An Interview With Lenny Abrahamson: All The Critics Love You In New York

Times they are a-changing. Once upon a time, I would regularly bump into director Lenny Abrahamson wandering around Dublin city, but now that he’s become the critically acclaimed director of internationally successful films like Richard Did, Frank and the upcoming drama Room, he’s much harder to get hold of. 

So much so that upon discovering he was staying in the absurdly swanky hotel where I was interviewing another actor, we couldn’t even co-ordinate a cup of tea amidst his hectic schedule of screenings and press interviews. 

Lenny Abrahamson has officially “made it” in Hollywood. Not that he’s letting it go to his head, he tells me when we finally talk a few weeks after our missed connection, right after his latest film i>Room, based on Emma Donoghue’s novel, is released in the States to rave reviews and instant Oscar buzz. Travelling back and forth to LA every two weeks, Abrahamson says that the surreal nature of the city isn’t for him.
“I quite like being here for short periods,” he explains, “but I could not live here, because I’m weak. I would totally get caught up in the ‘Who’s up and who’s down’ of it all. It’s hard not to, it’s such an industry place. There’s a ladder-climbing paradigm that I think would kill me.”

The director also occasionally pines for some peace and quiet, admitting that while the attention and acclaim is lovely, he misses having “absolutely nothing to do, which I think is the most creative space to be in.”

Not that he’s lacking for projects or inspiration. Though across the pond Lenny may be known for his stirring dramas (“It’s funny when people in the States introduce me, it’s so clear that they think Richard Did is the first film I’ve ever made”), his work on Garage, Adam and Paul and Frank has shown that he can perfectly navigate social realism as well as quirky, offbeat comedy.And now he seems determined to conquer every genre possible.

Currently on his slate is an adaptation of Sarah Waters’ ghostly novel The Little Stranger “which is really about class and class resentment, although it’s dressed up as a poltergeist story.” He’s also developing a story about Emile Griffith, who “was amazing. He was a black gay boxer in the 1950s and ‘60s in New York, and killed an opponent who taunted him about being gay. It’s absolutely extraordinary – it’s at that amazing nexus of race and sexuality and politics, because it was during the Cuban missile crisis, which plays a big part in it.

“I’m co-writing the story, based on a biography by Donald McRae which is really good. And then I’m working on a civil war story too, so there’s lots going on – but I really want to write something low-key based in Ireland. Just finding the time to do that will be hard, it’s been a crazy couple of months.”

Abrahamson should probably have anticipated the craziness. Room is a stunning adaptation of a truly remarkable story, with a premise that demands attention. Very loosely inspired by the Josef Fritzl case, Donoghue’s book tells the story of five-year-old Jack and his Ma, who was kidnapped as a teen and has been held captive in a 10x10 shed for seven years.
Told from the child’s perspective, the novel was simultaneously heart-wrenching and terrifying. Donoghue herself wrote the screenplay for the film, which has a two-part structure, examining the world the two characters have created within their tiny prison, and then exploring the world beyond. Thrilling, emotive and deeply moving, it’s a cinematic triumph, and one Abrahamson knew he had to make after reading the opening pages of Donoghue’s novel.

“It was a total experience for me both as a reader and a filmmaker,” he reflects. “I knew the book was about a mother and son being trapped in a room, having been abducted, but I didn’t know it was from the kid’s point of view. Once I sussed that out, I had two parallel experiences, one of which was the reader’s experience, and then the parent’s experience, which is so intense. My little boy Max was nearly four at the time, so I could see him in the story – that strange and gorgeous little optimism the child has, and that openness and vulnerability.

“Kids are unaware of how fragile it all is. That chimed with me. But I could also see it as a film, see them in the room and imagine how it would feel. I could imagine how it would be true to the miserable confining feel of the space, but also beautiful, which was the key.”

Abrahamson decided to be proactive and wrote a letter to Donoghue, pitching his vision for the film – and also, he admits, slyly indicating that no-one else would be able to adapt her book with as much emotional authenticity as he could.

“The gist of the whole thing was, ‘Everyone else will fuck it up!’” he laughs. “It was a long, very well-written spoiler for other people’s pitches. I spent years in the world of academia, so I’m suited to writing essays and getting thoughts down, and expressing complicated ideas in ways that are compelling to read. I threw all of that into this letter. I wanted Emma to understand that I really got her novel, and then to talk to her about what film is good at doing, and the native expressive means that film has at its disposal.

“For me it’s about the immediacy that films can have, their bareness and truthfulness. So I pushed the immediacy of it, and the relationship that creates with the audience. I also said to Emma that it could capture all of the thematic, emotional, magical, fairytale-like stuff that she’d managed to sneak into the novel. We could portray all that.”

Abrahamson laughs mischievously. “And then I threw in a ‘By the way, here’s what other people will say and they’re wrong!’”
The director’s sly technique of poisoning other people’s pitches clearly worked, as Donoghue heard many a proposal over the next two years, but kept returning to Abrahamson’s vision, finally agreeing to collaborate with him. So began one of the filmmaker’s most testing challenges to date, as he was confronted with bringing a hugely beloved and bestselling novel to the screen under intense scrutiny. Indeed, even Barack Obama had been photographed with the book, so imagine messing that up. But he also had to find and then work with his lead child actor, Jacob Tremblay, upon whom the entire success of the film rests.
“Directing him is the most intense thing,” notes Abrahamson. “I’d always be on my knees beside the camera, talking him through things, parroting lines, and doing really long takes where we’d run the scene five or six times within a take – because you lose a kid’s attention when you stop. But then it was amazing to see Jake turn into a real actor, learning these acting muscles he had and just running with it. It was like teaching your child to ride a bike then seeing them go.”

Abrahamson admits that his parenting skills came in handy while working with the seven-year-old, something even Jacob picked up on.
“Jake uses that line now, he says, ‘Well Lenny’s a Dad – he understands kids really well so he’s really nice.’ But then he also says that I sound like the leprechaun from the Lucky Charms ad!”

The film is also remarkable in that it defies the conventions of the modern thriller. While modern pop culture has an obsession with celebrating and even fetishising the villainous characters – think Walt in Breaking Bad, Moriarty in Sherlock, the lead in Hannibal – both Abrahamson and Donoghue were determined not to trick the audience into empathising with the kidnapper, dubbed Old Nick.

“He’s just a failure of the highest order,” says the director. “One of the things that me and Emma spoke about was wanting to tell the story from the POV of the mother and son, not the kidnapper. So often you get these stories where the villain is the protagonist, whereas Old Nick is a nothing, a terrible blank. In a way, there are elements of an awful marriage in the story – you have this guy who feels hard done by and unappreciated, but who is in fact the jailor and the destroyer. And then you have this woman who has to pretend to be grateful for this pathetic life she’s been given.”

This ethical approach of deglamourising representations of heinous crimes and empowering survivors also applied to how the relationship between Ma (beautifully played by Brie Larson) and Old Nick was portrayed.

“Another great thing that Emma put in the book that felt so important was that we didn’t go for the Stockholm Syndrome thing,” points out Abrahamson. “We didn’t say that she’s dependent on him emotionally. We allowed her to hate him and know him for what he was. There were so many cases like that, where women were able to persuade their abductors that they were submissive just so they could get the opportunity to escape. It seems to be that in mainstream culture now, people are much more interested in the closeness of the relationship, because that’s considered more complex. But I think there’s a real moral clarity to this story, which felt important.”

The movie is generating serious awards buzz, and thanks to the star-power of both Frank, which starred Michael Fassbender, and Room which also stars William H. Macy and Joan Allen, Abrahamson is getting mainstream recognition of the kind he’s enjoyed for years on the arthouse circuit. Looking back over his career, he muses that the shift “does does feel a little bit different.”

“It normalises very quickly, like everything in life,” he considers, “but it’s like I have this invisible, Access-All-Areas pass at the moment, where I can just kind of wander in and talk to anybody I want in the studios. But what’s constant about it is that I’m still working with Ed Guiney [producer of Room and Frank and the head of Element Pictures.] All of this stuff is with Ed and we’re entering that new space together, which feels important. But it is interesting, it’s really intriguing just from a sociological level to be around all this stuff at this time of year in LA, the premieres and Q&As.

“It’s nice to know what that’s like, even if that’s not your primary goal as a filmmaker, because you spend so much time outside it. And now I can get things made that are bigger, and there are more people who want to be in them. So it does feel different, and I haven’t hit any dark spots – yet!”
In spite of the high demand for his work in the States and the exciting path his career is taking, the father of two is nothing short of definitive when he reassures me that he’d never leave Ireland permanently.

“Look, there’s a lot about it that drives me absolutely crazy,” he acknowledges, “but I feel very rooted in Ireland. I’m very much a homebird in some weird way. I’m totally connected to the strange, dysfunctional, self-parodying attitude that we have in Ireland. In America, I’m always the funniest person in the room, and the person who can drink the most – and I don’t even drink that much! I just love the culture in Ireland. And we’re still messed up in so many ways, but there’s a kindness to the psyche that is so important. And I love Ireland physically too, it’s so beautiful. I can’t see myself living anywhere else.”

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Room is play in cinemas now.