Director of Room relished being boxed in
In Room, a bracing story of a mother and son held captive for years, director Lenny Abrahamson created a set ‘where whole walls could be removed’ in order to shoot from within, recreating the most confined of spaces
Things were a tad squished in the Toronto hotel room where Irish director Lenny Abrahamson and then-8-year-old Vancouver actor Jacob Tremblay (now 9) held court. Piled onto and around a couch opposite them were a halfdozen media hacks, yours truly included.
Such is life when your movie is one of the most-buzzed-about releases at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Abrahamson’s fifth feature, Room, went on to win the audience award last month. Hello, Oscar talk.
The physical parallels between the interview and the movie were hard to ignore — the first half of Room takes place inside the cramped quarters of a shack that was “not much bigger than this,” Abrahamson explained.
Based on the bestselling 2010 novel by Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue, it tells the bracing story of Ma (Brie Larson) and her young son Jack (Tremblay), held captive for years by a man who kidnapped Ma as a teen.
Abrahamson walks a fine line, preserving elements of the innocence of childhood while confronting the grim reality of the situation in which his protagonists find themselves. It was a balancing act embraced by the director of such skewed films as Adam & Paul (2004, about a pair of heroin addicts in need of a fix) and last year’s fame-satirizing Frank (starring Michael Fassbender as a rock star in a papiermâché mask).
He landed the gig by penning a long letter to Donoghue (who had many offers, and adapted the screenplay herself ) explaining that he wanted to tone down the tale’s central hook: it was narrated from the wide-eyed perspective of the child.
“Because (Donoghue is) IrishCanadian, I knew she wouldn’t need flattery,” Abrahamson said. “Irish people don’t do that to each other — it’s bad practice. So it was a really direct letter. I said, ‘People will suggest you do the following, and I think that’s wrong.
“’My view is that any attempt to directly translate that firstperson, boy’s point of view is a mistake. You would end up with a very stylized film that would be magical and all that stuff, but in the wrong way. The key is that you believe that situation and feel the emotional catharsis of the film is earned and based on something true.’”
Abrahamson went to great lengths to make the Toronto-shot film feel authentic, constructing an elaborate set no bigger than the fictional box in which the first half of the action takes place. He worked closely with Montrealborn, L.A.-based production designer Ethan Tobman and British cinematographer Danny Cohen (The King’s Speech, Les Misérables) to imbue Room’s absorbing atmosphere with an immersive realism.
“I’ve certainly never talked as much about such a small space — every detail of it,” Abrahamson said. “Artistically, we were trying to think about how the patterns of wear and tear would work. We had a sun path. We knew the direction the shed was facing and how the sun would move every day; the path of the sunlight on the wall — those tiles were more faded than elsewhere; where (Jack’s) shoulders would rub during play; the levels at which he made marks; and the sorts of marks he would have made at different levels as he grew up. All that stuff had to be planned.”
Shooting in such contained surroundings led to no shortage of technical challenges. While most filmmakers manipulate time and space as a matter of course, the director stuck to the constraints of Room’s premise. That’s not to say he simply plunked a camera down and let it roll. He simply adapted the space to suit his purposes, creating a Transformersstyle set that could adjust to his every whim.
“The set was built in a modular way. Every section of four tiles could be removed,” he said. “Whole walls could be removed, parts of walls could be removed, parts of ceilings could be removed, the floor could be taken out. If we needed to get really low, we could get the camera at floor level. But the rule was always, ‘Never put the lens where it couldn’t physically be.’ We didn’t cheat. We were always filming from inside (the space).”
They were also always filming in sequence — a luxury most filmmakers can’t afford. The industry norm is to shoot scenes willy-nilly, prioritizing financial concerns and scheduling considerations and working it all out in the edit. Abrahamson shot the story as it was written in order to further plunge his actors into what their characters were experiencing.
Ma and Jack’s perspective shifts dramatically halfway through the film as they escape their captor, only to be faced with a whole new set of problems in the outside world. For Abrahamson, the progression offered an opportunity to tell a story that resonates on a broader level.
“At the point when I read the novel, I had a little boy of three and-a-half, and a tiny baby,” he said. “It spoke to me of all the tensions and challenges of parenthood, and of childhood and what it is to grow up — deep things that resonated within me.
“The challenge of the novel is to translate something so specific into something that really works. It got my blood flowing ... It was never a calculation for me. It was a visceral thing. I really loved the book, I could see it and I wanted to make it.”