Hunger Games banned Vietnam

'i've huge affection for President Snow' … Donald Sutherland inside Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Photograph: Murray Close/Lionsgate

Donald Sutherland wants to stir revolt. An actual revolt. A youth-led uprising against injustice that will overturn the US even as we understand it and usher in a kinder, better method. "I hope that they'll do something given that it's getting extreme inside nation." Drone attacks. Corporate tax-dodging. Racism. The Keystone oil pipeline. Denying meals stamps to "starving People in america". It really is all gonna pot. "It's not right. It isn't right."

Millennials need awakening from slumber. "you understand the young people with this society have not moved within the last 30 years." With the exception of Occupy, a minority motion, passivity reigns. "they've been used with telephones." The vocals hardens. "Tweeting."

Our company is high-up in a Four Seasons resort overlooking Beverly Hills, sunlight glinting down mansions and boutiques the following, an unlikely cradle of transformation. Sutherland, resplendent in a dark suit and purple link, is pushing 80. But he is quite seriously interested in the decision to hands. "We did it in '68."

The Canadian actor has actually a venerable record of leftwing activism dating back to support when it comes to Black Panthers and resistance towards Vietnam war, but this latest foray into subversion dovetails with marketing The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the 2nd instalment in a series of four movies according to Suzanne Collins's bestselling books for teenagers. It can take ahead the storyline of Katniss, played by Jennifer Lawrence, who must combat other oppressed proles towards the death as an element of a tyrannical federal government's method of guideline through anxiety. The dystopia, called Panem, is created in the ashes of this United States, and Sutherland desires young viewers to react to the allegory. "Ideally they'll see this film as well as the after that movie as well as the next movie and then possibly organise. Remain true."

It is a nice advertising pitch: go see the movie to not enlarge a Hollywood blockbuster's box office but to fan a flame that will make the globe a far better location. Couple of stars could easily get away thereupon spiel, not likely even other liberal contemporaries including Warren Beatty or Robert Redford. Sutherland, but handles to seem sincere, even though insisting Hunger Games is not actually a franchise since it's considering a literary trilogy. It helps he exudes allure and happily careens off-topic into eclectic anecdotes and observations: the way the Guardian made him money, the evening he ripped off a toenail on-stage, the secret of a happy relationship and exactly how some people tend to be beyond redemption. Oh, and James Joyce, farting and masturbation. Initially, though, politics. In Hunger Games, Sutherland plays President Coriolanus Snow, a tyrant's tyrant, with basilisk malevolence. Perched today on a sofa, long feet folded (he is 6ft 4in), the white mane equally magnificent as on display, he could be very nearly since intense whenever declaiming the movies' insurrectionary potential.

'We Have great hope and faith in the youthful' … Donald Sutherland. Photograph: Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images

His own generation's rebelliousness lapsed into bumper sticker slogans and after this's youthful are too fretful about finding jobs to change society, he laments. "i simply believe they're perhaps not organised. It's not a thing that's occurring within the universities, that is ordinarily the reproduction floor for that type of task." Does he despair associated with young? The famous drooping, pale blue eyes widen. "No, no, no. Usually there is no point making this film. We have great hope and trust in them. I am aware because I keep in touch with my kids." That will be equally well, because Hunger Games made the 78-year-old one thing of a pin-up to a new generation unfamiliar with The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes, Klute, cannot Look Now or MASH, movies that made him a star for their moms and dads.

The Hunger Games, Sutherland proposes, is a coded discourse on inequality, energy and hope. "It just places things in the light and lets you check out it. If you are taking from it what I hope you may take from it, it will make you might think a tad bit more pungently concerning the political environment you live in rather than be complacent."

Four films spread over as numerous years may have a cumulative impact, he claims. Young people cannot revolt, he concedes, but they may effect serious change. "They might produce a 3rd party. They may replace the electoral process, they could be capable dominate the federal government, change the tax system."

Sutherland with Julie Christie in Don't Look Now. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Functions

Sutherland's belief when you look at the energy of film is due to a double-bill he viewed in Toronto in 1954, aged 19: circumstances of bliss cast by Federico Fellini's La Strada dissolved by Stanley Kubrick's very first world war crisis Paths of Glory. "When I came out of the motion picture I happened to be getting stones, pieces of gravel, everything, and throwing them at the road, such was the trend during the injustice that I thought."

One reason The Hunger Games was so successful – the first film, directed by Gary Ross, made almost three-quarters of a billion dollars at global box office – is the fact that allegory could be read multiple means. A critique, including, of main federal government trampling states' liberties. Sutherland as an alternative views a critique of Tea Party-led excesses but he does note a parallel between his character and Barack Obama, who he aids. "i believe he realises, like Coriolanus Snow realises, that to use authority and to get a grip on a situation it is important to make sure expedient choices that you'd not normally make. I do not believe it is in his nature to send Predator drones. I was thinking it absolutely was in the nature to get out of Guantánamo, but men and women stopped that. It is not been easy for him to govern, since this is an extremely racist culture."

Sutherland does great villain – sadistic foreman in 1900, sadistic warden in Lock Up – to the extent that a l . a . neighbour which saw him as a Nazi spy in Eye associated with Needle accosted his partner and asked, appalled, exactly how could she stay with him. (His wife, the French-Canadian actor Francine Racette, responded it had been their job.) He claims he loves the amoral President Snow. "I have huge affection for him. I am aware the turmoil therefore the difficulty that is in his head."

Can Snow be used? Sutherland shakes their head and replies with a personal tale. "we'd a housekeeper in Canada, a wonderful lady, whoever daddy raped all his daughters. She went to see him when he ended up being dying and stated, 'I'm right here to forgive you.' He said, 'Forgiveness for just what? It was my right.'"

Sutherland with Elliott Gould in MASH. Photo: Allstar/Cinetext/CBS television

Despite subsequent roles as a hippie container leader and cooking pot cigarette smoking professor, his preferred drug was acting. "I became on a stage when in Perth in Scotland putting on big high-heeled shoes and I also tore my huge toenail down. When I moved off-stage it was screamingly painful. But as soon as we came back on-stage it didn't hurt more."

Little components in movies and television series including the Avengers and The Saint led to his role as a lippy person in The Dirty Dozen, alongside Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin. He relocated to Hollywood and landed diverse, plum functions in the 60s and 70s: The Eagle Has Landed, Invasion for the Body Snatchers, a single day of this Locust, Casanova, never Look Now. Relationship to his second spouse, Shirley Douglas, produced son Kiefer, and his twin-sister, but ended in divorce or separation. A relationship with Jane Fonda, their co-star on Klute, immersed him in leftwing activism, before he met Francine regarding the collection of the 1974 film Alien Thunder, producing three kids and reputedly certainly one of Hollywood's best marriages.

Sutherland with Brooke Adams in Invasion Of This System Snatchers

Sutherland is in full circulation when his partner rings their mobile. A brief, murmured discussion. "i am working darling. We'll see you shortly." What's the secret to an extended, pleased union? I ask. A sly smile. "Answer the phone."