Brie Larson

Two weeks ago, I, along with a few other members of the Washington, D.C.-area press, had the chance to sit down with Brie Larson and discuss her new film, Room. In the film, Larson plays a young woman named Ma who is kidnapped by a rapist at age 17. Her captor, Old Nick, fathers her son, Jack, during her seven years of captivity in Old Nick’s 8-by-8 backyard shed. The film is an ultimate testament to what a mother is willing to do to keep her child safe, as well as the bitter double-sided reality of life after sexual assault.

Larson welcomed us into the tiny, quaint living space of her room at the Capella Hotel with a big smile and a bit of shock in her eyes. There were, after all, enough of us to hold a small press conference. Larson is a busy woman these days, which for us meant we only got about 20 minutes at a roundtable interview with her. Here’s what I managed to ask.

DBK: Is there any final succinct message you’re hoping to deliver with the character of Ma?

BL: I didn’t know exactly what the message was as we were shooting it. Throughout the whole process, Lenny [Abrahamson] and I were rediscovering what that was. I’m hoping that it shows a side of women and motherhood that’s complex and interesting. I think that motherhood is one of the most complicated roles that we take on in society. It’s a huge responsibility to try and explain to a kid what the world is. This is an amazing chance to see that in a very condensed way.

On preparing for the film:

BL: I went on a restrictive diet of basically no carbs, no sugar for about six months. No toast or sweet potatoes, which was extremely painful in the dead of winter in Toronto, because that’s all your body wants. And I stayed at home for a month, [as] part of my research on where the brain would be at after seven years in this confined space. It’s a lot different than if we were starting this film like a week in [captivation].

I remembered that I had friends that had gone onto these silent retreats, where you can go for 10 days and you’re not allowed to speak with anybody; you’re not allowed to look at anybody … and you basically are in stillness with yourself and you see what comes up. She had seven years of that, so I decided to try and see what would happen for a month, which wasn’t very hard for me, but I think I just like being at home.

I remembered this memory from my childhood of being seven, eight years old. My sister was about three or four. And my mom had packed up our old Mercedes. We each had a couple pairs of jeans, a couple shirts, a pair of shoes each. We were really broke at that time so we lived in a room that was not much bigger than Room. The bed came out of the wall, [and] we ate Top Ramen and those two-for-99-cents Jack In The Box tacos. And I didn’t have any toys, but I remembered it being one of the greatest times of my life, because my mom has an incredible imagination and turned that space into something that was bigger than those four walls.

There was one memory in particular that I had completely forgotten, where we were all sleeping in the same bed together, and I woke to see my mom in these choking sobs. She was covering her mouth with her hand so we wouldn’t hear, and I remember just thinking, ‘This sounds like when my toys are taken away from me.’ I didn’t know anymore than that.

Now, being 24, I realized that what had happened was my dad had asked for a divorce, and my mom had packed up the car, driven us from Sacramento to Los Angeles, having $4,000 to her name, not knowing anybody there, and she was figuring out what her identity was. She was trying to find her place and survive now. But I never knew that as a kid. I only saw that there was this imagination around me, and I think it was my mom’s way of coping as well. When me and my sister were having fun and laughing and being entertained by this alternate reality, that was a world that she could also go into and didn’t have to fully stay in her adult world of pain.

On preparing for this film versus a large scale film:

BL: I think the setting is part of what creates or inspires the final product, so there’s something to the intimacy of a small set, of a small crew, which can create one type of movie. And then the bigness of being in a bigger movie creates a different kind of setting and a whole different process.

It’s like working with different directors. Every director has their own way of getting into it. There’s no other aspect of your life that you can say, ‘I only do this. I only camp in a tent.’ Because sometimes you want to stay at the Four Seasons. It depends on where you’re at and what you’re feeling and what you mentally need. There are some times that I want to be the passenger in the car and other times that I want to drive.

When it comes to the process, though, of preparation, I feel like the care has to be the same with everyone. Because, yes, the bigger movies seem to have not as much emotional depth sometimes, but I think with the right time and care and with the right people involved, you get something like Trainwreck, which has the best of both worlds. And it would be a huge disservice to these larger movies where presently more people are seeing them, to not put the same amount of care into those.

On keeping journals for her character:

BL: I was cracking myself up making those journals. It was so much fun. I went to a bunch of stores, like 99-cent stores, any stationary store I could get my hands on and found … leopard-print scotch tape, all the tacky pop magazines, glitter stickers, all of it. And I picked out one [journal] for when she was about 10, then when she was about 13, 14, and then one for 16, 17, right before she got kidnapped.

It was a great opportunity for me to go back in time and see what those years were like for myself. And I wanted something that was almost a time capsule for myself that would trigger me. So I put [in] things that I remembered from old notes that I’d written for my friends or old journals that I had. I remembered how I used to draw people when I was 10 with these big googly eyes. I put all of that in there, because it was all going to come back at the end of the movie. … The concept being, these things that she’s writing in these journals, these were the things that were the most important in her life….

And then, when she comes back to it and is looking through these notebooks trying to remember it, trying to remember what was so important in her life that she was trying to get back to, [she realizes] there’s almost nothing there. It’s just an average, ordinary life. There’s this amazing thing that happens as we get older where our awareness as to what’s important grows. So there’s nothing for her of her old life … for her to hold on to. There’s only moving forward. The past of Room and the past of before Room needs to be let go for space for something new.

On what surprised her about her character, Ma:

BL: Her strength is just something that always shocked me. … I remember doing the scene where [Jacob and I] were reunited, and I was just so tired and standing on my mark and making a joke to Lenny like, ‘This is going to suck. I’m going to be so bad, but just bare with me while I figure it out.’ And then Take One is what you see in the movie. It’s just something I can’t really explain.

But in the process of making the movie, the thing that surprised me the most … was as we were shooting the escape sequence. I had always imagined the story of me giving up my son to the world, and the pain of letting go of that son, but it wasn’t until we were shooting that … my nails were really digging into that rug.

What came over me was not that this was my actual child, but that this was my inner child; this was my innocence. This was the little girl inside me that I had to let go out into the world, and I didn’t know if I was going to get [her] back again. And it really hit me in my core that this was not just a real story of mother and child, but a story of mother and inner child, of growing up. Not of giving up innocence, but the process of how we spend the rest of our lives trying to get back to it.

On working with Jacob Tremblay, who plays the 5-year-old son, Jack:

BL: They had us go to trial about three weeks before we started shooting, just to hang out. But there was no real set plan, because I just didn’t want it to feel like we were ever forced to be friends. If he didn’t dig me, that would be totally okay. I’d figure out another way to make the movie.

Luckily, in our initial meeting, when we went and got pizza, he had these Star Wars figurines, and I started talking to him about Star Wars. He looked at me like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me, you know about Star Wars?’ And he invited me over that night to play Lego.

We kind of just had a very simple routine where we’d get picked up in the morning, have a 30, 40-minute drive to the production office. We’d build toys. We built all of the toys you see in Room. We did drawings of each other. And then we’d spend a couple of hours in Room, going through that routine that you see at the beginning. Lenny wanted it to be so ingrained in us that we did it every day. And then Lenny closed the door and let us hang in there, see what we would do.

I built him a checkerboard so I started teaching him Checkers. And we just hung out. We were shooting around our birthdays, so we had birthday parties for one another, bought each other gifts. It was just natural. We just lucked out that we genuinely have the same interests and enjoy each other’s company.

On experiencing a maternal role over Tremblay while filming:

BL: It was very easy in general, because I just like hanging out with him. There are just things that an 8-year-old won’t think about, like continuity. It just doesn’t make sense that you can’t scratch your hair and mess it up and then suddenly your hair is completely different in the middle of a take. So there were things that I just had to constantly [remind him of], like, ‘Hey, make sure you don’t do that.’

There was a physical closeness that just comes with making a movie with anybody. It’s just even more heightened when we’re in almost every single scene together, and we’re either holding each other or touching each other. There’s just so much intimacy between the two characters that it just became easy.

I think I enjoyed that part maybe the most out of the whole thing, the fact that my performance was second. It was all about Jacob. Jacob would always be first for coverage. The attention would always be put on him, and I loved that. I loved that I was able to put it all towards him and not have to put the pressure on myself. I was like, if we have time for me, great.