Room writer lets go of her ‘precious’
FILM ADAPTATION: Donoghue’s transition from novelist to screenwriter brought ‘nothing but happiness’
It used to be a maxim in the movie business that the only novelists shown any respect were the dead ones. But these days authors from J.K. Rowling to E.L. James are calling the shots. The latest to have a book filmed on her own terms is Emma Donoghue, whose 2010 novel Room was both a critical success and an international bestseller.
Room is told from the perspective of Jack, a five-year-old boy who lives in a single room with his mother. As the story unfolds, it gradually transpires that Jack and Ma are imprisoned in a shed and Jack’s father is their captor, a man known as “Old Nick,” who had kidnapped Ma off the street seven years previously.
Before Donoghue had even finished the book, her agent was convinced it would interest filmmakers. Seizing the initiative, the novelist barely drew a breath after completing the manuscript before starting work on her own screenplay.
“I didn’t know much about the film world, but I did know that there’s a historic suspicion of the novelist doing her own adaptation,” Donoghue says. “It’s always assumed we’ll be (adopts Gollum voice from Lord of the Rings) clutching our precious and not letting it be altered.
“I had heard that quite often film companies will hire the novelist for the first draft only, just to soothe her ego, and I wasn’t looking for that. So I thought the most obvious way to proceed seemed to be to write the thing.”
It may have been a bold step for a writer with no screenplays to her name, but Donoghue’s confidence has been amply justified: Director Lenny Abrahamson took on her script and Donoghue has since received more than a dozen award nominations, including Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA nods for the screenplay.
The performances of rising star Brie Larson as Ma and angel-faced Vancouver actor Jacob Tremblay as Jack have been praised not only for their ability to show characters living under extremes, but also for capturing the fraught, yet affectionate nature of a normal mother-child relationship: The bargaining and blackmail; the judicious deployment of hugs to head off a tantrum about eating vegetables; the requirement to respond to bizarre questions and endlessly repeated observations. This is a film about being held prisoner by a psychopath, yet everybody will be able to relate to it and fans of Donoghue’s novel will be familiar with the often homespun tone.
Donoghue, 46, was born in Dublin and has lived in Canada for almost 20 years with her partner Christine, a Canadian academic, and their son and daughter.
Donoghue was careful not to rush into accepting offers for the film rights. “I had a lot of nibbles: First dates, not offers of marriage,” she says, “but nibbles usually come from studios and producers and in this case I felt I absolutely had to know who the director was going to be.” Then, out of the blue, she received a letter asking for permission to make the film from Lenny Abrahamson, until now best known for hiding Michael Fassbender under a giant paper head in his 2014 film Frank.
“The first half of the letter was a kind of brilliant book review. He was picking up the Plato references, he got everything. He was the ideal reader. But then also he was hugely confident about how it could work as cinema. And he wasn’t using any of those phrases that make a writer worried like, ‘Let’s take your story and move it to a new level.’ ”
She trusted Abrahamson to junk parts of her script when he thought it necessary; one scene was “gutted” of dialogue, she says. But “when I watched that scene I thought, who needs words? And it takes a lot to make a writer think that.”
Filming took place in Toronto, a two-hour drive from Donoghue’s home in London, Ont., so she was able to visit the set a couple of times every week. “That was just the most fascinating experience. It’s an alien world, it’s like being dropped into the middle of a medieval monastery. You’re trying to figure out all the different jobs and different spaces.”
Donoghue is sad writers, particularly women, rarely gain the influence she has achieved on this film. “It’s not really helpful advice to any woman who wants to give it a go to say, ‘First write a bestselling novel,’ ” she says.
She is proud she was “assertive enough to grab this amazing opportunity when it fell into my lap,” but agrees that chance has played a big role.
“I can’t believe the luck I’ve had with this book from the start. Considering it’s such a dark subject, it’s brought nothing but happiness to me,” she says.