The new movie about a mother and son held captive is an intense, moving must-see. Emma Donoghue, who wrote the novel and adapted it into a screenplay, talked to BuzzFeed News. MAJOR SPOILERS ahead!
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During Room's running time — just under two hours — you will gasp, shudder, grip your seat, cry hard, and, yes: you will laugh. Lenny Abrahamson's film, adapted from Emma Donoghue's 2010 novel and then her screenplay, is an affecting, active moviegoing experience. Don't be scared, though. It is worth it.
Brie Larson plays a young woman who has been held captive in a shed for seven years, and Room begins on her son Jack's fifth birthday. Jack (Jacob Tremblay) was born into this minuscule world, and not only has he never been outside, he doesn't know there is an outside. His mother, whom he calls Ma, has protected him from the knowledge that they are prisoners and that there is an entire world beyond the confines of their shed. They exercise, they read, they watch a small amount of television, and Ma shields Jack from their captor's nightly visits. They communicate in a language without articles, since there's only one of everything: rug, wardrobe, room. That's the premise of Room — but then everything changes.
Room is now in limited release. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in early September, and then screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, and has been drawing raves and Oscar buzz since — for Larson, Tremblay, the screenplay, and the movie itself. For Donoghue, an Irish-Canadian novelist, her own role in Room's publicity campaign has come as a surprise. "I always thought the writer was the least important element of the film," she said with a laugh recently over lunch in Beverly Hills.
Donoghue adapted her own work, but those who have read the book and see the film will notice she was not precious about making changes. Things are added and subtracted; characters change, as do settings. It's a stripped-down self-edit that will please book loyalists, but also immediately grip people who know nothing about Room's plot and its twists.
Donoghue talked to BuzzFeed News about her close involvement with making the film, working with Abrahamson, the cast, and how her own life did (and did not) help create the novel and movie. There are many, many spoilers below, about both large and microscopic plot points. So stop reading now and go see Room if you don't want to be spoiled!
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"I know it might seem cocky," she said. "But I didn't want to feel I was going to try to bully a company into hiring me as the screenwriter just because I owned the novel."
Donoghue had written novels, short stories, and plays before, but until Room, she said, "I never felt I had quite such a filmable story." She decided to adapt it herself on spec, thinking that, yes, there would be interest in making Room into a film. "If they like it, we can work together," she remembered thinking. "If they tell me it's rubbish and I believe them, I may say, 'OK, let somebody else do it.' I was just trying to be cards-on-the-table about it."
Though Room's story was inherently dramatic, if not cinematic, its structure posed some challenges. The novel is told entirely from Jack's 5-year-old perspective, which would not be the case in a film. Though Abrahamson's direction often allowed the audience to share Jack's gaze, Donoghue embraced the difference in medium as she wrote the screenplay.
"Cinema doesn't spell everything out," she said. "It gives visual information quickly, say, about the room. But often you're looking at Jack's face and you don't quite know what he's feeling in that moment — where in the book, you know exactly what he's feeling. In the film, often these big beautiful faces of the actors, they're kind of a blank screen, and we project ourselves onto them."
Plot-wise, Room's story cleaves into two halves: the story of Jack and Ma's imprisonment in room, and then the aftermath of their escape. "The first half was way easier to write — we did far less worrying over the script," Donoghue said. "The first half has a real momentum: Will they get out?"
The screenplay was a living document throughout the whole process, even in editing. "There was no final moment with the script," Donoghue said. "All the way through, they'd improvise some bits, or Lenny would email me and say, 'You know what, we need a bit of dialogue, can you make it up to me for Tuesday?' Even in postproduction, he'd write to me and say, 'Oh, I'm missing something, write with me.' There was a wonderful fluidity to that."
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