December 9, 2010 SUZANNE COLLINS ON WRITING “THE HUNGER GAMES” MOVIE: “YOU HAVE TO LET THINGS GO”
A gutsy bow-and-arrow wielding 16-year-old rules the best-seller charts these days — Katniss Everdeen, the tough-as-nails star of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy. The series’ first book (The Hunger Games) alone has more than 2.9 million copies in print and spent over 100 consecutive weeks on the New York Times list. Collins (one of EW’s 2010 Entertainers of the Year) dreamed up Games a few years ago while channel surfing, when images of reality TV and the Iraq war melded in her head. Her books’ dystopian world features a government that does whatever it takes to control its citizens, even holding an annual lottery that pits the unlucky winners — all children — against one another, fighting to the death in an outdoor arena while the country watches on TV.
