Emma Donoghue is an award winning novelist, literary historian, screenwriter and mother. Born in Dublin she emigrated to Canada and now lives in London Ontario. She recently, of course, adapted her own novel Room for the big screen. The film premiered at TIFF this past September and has been on a roller coaster ride of critical acclaim and award nominations ever since. Room was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture and Emma was nominated for her work in the Best Adapted Screenplay category.
John Galway was privileged to have been able to sit down with Emma for Celtic Canada as she took time out of her hectic schedule to chat about her work and the success of the film:
Celtic Canada: Growing up in Dublin, then spending time in the UK before ultimately settling in London Ontario – how have your life’s journeys influenced your writing and the stories you want to tell?
Emma:
It’s definitely caused my writing to move geographically: my first two novels were set in Dublin, then I wrote a book of fairy tales which was set nowhere in particular in pre-modern Europe, then I started writing historical novels which were set in England, then a contemporary one called The Landing set in Ireland and Canada and then I’ve done a couple of novels set in the United States. So there’s been a kind of widening of the pool I suppose. I think the great thing about emigrating twice is that it kind of yanked up my cultural anchors so that I feel free to set a novel just about anywhere and in any time as well.
I did a Phd in in England and I think those years of historical research left me with a feeling that effectively a library or the internet is a time machine and if I want to set a novel in 1502 then why not! Where I think some writers feel that their writing absolutely has to come out of the circumstances in which they are living – their time and their place – where I just feel that I can go anywhere that my imagination or research skills can take me.
Celtic Canada: Ireland has a deep history of story-telling while Canada’s literary tradition is still relatively young. How would you contrast the two traditions?
Emma:
Well the Canadian one might be more recent but it’s extremely good! I find writers get a lot of respect in Canada, I think we are seen as central to the culture. I think sometimes in America – writers there can feel as though they are somewhat off to one side of pop culture.
One thing I like about the Canadian literary tradition is that women have been the big names in it for a long time. People like Carol Shields, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro where as the Irish literary tradition is more dominated by a handful of male names. So as a woman and a writer, sometimes I feel that there is all the more room of me in the Canadian tradition.
Another great thing is that Canada has really let its immigrants into its sense of itself so you get writers like Rohinton Mistry or Michael Ondaatje who are just seen as absolutely representative of Canada. So I find the loose Canadian sense of national identity actually makes it very accommodating and welcoming for an immigrant like myself.
Celtic Canada: Shifting to Room, how did the story come to you and why did you feel that you must tell it?
Emma:
My children were age four and one, and I was fascinated by parenting but had never thought of writing anything about it because I couldn’t think of an original story line … I mean I couldn’t just say “woman has baby” – that’s nothing new!
So when I heard about the Fritzl case in Austria, and that just happened to be the first of these long term kidnapping cases I heard about, I thought that that would be actually a fascinating premise which would allow me to lift and isolate the parent-child bond from the world and to test it. To ask whether it could make up to you for all the rest of the world you were missing. But that idea would only really have struck me because I had small children of my own.
Celtic Canada: adapting a novel, which often looks into the inner thoughts of a character, to film in which all thoughts must be expressed by actors is often a challenge. How did you find the process of adapting your own work with Room?
Emma:
There are challenges but I’m not sure it was any harder to adapt my own novel than anyone else’s – it’s not as if I felt wedded to every detail. You know if you feel that seriously protective of your work then I don’t think you should adapt your own work.
But I have always liked adapting work – I once wrote something for TV which didn’t get made so I adapted it to a short story – I like to move things back and forward between different forms – I did a play based on my book of fairy takes for instance so I welcomed the challenge. It was great to take the fundamental story and the fundamental structure in the novel Room and use totally different techniques to tell the story.
As you say, it brings out different facets. The novel has more psychological detail but the film gives a wonderful physicality to the characters and in particular when you are dealing with a small child – you know they are so physical – they say so much through their bodies. It was absolutely wonderful to see Jack embodied through the marvelous performance of Jacob Trembly from Vancouver – the film really gives Jack a body and in particular it allow Ma, the mother, to step forward and to be seen in her own right. To allow us to really see how she is managing her daily struggles. How she keeps her spirits up and make things fun for Jack even though it is a prison for her. I think film offers several advantages for telling a story like this.
Celtic Canada: and how would describe walking on set the first day and seeing the recreation of the room for which the novel/film is named?
Emma:
It was great! It not as if I wanted everything to be exactly as it was in my head because you see in the novel you are in the head of a 5 year old and they don’t usually comment on things like what their mother looks like or decor. His head was full of characters like the spoon he played with but not visual specifics so I had no particular stake in what characters looked like.
The funny thing about the room was because in the novel Jack thinks of it as just his familiar home – so it’s quite pleasant to him whereas of course the camera shows things much more coldly and objectively. So when I stepped into the set of Room I thought first of all it’s so small how could you possibly live here! how ugly, how grimy, how nasty everything is.
The great thing about the film is it shows all that – the low budget nastiness of this prison. Also the little moments of visual magic and delight he finds in it – so I think the film manages an amazing kind of double perspective that way. It shifts back and forth between making the room look small and making it look big and making it look ugly and making it look beautiful.
Celtic Canada: director Lenny Abrahamson and you worked very closely together – how was that experience?
Emma:
It was bliss…the best working relationship I have ever had in my life! He was enormously generous. He used to fly over to London Ontario in mid-winter and sit around with me for a week at my kitchen table and work with me on my script. It’s funny, I got to work with him so directly that I only since learned from other screen writers that this is not normal at all.
With Lenny and me it was a constant flow of Skype sessions and phone calls and I just learned so much from him. It always felt like a very collaborative relationship. It never felt as if I was arguing to make it more like the book or he was arguing to change it all….not a bit.
Celtic Canada: since TIFF where the film won the Grolsh People’s Choice Award it’s been a whirlwind I’d imagine! How have the last few months been leading up to all the Oscar buzz?
Emma:
It’s been a bit nuts! I keep thinking the travels are over and then there’s more of it! So it’s all going to go on ’til mid-March when we go to the Canadian Screen Awards where Room is up for eleven awards!
It’s funny, I am absolutely thrilled the film is doing so well but it does mean a sort of non-stop atmosphere of publicity and people asking me about my clothes and all this kind of thing!
Celtic Canada: when the dust all settles, what’s next?
Emma:
Well I have been working right thru this cause that’s the only way to stay sane. When you are doing a lot of flying and so on, you start to feel completely unreal unless you actually do the writing. Otherwise you feel like you are just pretending to be a writer.
So I have a novel coming out in the autumn set in 19th century Ireland. It will be my first one set in Ireland in some time actually and it’s really a kind of reckoning with my cultural heritage of Catholicism.
And then in a total contrast I’m writing a kid series set in contemporary Toronto that will be coming out next spring. That will be my first book for kids with illustrations and so on which again is a bit more like doing a film – it’s very collaborative – to let the illustrator bear a lot of the meaning. It’s been great fun!
