Veteran actor Donald Sutherland plays the autocratic President Coriolanus Snow in the film, a role that would have had less screentime had Ross (who received a screenplay credit along with author Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray) not written additional scenes - scenes not featured in the novel - featuring Coriolanus and "Head Gamemaker" Seneca Crane (played by Wes Bentley) into the film.

"Gary...came back with a couple of scenes in a rose garden, but they didn't have a rose garden [in the book]," explained Sutherland. "He’d built the rose garden...it was just it was brilliant the way he did it.  It was a very simple instruction to the young man [Seneca Crane], who [Coriolanus] believed would take over from [him] when [he] was no longer there."