger Gameswriter/director got a frantic call from a friend. David Koepp was shooting his first movie, 1996′s The Trigger Effect, and needed a bedtime story for Elisabeth Shue to read to her son in a scene. Could Ross come up with something on the fly? So Ross dashed out some verses about a boy named Bartholomew Biddle who flies out of his window using his bedsheet as a kite, surfing currents of air in search of wild adventure. Then Ross set Bartholomew aside for years, though the boy never really left his heart. It was while on the set of 2008′s Tale of Despereaux, the adaptation of Kate DiCamillo’s charming tale of a misfit mouse which Ross wrote the screenplay for, that he showed those early pages to DiCamillo’s publisher Karen Lotz. She too fell hard for Bartholomew’s curiosity and verve and offered Ross a book deal.

The tale of Bartholomew Biddle and the Very Big Wind has since bloomed into a 30,000-word epic told in verse, full of heart and fun and surprising poignancy, which Candlewick Press will publish next week. Ross wrote the bulk of the book in the year before he dove deep into The Hunger Games. “There were days it was the easiest thing in the world, like eating dessert,” he says. “And then days when it was brutally difficult. I was a real purist in the beginning. ‘I will never look at a rhyming dictionary. If a word doesn’t come to you organically it’s not appropriate.’ And then by the end the rhyming dictionary was on my bookmarks bar.”

There’s something touching, Ross thinks, about now getting to share such a personal project whose gestation has spanned his now 17-year-old children’s entire lives. “Especially afterHunger Games it’s nice sending this thing out into the world and seeing what comes back,” says Ross. (And so far what’s come back includes a starred Kirkus Reviews rave and an Amazon Book-of-the-Month pick.) As for The Hunger Games, Ross insists he’s never second-guessed his ultimate decision to walk away from the franchise after co-writing and helming the phenomenally well-received first installment. ”I didn’t feel that I would have the time for the way that I work to do the movie justice,” he says. “I wear two hats. I don’t wear one hat. When you write and you direct that’s a linear process, it’s not a simultaneous process. I would’ve had to have written a script and prepped the whole movie in four months and on the first movie that’s a process that took me eight months. And I thought [Catching Fire] was a more difficult adaptation, not an easier one. I didn’t really feel I had the time I needed to live up to my own standards. And I haven’t had a moment’s regret. It was absolutely the right decision and I’m thrilled about new challenges.” (Ross’ next movie will be Peter and the Starcatchers, a reimagining of the Peter Pan fable that he’ll direct for Disney.)

Read the rest HERE