Though he doesn’t have a huge presence in the books, Seneca Crane will of course be seen plenty in The Hunger Games film. The actor who plays him (Wes Bentley) is speaking to MTV about how they brought the character from page to screen as well as how they worked around the fact that the book is told from Katniss’ perspective.

Quotage from MTV:

“For anyone who reads the books, he’s not mentioned much in the books, mostly because it’s told from Katniss’ first-person perspective, so I had no idea what kind of angle we were going to take on it, and I really didn’t have an idea until I got to set,” Bentley said. “[Director] Gary [Ross] had such a clear idea of it that it made it easy to dig into.”

Bentley was hesitant to describe his version of Crane in detail, but after a bit of prodding, he did reveal that he took a few cues from his experiences in Hollywood to flesh out Crane’s persona a bit.

“The idea of him was a flashier idea than what you would think. He’s more a flashy producer,” Bentley said. “I’m still a tech-y kind of guy, still a producer at heart, so I used my understanding of show business and sort of magnified that to get a clear-cut vision of Seneca.

“He goes big. He’s all about the show,” he added about Crane’s all-for-the-sake-of-the-Games showmanship. “I went as far as I could without [going over the top], but what he’s about in his show is flashy, his look is very flashy, but he still tried to play it like he’s a cool cat.”

How the filmmakers are adapting this book – based on the aforementioned first person perspective – has been a big question for fans.