Suzanne Collins interviewed at Time Magazine.

From Part One:

I have a daughter who’s 3 who’s super-obsessed with Little Bear, and I always think it’s funny that you wrote both those and The Hunger Games, too. Where is the overlap between the Suzanne Collins who wrote Little Bear, which is so sweet and warm and cozy, and the Suzanne Collins who wrote the Hunger Games books?
SC: All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story. Even though the Little Bears are 7-and-a-half minutes, I wanted them to be well structured. You’ve got good characters. You want to tell a compelling story that will reach that audience. All the elements are the same. You’re just writing a different story, and sometimes you shift a little bit because the concerns of the age group that you’re writing for are different. People think there’s some a dramatic difference between writing Little Bear and the Hunger Games, and as a writer, for me, there isn’t.

From Part Two:

If you look at the arenas as individual wars or battles, you start out in the first one and you have a very classic gladiator game. By the second one it has evolved into what is the stage for the rebellion, because the arena is the one place that all the districts that cannot communicate with each other, it’s the one place they can all watch together. So it’s where the rebellion blows up.

And then the third arena is the Capitol, which has now become an actual war. But in the process of becoming an actual war, in the process of becoming a rebellion, they have now replicated the original arena. So it’s cyclical, and it’s that cycle of violence that seems impossible for us to break out of.

As it's going to be a five-parter, there's plenty more to come!