While individual readers and/or audience members will ultimately have to make their own conclusions about the story’s relevancy to their own lives, actor Donald Sutherland has some very specific thoughts on the sociopolitical meaning of the tale, likening Katniss Everdeen’s struggle to the Occupy moment.

Q: Well, I was going to say that there is some sympathy there because we don’t know this world and we know that something very bad has happened in the past. You can almost see fear in him.
Sutherland: I don’t think you see fear in him. I think you see challenge. At my age the only thing you’re really afraid of is Depends [laughs]. I think he sees challenge and I think he sees it in this Katniss Everdeen. I think he sees in her the challenge that he’s been waiting for. You know, sitting there, somebody someday is going to come up sometime. And this particular one, given how it’s all gone, you can’t just kill her. You have to find some other way of controlling her, containing her.

Q: Your character is the only one who seems to really understand that there is a world possible outside of the Hunger Games.
Sutherland: Yeah, sure there is. You know, you think when General Electric doesn’t pay tax on four billion dollars they don’t know that there is another world possible where they did pay the bloody tax? Sure they do.

Q: It’s interesting that you could really connect it to the Occupy moment. The underdog speech is something you might hear on conservative radio.
Sutherland: Exactly, yeah. Yeah. Except for Rush [Limbaugh] [laughs]. I bet Lionsgate doesn’t want us to dwell too much on Occupy Wall Street. But you’re right. I went there. I went to Occupy Vancouver. It felt so good. Somewhere around ’74, whatever we were doing was co-opted. It was commercialized. It became a brand and everybody lost heart. I have here [reaches for his briefcase], I have it here I don’t want to take it out, “The Port Huron Statement,” that the SDS made in 1962… Oh god, read it. Read it! Read it! It’s so — it’s just brilliant. It’s really brilliant. It’s brilliant today and I can’t read it because I can’t see properly, but it ends with something to the effect of, “You might think that what we are proposing is unattainable. But we’re proposing that because otherwise what is going to happen is unimaginable.” And that’s what happened.

Read the full interview at ComingSoon