A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
How is a movie that seems so scary, dark and depressing bringing audiences to their feet with riotous applause? It's a question that forms much of The Frame's conversation with Brie Larson, the lead actress in "Room."
Based on the best-selling novel by Emma Donoghue (who also wrote the screenplay), "Room" is about a mother and child held captive in a shed. It's a 10 foot-by-10 foot room with one skylight. The mother, simply called "Ma," had been kidnapped seven years earlier as a teenager. She gave birth to a son in captivity. Ma is determined to preserve his innocence by not revealing the actual circumstances of their life.
When the movie premiered at the Telluride Film Festival it quickly became the movie that everyone was talking about. Then when it played at The Toronto International Film Festival, it won the coveted Grolsch People’s Choice Award. And Larson's performance is generating a lot of Oscar talk.
(Note: While we don't get into any particular plot points of the film in this conversation, there are "light" spoilers.)
Larson's other screen credits include the indie film "Short Term 12" and the Showtime series "United States of Tara." When she met with The Frame's John Horn, Larson spoke about one key way she tried to get into the "mindset" of Ma: she didn't leave her home for an entire month.
I knew this story and this script meant something very deep to me but I didn't know what it was exactly.
But when Larson was in this forced retreat at home, she found herself reflecting on a point in her childhood when she and her sister and mother had moved to L.A. from Sacramento.
We lived in a studio apartment that was a room that was not that much bigger than [the one in] "Room," with a bed that came out from the wall. And I had, like, two pairs of jeans and a couple of shirts. My sister and my mom [had] the same thing. And my mom did not have the money to even get us a Happy Meal. It was such a sparse period of time where we had not a dime to spare. But for me, when I look back on it, it's one of the greatest times of my life. Because my mother has an incredible imagination ... everything was a game and everything was bigger and went outside of that space.
Reflecting on this time also brought up one memory that resonated deeply given the role Larson was about to play.
I had remembered a part of it that I had forgotten, which was waking up in the middle of the night — because all three of us would sleep in the same bed — to my mom covering her mouth trying to be quiet, but just choking sobs — these deep, deep, deep sobs. It wasn't until many, many years later that I realized that my dad had asked for a divorce and we had moved down and my mom had no means of supporting herself, didn't know what we were going to do.
Larson said that finding those memories while making "Room" went directly to her efforts to "slowly grasp that mother's love that is so unique and intense and beautiful and complicated."
John Horn: This movie clearly means a tremendous amount to you as a person. It means a tremendous amount to you as an actor. Are you able to set those things aside and have any perspective on what it means to you in terms of your career?
No. I think the movie means a tremendous amount to me personally. And that's how far it goes. And then it can go out a little bit further when I'm at a screening and I see how much it can mean to people. 'Cause I believe so much in film as a medium of transformation — a medium as initiation. It can be this chance for you to watch someone struggle and win. And connect us and remind us of who we are, where we came from and how similar we are. You know, "Room" is not a story that you think ... that we can all relate to. But you will see every shape, size and color crying together over this as humans.