Interview (Written): Emma Donoghue (“Room”)

A Creative Screenwriting interview with Emma Donoghue, nominated for a 2016 Academy Award for Best Adapted screenplay for Room:

What was your point of entry into the adaptation?

The very first thing I did was look for what had to go or be changed, and funnily enough, we ended up putting a few of these things back in afterwards. For instance, in the book, the boy has long hair, and you don’t really notice it, but on screen, I thought this little boy’s huge head of long hair would be distractingly androgynous, so I better give him short hair. But then the director Lenny Abramson was like, “Let’s go back to the long hair,” and since Lenny was such a veteran of film, he was confident about the film’s ability to include unusual elements, without alienating its audience.

How methodically did you consult your book as the blueprint for the screenplay?

I wasn’t totally attached to any one scene. It was all about figuring out how to tell the story in a way that suits cinema. For instance, in the first thirty pages of the book, the reader is involved in a kind of guessing game of figuring out exactly what’s going on, based on Jack’s childish prattle. He’ll make some little reference to Ma taking her pill, and the reader is thinking that Ma’s on “The Pill”, and wondering who she’s having sex with, so the reader is filling in all of those little gaps. But in a film, obviously the camera shows you that world, so I knew the story would have to move much faster. But the major components are roughly the same shape and proportion as they were in the book, so as adaptations go, this was a pretty faithful one.

For the rest of the interview, go here.

You may download the script for Room here.