In the new film, “Room,” Brie Larson plays a young woman held captive in a small room with her five-year-old son — a son fathered by her captor, known as Old Nick, against her will.
Based on the novel by Emma Donoghue, "Room" is a powerful story about survival and the love between a mother and a child. But in the wrong hands, the film adaptation could have easily been too grim or too sentimental.
Irish filmmaker Lenny Abrahamson didn’t want that to happen. He felt so strongly about the story that he wrote a 10-page letter to Donoghue to convince her that he was the best choice to direct the film. Donoghue penned the screenplay, despite never having written a script before.
When Abrahamson joined us on The Frame, we asked him about the process of collaborating with Donoghue, the conversations he had with Larson about parenthood, and the moving relationship between Larson and Jacob Tremblay, who portrays the her son in "Room."
Interview Highlights:
What was it like to collaborate with writer Emma Donoghue?
It wasn't like Emma was fighting for the novel and I was fighting for the film — she wasn't trying to hold on to stuff, and I wasn't trying to dump things against her wishes. But she'd never written a screenplay before, and in a way she wasn't allowing herself to do things she felt were rule-breaking.
As she says herself, she thought that one thing about film is that you come into a scene late and you go out early. I told her, "That's for a very particular sort of film, and it doesn't have to be this one." So I encouraged her to write scenes long, to allow me to find the moments and not specify in the writing exactly where the dramatic beat is. Sometimes I was the one encouraging her to hang on to more of the material from the original.
If people were to visit the set of this film, they'd see that it's intimate in terms of the set, in terms of what you're shooting, but I suspect there was also a special intimacy between Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay. If people saw the set and visited when the cameras were off, what would they see between those two actors?
They would see just an incredible degree of comfort and, mostly, fun — laughing, playing, Jake teasing Brie. And Brie just loved Jake. It's the thing you can't manufacture. To facilitate it, we just got them together quite early and we got the set finished quite early so that they could spend some time there together.
I think Brie's unique in that she's got huge dramatic depth, but also a lightness and warmth about her, and the two don't always go together. That warmth was important for me because we knew that she was going to have to bond with a little boy.
As a parent yourself, what conversations can you have with Brie about what it means to be a parent, how that changes your view of the world, and what you see in your child that you can't really understand until you've become a parent?
That's the most interesting territory of all, in terms of the discussions we had. Like all really great actors, she has a capacity to think herself into previously unexperienced situations and characters. She hasn't been a mother, but she's been a child, so she can circle the space of parenthood without ever having fully occupied it.
What I did give her permission about was the degree to which she could be angry with her child. Every parent experiences that kind of absolute fury, and nobody other than your child can bring you to that point, no matter how good a person you are. When you see it in the supermarket and you haven't had kids, you think, How can that woman treat that child like that?
And as Louis CK says, "After you've had kids, you think, What has that sh**ty child done to that poor woman?" So for the character of Ma, you've got to feel how frustrating and tough and claustrophobic it would be in that room, and those were the things that myself and Emma helped Brie get to.