I remember hearing about ‘Room’ when it was shortlisted for the Booker in 2010. I remember how the reviews were full of surprise at the innovation of the story and at the unusual choice of narrator. When you read ‘Room’, its cinematic quality strikes you very early on. It is not surprising at all that Emma Donoghue wrote the screenplay for ‘Room’ before writing the book. Her story was inspired by the Austrian man who kidnapped and held his own daughter hostage for decades, and forced her to have and raise seven children. ‘Room’ tells the story of Ma and Jack, who are similarly trapped in a room for seven years, by their kidnapper Old Nick, in small town America. Donoghue has had an illustrious career. Her first novel “Stir Fry” was published in 1994 and she has written 7 more novels, short story collections, radio and stage plays, since then. This year ‘Room’ was released to positive reviews at film festivals around the world and saw its regular release in theatres on the 30th of October. As we were lucky enough to have her in town for the Vancouver International Film Festival, where the film was screened, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to talk to the literary legend. Emma told us all the juicy secrets about writing and screenplays.
Do you remember how ‘Room’ came to you? Do you remember what you were doing at the time?
Oddly enough I do! I was driving. I’m a really bad driver. I learned late so I’m a fearful driver. I was in the car and just a couple of days earlier I had heard about the Fritzl kidnapping case in Austria. I usually don’t pay much attention to the headlines but I think because my kids were four and a half, and one, something just lodged in my mind about how you would mother in a locked room. As I was driving along I suddenly thought what an interesting perspective a 5 year-old boy like that would have on the world. I thought all in one go that it should be called ‘Room’ and that the escape should happen exactly in the middle. It should start on his birthday and it should end when they go back to the room and say goodbye to it. Ideas usually come a lot more slowly to me and more uncertainly than that. I couldn’t stop to write any of this down because I was on the highway! So I got where I was eventually going and wrote it all down on a napkin. I was enormously lucky to hit on an idea that was so strong. One of my favourite things about the idea is that it is capable of a lot of different interpretations. Some people write their PhDs on psychoanalytic readings of ‘Room’ while others buy it at Costco and read it as a crime story. It is capable of many different readings. It has been so enjoyable for me to get fan letters from all these different people who find their own story in it.
Do you think that it is a sign you have something good when it just comes to you?
I think so. ‘Room’ was distressing to research but it was very painless to write. Turning it into a film has been such a pleasurable procedure, as well. Adaptations are all about how we, all together as a creative group, can translate what worked in the book into what works on the screen. Book and film are just two different forms, two different languages. We all saw the adaptation in very positive terms, more as a translation rather than the getting rid of or cutting out of things.
What was the creative process like?
I wrote the script before the book came out. I wanted to write the screenplay before anybody would come along and tell me that a more experienced screenwriter should do it. I know that is not how the film world works. You are meant to wait till someone pays you to write the script. I just wanted to see if I could do it, you know. I talked to a few different filmmakers and ended up going with this small Irish company. Lenny Abrahamson, the director there, wrote me a ten-page letter. It was just so smart and so eloquent. I thought, “Oh yeah this guy is going to make a great film.” He was perfectly happy to work with my script too. Of course the script went through lots of changes. It is eternally evolving. Even during the production process, the script changes everyday. Actors improvise and things change. Scenes get cut and moved around. I am more relaxed about that now. I realise that the script is only ever a blueprint. But I am so happy with the results. Everybody, from the designers to the cameramen to the actors, took on the idea of making a journey from a small world into a much bigger world.
What made you hand over your script to this particular team?
It was mostly the letter from the director. I liked Lenny’s previous films very much. They showed that he is not afraid of dark material. His first film “Adam and Paul” is about two heroin junkies. The film finds a huge amount of humour and warmth between the two main characters, even though it really is a bleak art film. In the letter Lenny picked up on my references to things like Plato’s cave. He got that the story of growing up in a locked room was an allegory for everybody’s childhood. Lenny is actually more of an intellectual than I am. It didn’t bother him that the whole film is not shaped the way conventional films are. The escape happens right in the middle, which is a really weird structure.
You and Lenny Abrahamson shared the same vision and had a lot in common as well. Such as your backgrounds, for example.
Yes! I wasn’t looking for someone from Ireland. I am settled in Canada now and the story is set in America. I have to say though, the fact that we are both from Ireland meant it was particularly easy to work together. The Irish mock each other all the time. That is how we feel with each other. It was a very easy fit. Of course, Lenny is so experienced in film that I felt relaxed about my complete ignorance in the world of film. Sometimes when I would write a scene according to screenplay writing books, like coming into a scene early and getting out late with very snappy dialogue, he would catch it and say, “That’s too TV!” He encouraged me to slightly bend those rules. He would also quite often say, “Let’s go back to the book.” It wasn’t me clutching the book up against he film industry. It was both of us constantly looking at what worked in the book, and for so many readers, to replicate the same magic on screen with a totally different set of tools.
There must have been aspects of the story that you could not explore in the book but were able to explore in the screenplay.
Absolutely. It’s funny, that question is often asked the other way round like, “What did you have to leave out?” It’s more that film can fill in. Film can give visual information so quickly. In the book I make a game out of the reader not knowing yet what is going on and make them guess a lot. For example, Jack refers to Ma taking pills from a “numbered pack”. Many readers would go, “Oh she’s on contraceptives”. I drop lots of little clues like that in the book and the reader spends almost 30 pages putting together their sense of the situation. In film however, the camera turns and here we are! We see that we are in a locked room immediately. You move on with the story much more quickly. Film is more economical that way. It has the beautiful ability to show you what somebody is looking at. You can see something through Jack’s eyes and the next minute you see Jack. There is that lovely double perspective. Film can also be wonderfully naturalistic and objective. You can see how grubby the room is, how worn away it is, how long Ma and Jack have been there, how stained the floor is- all the things that Jack did not see in the book. Most importantly, what the film adds is that you get to meet Ma directly. It was a bit tantalising for some readers to only get information about Ma through Jack. I never questioned sticking to that scheme in the book. I think the strength of the book is that it is a single-pointed book. But sometimes readers might have been like, “Why is Ma doing that? What’s going on?” The film is much more of a two-hander.
Films of course can’t cover as much as books in terms of digressions. The book can offer so many different comments. In the second half of the book, Jack goes on so many little trips, whether to the sea or the grocery store or the mall. He can do a lot of social commentary. There is time for all of those little thoughts in the book. Whereas in the film we stay much more focused on family.
Film also allows you to meet people in all their physicality. I could literally see Ma wincing as her wrists hurt. The film gives her a physical life and she is not just a voice talking. Same with Jack. Fewer of his thoughts are spelled out in the film but you see more of his physical life. Kids have a physical vocabulary of their own. They are expressive and yet odd. They scrunch up their feet. Their noses make little rabbity gestures! So it’s lovely to see Jack getting a body.
What is really appreciated about the book is the voice of a 5 year-old. There is poetry in all the words that he invents.
Yeah and the way he names objects in the room.
Were you able to preserve that?
I mean there is a lot less of Jack’s dialogue in the film than there is in the book. Between the dialogue and Jack’s occasional voiceover passages, I think you get just enough of his language for it to work. Jack’s perspective is very different from an adult’s. He is under the bed or in the bath. It is a different little world for him but he doesn’t see it as small. I love that when they hang up a washing line in the room to dry, the line looks like it goes on forever. There is no sense of smallness about the filming of the first half of the film.
You really get to take your story and explore all angles of it by employing different mediums to it.
I hadn’t done a feature film before but I had worked a lot with radio plays and stage plays. I have certainly translated a story into a play and vice versa. I really enjoy those moments of adaptation. It is fascinating to see how the story changes in a different format. Different formats bring out different aspects of the story. I once made the mistake of taking a very grim short story and reading it aloud at a public reading. It became twice as grim because everything is more vivid when you read it out loud. When you perform something in public it becomes more visceral and more upsetting, but also funnier! All the funny bits become funnier. That is something I really enjoy about film.
‘Room’ actually has quite a grim premise.
The back-story is grim. I wouldn’t say the story is. The kidnapping and the seven years of rapes make the back-story. We have always told it as Jack’s story. His innocence is quite protective of the reader of the book and of the viewer of the film. I chose to tell the story at the point where Jack is five years old, and Ma has been in the room for seven years. It was my way of taking a story of rape and captivity, and turning it into a story of survival. Just like Ma does to Old Nick, we keep the psychopath at a distance. We say we don’t give a damn about his childhood. We don’t give a damn about how he ended up this way. We don’t show that first initial capture and the first rape. We show it as the tedious grim business that it has become. When you see Old Nick through the slats of the wardrobe, you see him drop his trousers and his hairy knees, and it is just the least sexy sex scene on film.
I wanted to tell this crime story in an unconventional way. Our culture is so obsessed with the story of the lone rapist, the murderer, the psychopath. There is always sentimentality attached to these criminals. There is always an innocent virginal girl involved whereas there is nothing innocent about Ma when we meet her. She is a survivor of seven years of brutalisation and yet she has this glow, this radiance. She gets all her power from all the fun and sheer magic of nurturing her son.
Is that the Irish optimism?
Somebody once described ‘Room’ to me as a very Irish book because it about a mother and her child talking in the dark! We might be a little bit obsessed with the mother-child bond.
Can you tell us about the cast of the film?
The casting was such a pleasurable task. I watched every film featuring a woman between twenty and thirty. It was so enjoyable. We always knew that the actors were out there for Ma and Grandma and so on, but the great unknown was the child. We were planning this film for years. Lenny and the producers kept saying, “Oh we’ll find a great child but we have to wait until just before filming, otherwise he’ll grow up and he’ll get big teeth!” As we approached the production date I was becoming nervous because the film would be wrecked if you had a child who was even a bit stiff. Finding Jacob Tremblay was a big relief. Until I saw his audition tapes I couldn’t be sure that there was a kid out there who could play Jack. It is a really demanding role. One thing that really helped is that we filmed it all, more or less, in order. It really helped Jake understand who he was meant to be, and what he was meant to be feeling or doing, even in terms of physical confidence. It helped him figure out when he should be timid and tentative in the new world, and when he should be all relaxed while playing soccer.
Is it quite eerie to see Jacob in the flesh?
Yes. Jake performs Jack so naturally. He performed the part when he was eight. He was all the time remembering what it is like being five. There was a lovely moment when he was improvising with Brie, and he said as Jack, something like “Five and five is twelve”. As soon as the cameras were off he said to Brie, “I know that five and five are ten”. He was very intelligently playing younger but not in a cutesy way. No baby voice or anything. It was pretty arduous work and it was not all acting. A lot of it was “Lie still while we adjust your wig”. He had to have his wig put on for about an hour each morning. There was an awful lot of “Move your foot to the left” and “let’s try that again with different lighting”. They had cameramen hidden under the floor of the room. There was a lot of technical fiddling around and yet Jake just seemed unbothered by any of it. He saw it as a very fun kind of task. He’s a natural. We were so lucky to find him.
Did you use inspiration from your personal favourite movies when coming up with the look and feel of the film?
One movie that I found helpful was “Life is Beautiful”, which is all about a man lying to his child about them being in a concentration camp, in order to protect him. That film was a very good example of having a very painful backdrop for a deeply loving and safe, parent-child bond. It was good for learning how to get the balance between light and dark right. I also looked at films featuring small children. “Beast of the Southern Wild” was a very good one. I liked the young girl’s voiceovers there. I liked that they weren’t just commenting on what was happening but also had that slightly spacey, daydreamy stream of consciousness quality to them. That is what it sounds like when a child is telling you some long rambling story and you are not even sure if it is something real or imagined. We really tried to use voiceover in that way. We did not want to milk each scene for emotion. We wanted an unsentimental kind of voiceover. We wanted to add a child’s thoughts to the execution that don’t necessarily go with what is happening in the moment.
How did you react when you first saw the film?
I wept like a baby. Even now I can’t keep any distance on it. I have seen it in cinemas about six times. Now I’m going to try and look out for the framing of each shot and details like that. I showed it to my kids the other day. They are eight and eleven. I showed it to them over video and we sped over the scary bits. I told them what was going to happen in each scene. My son was constantly noticing prison bar effects in the scenes of the second half- prison bars in banisters or trees. There are an awful lot of those clever visual elements in the film and my son was spotting them all! I hadn’t even noticed. Each time I get so caught up in the story I’m like, “Will they escape?!” It’s ridiculous! I know they escape (laughs). The film grabs you so much that it involves your heart every time.
You have had a long career as a writer. What is the secret to your longevity? How do you stay inspired?
You know that line they use in all creative writing classes about writing what you know? I would have run out of stuff that I knew decades ago. I have not had a particularly interesting or varied life. I have had no real jobs, you know. So I think writing what I don’t know has been the secret to my success. I mean we don’t know much! All we know is high school, university, maybe a job in the arts, and then we run out of material. So I’m just like, “Okay I’ll write as an 18th century prostitute today!” and it’s all fine.
‘Room’ opened at your favourite theatre on October 30th so make sure you catch a show!
-Prachi Kamble