Philip Seymour Hoffman, an American actor, was probably best known for playing deplorable characters in many successful films. His career began in 1991, when he appeared in the series Law & Order, playing the role of a young thug in season 1, The Violence of Summer. From 1992, he began playing supportive roles in films like Scent of a Woman (1992), Magnolia (1999), and Along Came Polly (2004). As his career grew, Hoffman eventually played leading roles and won the Academy Award for Best Actor in the movie Capote (2005). Being a successful actor was not the only accomplishment under his belt, Hoffman was also a film director, who had his first film Jack Goes Boating debut in 2010.
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Unfortunately, in his youthful years, Hoffman struggled with drug addiction, and though he managed to abstain for several years, he relapsed in 2012 and died of combined drug intoxication on February 2, 2014. At this time, he was filming The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, which though sad, placed director Francis Lawrence in a tough spot. Philip Seymour Hoffman played the role of Plutarch Heavensbee in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 and 2. Lawrence had to figure out what to do for the unfilmed sections, and CGI was not an option. He eventually found a good solution, and the film was a success.
How Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Death Affected The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Movie
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Luckily, most of Hoffman’s scenes had been filmed, and only two remained. The problem was that these two scenes had dialogue, and using CGI was not an option for Francis Lawrence. He decided to rewrite the scenes, giving the dialogue to other characters. During an interview with Huffington Post, Lawrence says “we decided we didn’t want to try any digital trickery with him, so we rewrote his scenes and gave the dialogue to other actors.”
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The Hunger Games franchise is based on Suzanne Collins’s novels. For those who have read them, Mockingjay – Part 2 ending has Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) having a dialogue with Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence). Due to Hoffman’s death, we instead see Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson) reading a letter from Hoffman to Katniss that she’ll be pardoned for Alma Coin’s (Julianne Moore) murder. We also see Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) and Abernathy take up more screen time, perhaps to compensate for Plutarch’s absence. Changes were also made to the shooting schedule to cater to Hoffman’s absence, including some that gave the actors shorter working durations and days to give time for mourning. Ultimately, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 was a success and received positive reviews from critics. It grossed over $658 million worldwide, settling in the ninth position in the highest-grossing films of 2015.
Why CGI Wasn’t Used to Recreate Philip Seymour Hoffman
Despite fans speculating the Hunger Games director would resort to using CGI and stand-ins, Lawrence felt Hoffman was too fine of an actor to be represented via CGI. The director even stated, “he was one of the greatest actors, I think, of all time, and I just think to try to fake a Philip Seymour Hoffman performance would have been catastrophic, and I would never want to do that.” He even said there wasn’t much discussion on whether to use CGI.
Typically, once an important actor dies during production, which is more common than you think, the go-to solution for directors is CGI. We have the likes of Bruce Lee, Marilyn Monroe and Paul Walker, who had a whole movie dedicated to sending him off, perhaps why Hunger Games fans thought CGI would be used to recreate Philip Seymour Hoffman. Francis Lawrence’s solution, though seeming slightly awkward, was actually brilliant. Having another actor perform Hoffman’s dialogue through a letter and using existing footage of the actor added emotion to the scene. Lawrence even echoes this during an interview with Los Angeles Times. He comments, “it added an extra layer of emotion to the experience. To be shooting this scene that has this meaning, that’s important for the movie’s thematics and ideas and was a scene that Philip was supposed to do…. And also to end, after such a long time when we’ve been away from home for so long, with the lines, ‘What now?’ ‘We go home.’ It was really just strange and poignant.”
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Despite having a great solution for the film, Lawrence still felt he had not done enough to honor Hoffman. He laments, “I regret to have that … label of it being his last film. Because obviously, there’s not quite enough of him in it. I would have liked his role to be larger.” But because Hoffman was perhaps one of his generation’s best actors, fans felt he never needed more screen time to leave a mark.
