‘Room’ delivers emotional drama, gets Oscar buzz
Actors spent half of the 10-week shoot in a 10-by-15-foot space.
The biggest film of the fall festival season also has the tiniest star. Jacob Tremblay, 9, has watched Room three times since its rapturous world premiere at Telluride last month. Seeing himself on screen, “it makes me feel good,” he chimes, legs dangling off a bench. “It makes me feel like, if you do lots of effort, you get all this stuff and awards and” — he whispers — “more toys.”
Smartly dressed in a collared shirt and sweater, Tremblay has cleaned up since his ponytailed days in Room (opens in New York and Los Angeles Friday, nationwide Nov. 6), playing a 5-year-old boy named Jack who knows nothing of the outside world. He’s spent his whole life locked in a backyard shed with his fiercely protective mother (Brie Larson), who was kidnapped as a teenager, raped repeatedly by her captor (Sean Bridgers) and eventually plots a way to escape.
Based on Emma Donoghue’s best-selling 2010 novel of the same name, the tense thriller won the coveted People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. Past winners include 12 Years a Slave, The King’s Speech and Slumdog Millionaire, all of which have gone on to win best-picture Oscars.
Before Room even published, Donoghue wrote the screenplay so no one “could tell me what to do,” she says. “I (was) happy for there to be no film rather than a soppy one or a creepy one, so I said a lot of ‘No’s.” The Irish-Canadian author and mother of two eventually said yes after receiving an impassioned 10-page letter from filmmaker Lenny Abrahamson ( Frank), himself a parent, who embraced the challenge of telling an often dark but ultimately uplifting story from a child’s perspective.
Tremblay, whose only major credit before Room was voicing a character in The Smurfs 2, was found in a casting search of hundreds. Larson, meanwhile, has been a star on the rise, building her résumé with roles in 2010’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and 2012’s 21 Jump Street and earning critical acclaim for 2013’s
Short Term 12, playing a counselor at a foster-care facility for troubled teens.
“She has this incredible ease in front of the camera,” says Abrahamson, who first saw her in Short Term 12. “It’s like she has this presence, but she’s not self-conscious about it, she’s not parading it. There’s a truthfulness and believability to everything she does.”
Larson, whom pundits have identified as the best-actress front-runner on awards site GoldDerby.com, went Method to prepare for the role of Ma. She adopted a carb-free diet and talked to a trauma specialist, and she cloistered herself at home for a month before shooting, avoiding nearly all communication with friends and family.
“Through that silence, I was able to remember a lot of memories from my childhood that I had only seen through my child eyes,” says Larson, 26. In particular, she reflected on her experience growing up in a one-room Los Angeles apartment with her younger sister and mother, who was going through a divorce but put on a brave face for her kids.
“You’re always trying to find the way that you can reach whatever this character is,” Larson says. “I didn’t know what my mom’s experience was like during that period of time at all. But I found that the movie would be a chance to explore that thematically and see what came up.”
Larson and Tremblay spent half of the 10-week shoot in a 10-by-15-foot space with director Lenny Abrahamson and a crew. Playing games and making toys to use as props, the actors had an instant connection that carried them through the heavier, more emotional moments.
In one scene, “Brie had gone to the very limit: bawling, crying, falling over,” Abrahamson recalls. “As soon as I called ‘Cut,’ Jake was there like, ‘ Hey, why are you still crying? We’re not filming anymore. What’s your favorite Star Wars character? Who would win in a fight: a saber-toothed tiger or a mammoth?’ And that made her laugh.
“In a way that Jack helps Ma survive, Jake really helped Brie through this process.”
Emotions are on display in the tough drama, drawing buzz in the early Oscars race