Inside the Cannes ‘Catching Fire’ Party with Vulture

5/21/2013UncategorizedEmily

Vulture reporter Jada Yuan was able to attend the Catching Fire Capitol party at Cannes this past weekend and shared some highlights of the event. The party featured Capitol fashion, colorful food, and Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth and Sam Claflin were all in attendance. The party looks and sounds like it was an amazing night!

You could tell Lionsgate was going to throw some money at its Capitol-themed party for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire at Cannes from the invitation alone. It came in an inch-thick satin-lined white paperboard box with the Capitol seal embossed on the front. Inside was a silver pin in the shape of a rose and a gold-lettered request for the pleasure of your company from “President Snow.” Fail to affix the pin to your lapel, or bring the invitation, which was marked with a stamp only visible in black light, and it was off to the Arena for you! Or they’d just turn you away, and at Cannes, not getting into one of the night’s hottest party might be the worse fate.

 

Down below, in a vast tent whose insides were draped with red fabric, Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Sam Claflin (Finnick), and, randomly, Paul Haggis sat on couches surrounded by security guards, followed by a wall of people holding out their iPhones.

 

Still, the spectacle that Lionsgate and event producer Danielle Pelland did manage to pull off was sufficient for a pretty great time. Hanging from the tent’s ceiling were crystal chandeliers along with giant dripping Baroque arrangements of white peonies topped with candles. More peonies topped large Roman columns, topped by more candles. The center of the room was dominated by an endless food table piled high with desserts (10,000 pieces of food for the event total) and book-ended by two three-tiered chocolate fondue fountains, one white and one dark. Behind the bars on either end of the vast tent were framed Baroque-style portraits of the Hunger Games characters in their Capitol finest. Male waiters and bartenders were marked with fake face tattoos resembling either tiger stripes or Mike Tyson’s. Mixed drinks that Les Misérables’s Samantha Banks called “very fierce, very colorful, very extreme” were standard in flavor (gin fizz, tequila sunrise), but concocted in unnaturally bright greens and blues. “You mean that Gatorade-blue drink? It was terrible!” said Hemlock Grove’s Bill Skarsgård. Was he a Hunger Games fan? “I actually tried out for what’s-his-name”— Gale, he said, laughing. “I didn’t get it.”

Read the full article—including how the Capitol models’ costumes were conceived and how the weather affected the party—over at Vulture.