Jordi Querol i Rielo

Disney fired her over the phone while she was still in the delivery room with her newborn. Three years later she landed The Hunger Games on a phone call with the author, and those movies went on to make $3.3 billion. Her name is Nina Jacobson. And today Suzanne Collins, who almost never gives interviews and even skipped the midnight launch party for her own book last year, put out a five-page letter that tells you exactly why she picked her. The film rights went up for sale in 2009, right as Catching Fire hit shelves. Jacobson was running a two-year-old company. Collins says she won because she was committed to making the movies faithful to the books, and if you read the rest of the letter, you realize she meant that pretty literally. Collins basically never let the team change. Francis Lawrence has directed five of these movies in a row and now produces them too. James Newton Howard has scored every one since 2012, and Debra Zane has cast all of them. She also says the producers oversee each film starting from a book that isn't even published yet. They started looking for a 16-year-old Haymitch with nothing but a few rough outlines from Collins. Which is how you get the part about Woody Harrelson. Back in Catching Fire, Collins gave Haymitch's past almost no space. Katniss and Peeta watch a replay of his Games that the Capitol twisted into propaganda, and that's about it. When Woody started playing him in 2012, he had almost nothing to work with. He still spent four whole movies playing a guy who was obviously carrying something awful. Then more than a decade later, Collins finally sat down to write what actually happened to him. She says Woody had nailed the character's emotional journey so well that writing the young version got easier, because nothing he'd done on screen fought with the page. So Woody was guessing the whole time, and when the real story finally showed up, he'd guessed right. Next week he's back with Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson, and Collins calls it a gift to watch them connect his story to Katniss's. Jacobson made Collins a promise on one phone call in 2009. Five movies and $3.3 billion later, the author who basically never talks wrote five pages to say Jacobson kept it.