It was Banks who first reached out through a mutual friend to director Gary Ross, whom she’d worked with on Seabiscuit. “I love Effie Trinket,” she said. ”So tell
Gary that if he’s talking to Lionsgate about the movie that I want to
do it.’” When Ross invited her to his office to talk about the role, she
came prepared with a fully fleshed-out vision for Effie. “I always saw
her as a very three-dimensional, very unique character,” she said. “Even
in the book she can be written off as sort of comic relief.”“But
what I love about Effie,” Banks continues, “is she’s this great
representative of the Capitol and all the Capitol stands for. She drank
the Kool-Aid. So essentially she’s a villain — a really fun villain, but
a villain nonetheless. The challenges for me were how to make her
theatrical and larger than life but also fit into the tone of this
movie, which is very serious. How do we make decisions where she can be
overly effusive and positive about everything but at the same time be
telegraphing to you that this is a horrible thing that’s happening?
She’s not unknowing. Once Gary knew that I wasn’t going to come in and
do a funny voice and make jokes, that I took this world as seriously as a
fan should, frankly, then he was like ‘Okay, well I’d love for you to
do it.’”
Ah, the voice! It positively trills and clangs in Collins’ pages, like a creepy pop song being played as the Titanic
goes down. “The voice took a long time for me,” says Banks. “Suzanne
Collins talks about the Capitol accent the whole time and I just wanted
to make sure I honored that without doing something too silly. And I’m
really happy with where we ended up. I sent Gary a lot of recorded
samples of myself — everything from super British to super Southern to
impressions of Christine Baranski. Ultimately I looked at movies from
the ’30s and ’40s and theatricality was at its height in the movies of
the ’30s and ’40s. I looked to the Philadelphia Story, Katharine Hepburn, and Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame.”
Next came crafting Effie’s thoroughly unique appearance. “There was
two days in the trailer of putting the look together,” describes Banks.
“The hair’s pink. Is it dark pink, light pink? What’s the shape of it,
what’s the texture? What’s the shape of her generally: Is she big, is
she small? Super white skin and then not white skin, a lot of color, no
color. And the jumping off point was Joel Grey in Cabaret. And
what that meant to us partially is that you feel like Effie’s striving
for her ideal, her vision of perfection, but she’s missing it.”
As these last few days of wait tick by before the March 23 premiere,
Banks assures fans that they’ll be pleased by everyone’s sincere
attempts to do Collins’ world justice. “It’s everything that the books
are,” she says of the film. “It’s the essence of the book and that’s the
best you can do.”
