‘Room’: 12 Captivating Facts About The ‘Best Picture’ Oscar Contender
Room is a poignant and emotional movie based on the book of the same name written by Emma Donoghue. A fictional story, it is nonetheless powerful, telling of how a mother and her son, Jack, are held captive in a single room and how Jack discovers the outside world.
The following are some captivating facts about the movie Room that will surprise most fans of the movie.
1. Useless Daily reports that Shailene Woodley was a semi-final contender for the role of Ma in Room, which ultimately went to Brie Larson.
2. In order to get better acquainted with what her character was going through, Larson went into complete isolation for a month and followed a very restrictive diet.
3. Brie Larson also avoided washing her face while filming Room to make her face look genuinely makeup-free.
4. When filming Room, the production designer, Ethan Tobman, wanted to have it snowing in the final scene. However, because fake snow would have put them over budget, the opted to scrap the idea of snow. Miraculously, on the last day of filming, it snowed!
5. Jacob Tremblay, who played Jack in Room, could not bring himself to scream at Larson during the birthday cake scene. To help him out, the whole cast and crew started to scream and jump up and down to help encourage him to do it. He eventually managed it on his own.
6. In Ma’s bedroom in her childhood home, there is a poster of the band Phantom Planet that is out of focus. Larson is in a relationship with the lead singer of Phantom Planet, Alexander Greenwald.
7. Vulture reported last year that Emma Donoghue said she was able to write the part of Jack in Room thanks to her own five-year-old son, Finn.
“I paid attention to his Legos and his Pokemon in ways I never would have.”
Donoghue actually went through Finn’s books to see how many phrases of his she had used and nearly every page had highlights.
“Writers like to say, ‘Every baby costs you a book.’ But it’s the best thing I could have done for my books, oddly enough.”
8. Tremblay has said there are similarities and differences between himself and his character, Jack.
“Well, you know, I’m pale, and he was born in a room so he’s really pale, and also, he has lots of imagination, the same as me. But I didn’t have long hair, and I don’t like Dora the Explorer.”
Watch Jacob Tremblay charm the pants off Ellen DeGeneres https://t.co/JISMCpY9lZ pic.twitter.com/3we0Yre6ph
— Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost) February 3, 2016
9. Whenever Brie Larson couldn’t stop crying after they finished filming a scene for Room, Tremblay would sing her Jackson 5 fiw and tell her she could stop.
“The camera’s off. Stop crying!”
brie larson with jacob tremblay appreciation tweet pic.twitter.com/eoiv8mhPPW
— duda (@xmenorigens) January 31, 2016
10. Business Insider reports that Emma Donoghue wrote the screenplay for Room before the book was published.
“I didn’t want to have some company come along and say ‘Let us take it off your hands and have some experienced writer take it. I decided that, privately, I’d do a draft of it myself before anyone could tell me what to do.”
11. Donoghue knew immediately that Lenny Abrahamson was the right director to handle the adaptation of Room.
“He immediately got my references to Plato in the book. He understood this was both a realistic story about people being kidnapped and a metaphor for the moment when you move from childhood into adulthood. And he didn’t call it The Room.”
12. In her first draft of Room’s screenplay Donoghue took away Jack’s long hair, but Abrahamson convinced her to include it.
“One thing I changed immediately for my first draft of the script was Jack’s long hair. But Lenny said, ‘No, go back to the long hair.’ He was just unafraid of the unconventional aspects of the screenplay.”
[Photo by Kevin Winter / Getty Images]
