Catching Fire director Francis Lawrence dropped some interesting tidbits about his choices for The Hunger Games sequel in a new interview with MTV.

One aspect of the film he addressed was how he selected an actor to play Finnick. The choice of Sam Claflin for the role was met with some criticism as you can read in the comments of our story announcing his casting. With MTV Lawrence revealed an interesting perspective: He was looking to the future when selecting an actor. “There’s kind of a rogue-like quality to him in this book. And long term, he’s actually an emotional character and a very loyal character and a character who’s in love; a character who experienced quite a lot of sadness. And he was really able to tap into that, as well as being really charming and sexy and handsome as hell.”

By “long term” we assume Lawrence is referring to Mockingjay, where Finnick will ultimately meet his death.

Another tidbit revealed concerned developments in Haymitch’s character. In Catching Fire, we can expect to see Haymitch, played by Woody Harrelson, struggling more with the idea of war and post-traumatic stress disorder. “One of the things I really like about this book is you start to see kind of why Haymitch is the way he is, why people are the way they are, so he and I did a fair amount of work in terms of that, in terms of understanding PTSD and how to work with somebody with post-traumatic stress. Also we started messing around a lot with some real humanity in Haymitch because he can be quite cynical and sarcastic at times. But I think there’s a more human side to him in this one as well.”

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire opens November 22, 2013. On MTV you can read Lawrence’s comments on shooting in Hawaii and taking Gary Ross’ place.