The indie heart-breaker Room is a movie you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Based on the novel by Emma Donoghue, who also wrote the screenplay, the story follows 5-year-old Jack (Jacob Tremblay), who has lived his whole life in one room with his Ma (Brie Larson). You find out this room is actually a prison for Ma, who was abducted and forced to live there for seven years, but for Jack, it’s his whole world and one filled with endless possibilities.
Ma, however, desperately wants to escape and now that Jack is somewhat old enough to understand, she tells him about her plan to get out, for which she needs Jack’s help. Once the plan is in action, Jack is suddenly faced with a more awe-inspiring revelation: There is an even bigger, more amazing world outside of Room.
At the film’s press conference, writer Donoghue, stars Larson, Tremblay and Joan Allen (who plays Grandma) and director Lenny Abrahamson speak about the powerful emotions in making this film and about how the absolute purity of working with young Tremblay made everyone bring their A game.
Step 1: Turning the book into the film
Emma Donoghue: “I relished the opportunity because cinema has different techniques and offers different pleasures. One thing I love, which is different from the book, is when you’re looking at Jacob’s face on screen and you don’t know what’s going through his mind. I love the un-spelled out nature of that. In the book you know exactly what they’re thinking. I love that Ma and Jack is a real two-hander in the film – you get equal access to both of them. In many ways, that’s a huge improvement on the book. There were many moments where I’d change things in the script and Lenny would say let’s get back to the book. I didn’t feel opposition. It felt as if he and I were both trying to translate the magic.”
Step 2: Finding the total commitment to playing Ma
Brie Larson: “Over the course of the seven months I spent prepping and filling my brain that was her, I was really changing the neurology so that all of this stuff was accessible to me. By the time we were set and shooting, I wouldn’t have to think, ‘oh my wrist hurts and I have lack of vitamin D.’ It becomes so ingrained in you that it works as if you are functioning as this other person.”
Step 3: Writing a journal to help reach the character
Larson: “There’s a couple of layers of ‘Ma’; there’s ‘Ma’ as ‘Joy.’ From birth to 17, I ended up writing three journals as her; one from when she was 10, one from when she was 14 and another when she was 16/17 – just to get into that mindset. Then there’s that two years of isolation before Jack comes along; I stayed at home for a month and sat with myself and saw what would come up. There was a lot of time for her to reflect and magnify and to forgive and to create a fantasy. Then when she discovers she’s pregnant and there’s this new thing to fight for that’s outside of herself, I had some amazing conversations with my mom. I’m of the age where a lot of my friends are having children of their own and I’m getting to speak to them about this turn that happens where there’s not time to wallow. Your heart grows three sizes.”
Step 4: Finding herself again after playing Ma
Larson: “You have to find a way to shake it off. There were many things I did like really being open with my friends and family. Making sure that they called me constantly and reminded me of what my name was and sent me care packages. Small things like Palo Santo, a type of wood you can burn, and I burn it in my house all the time. I even would take a piece of paper and draw a line down the center and write ‘Brie’ and ‘Ma’ at the top and list all the things. You can very clearly call back on that… Learning more about the brain helped me a lot. Because then it didn’t seem like I was going down some dark path. It was just my brain being really helpful. ‘Oh, you want to access the pain of being sexually abused, here we’ll put it right there in front!’ And then later, ‘Okay, thank you, let’s move that somewhere else. Let’s move that into another storage facility I don’t have a key to, thanks.’”
Step 5: Playing Jack
Jacob Tremblay: “Wearing an itchy wig.” But he added, “It was not that hard. I played a lot. I play a little kid that was like, ‘Eh. Whatever.’”
Step 6: Working with Jacob
Joan Allen: “He reminded me to stay open and curious and shut my brain off and just do it. Acting sort of childlike in many ways. You’re pretending but sometimes you have the tendency to overthink things that doesn’t look as natural and is stilted. So it was very inspiring to work with Jake, who was very present in the moment. To do exactly what was required at that time, to a beautifully pitch-perfect degree. So I just shut my brain off.”
Larson: “You remember there’s a sense of play and an ease to all of it. Although we are telling a story that has some delicate and dark material, it’s just not something you have to dip that far into. The same way that Jack brings this perspective of innocence and light, so did Jake bring to the set. We couldn’t get too serious because we were also joking around. I remember when we did our reunion scene, and I’m banging on this police door, crying and holding him. Then when we yelled cut, Jake kinda pushed off of me, going, ‘I don’t get it. You saw me 10 minutes ago. I don’t know why you’re so upset.’”
Step 7: Shooting Room in sequential order:
Lenny Abrahamson: “It was a decision we made very early on. It wasn’t practically the easiest thing to do – it would have made a hell of a lot of sense to get the exteriors out of the way before the winter in Toronto. Stuff would happen in the Room section we discovered things about their relationship – tonal shifts would happen – and we would then be able to imagine forward and put that back into the script. All of us, in the end, found it a wonderful way to work.”
Larson: “It became such a vital aspect of it. You could feel everything that was happening in Room, we had a crew of six. It was such a small space that every day we shot in the room, you could feel more and more agitation with the crew – this push to get out of there. By the time it hit to do this escape sequence, it felt like, ‘Brie. Get us out of here. Get us home.’ People would think, ‘It’s going to get so much easier for you.’ No, it wasn’t.”
Abrahamson: “Nor was it for the crew. We all got outside in bad weather. In a funny sort of way we’d all become institutionalized. We didn’t have that cozy certainty of everyday life. We knew where the badness was in Room and we knew where the goodness was. In the outside it was complicated which is more threatening and more challenging.”
Step 8: Understanding the film’s universality:
Larson: “This is taking a story that we had seen in the news, but reminding us of our roots of where we came from. It’s a real universal love story and a story about growing up and the pains that go with it – the beauty of living in a small space as a child. It’s so nice to not see the darkness… but there’s a whole range of experience that’s being missed because of it.”
Room is currently playing in limited theaters. Go see it!