Dublin-born novelist Emma Donoghue recently passed through Boston on a promotional stop for director Lenny Abrahamson’s exceptionally powerful film, Room. Donoghue did a wonderful job adapting the screenplay from her own novel, and she was blessed to have two tremendously talented actors bring her characters to life: 26-year-old Brie Larson as Ma and 9-year-old Jacob Tremblay as her son, Jack. Both are expected to be in Oscar contention for their tear-inducing performances; if so, Tremblay will tie with Jackie Cooper (who was also 9 when he starred in 1931’s Skippy) as the youngest actor to be nominated for an Academy Award. During my chat with Donoghue at the Eliot Hotel, we discussed what inspired her to write about a 5-year-old boy who’s spent his entire life locked in a windowless room with his loving mom, the difficulties of translating a book to the screen and how she values intelligent people—including our local populace.

BRETT MICHEL: You have two children of your own?

EMMA DONOGHUE: Yes, they’re 8 and 11. The 11-year-old inspired Room when he was 4 and a half. I mean, just the fact that I had a child that young around. I followed him around and studied him.

BM: Presumably, you didn’t lock him in any rooms?

ED: No, but I did roll him up in a rug. When I was writing the novel I wanted to test out the scene when the child is rolled up in a rug, so I bribed my son to do it—and it’s really hard to get out of the rug! So, I had to rewrite the scene.

BM: How close did the film come to how you’d envisioned it when you wrote it as a novel?

ED: It’s hard to remember how I thought of the book before the film—the visual images in the film are so memorable, they sort of supplant everything. I certainly never had a detailed idea of what the characters looked like. I didn’t so much care what they looked like; I cared what they felt like.

BM: Well, considering the 5-year-old voice you employed as the book’s narrator, that that makes sense.

ED: Exactly! A 5-year-old doesn’t exactly care what his mother looks like. Or, for instance, the way he describes the room—when I stepped into the set the first day, I thought to myself, “Oh, how small and how ugly this is!” because the camera is way more objective.

BM: It’s incredibly rare that an author is able to adapt their own book. Did you write the script on your own and then shop it to a producers?

ED: I did! I knew that was an odd way to proceed, but I wanted to be able to say, “Look, here’s my script. Can we work together? Do we have the same vision of it?” I didn’t want to try to make them hire me without credentials, so it just seemed more honest to say, “Here’s the script.” So yeah, I wrote it after selling the novel, but before publication.

BM: You’re from Ireland but live in Canada—and although the movie is set in the US, the film was also produced in Canada. Did it shoot very far from where you live?

ED: Yes, they shot in Toronto! Until quite late, they weren’t sure where they would film, and they said, “Oh, it might be Spokane, Washington,” and I thought, “Oh, I can’t leave my kids that often!” So, I thought I’d only get to set once, you know? But, when they settled on Toronto, I was so happy, because I got to go up about once a week. I got to sample all the locations, for instance, and see a little bit of how they do a scene with a speeding truck, and how they do scenes in the wardrobe, and I sort of interviewed everybody about what their jobs were—because it’s a new world to me!

BM: How did Lenny Abrahamson become involved?

ED: He wrote me this extraordinary letter! He’d read the book and he thought, “Oh, I’ll never get this,” because it’s a big bestseller and, it’s funny, he had this idea that I—as an Irish person who had made good North America—would despise the idea of working with an Irish company. In fact, I wasn’t specifically looking for an Irish company, because the film is set in America, but I was open to genius wherever it came from—and his letter just blew me away. It was so smart, just thoroughly intelligent and passionate and eloquent; he saw right through the crime story to the much more universal story that I was trying to tell. He was personally passionate, as well, because he’s got two small kids, so he was writing as a father who is fascinated by his children. He was just bringing all his intellect and warmth to it, and he had a great confidence about how he would film it. Lenny could already see it in his mind, so he wasn’t approaching it like, “Oh, you’ve got a lot of problems that I need to fix.” It was more like, “Ooh, how do we take this novel—which works this kind of magic trick with the child’s perspective—and how do we do that in cinema?” Really, he was approaching it very similarly to how I had approached it in my script, so it was like puzzle pieces clicking together.

BM: Was it tough fitting those pieces together when adapting your book into the screenplay?

ED: It’s funny. Everybody would have assumed that the first half was difficult because you’re in the room, but I sort of trusted that the camerawork would be smart enough to keep that interesting and varied. So, story-wise, the difficult part is in the second half. In fact, there’s one sequence that Lenny got me to rewrite over and over again. I had to do a lot of carving away. They filmed an entire scene in a shopping mall and ended up cutting it out—and there was quite a long sequence in the police station, and that got dropped before filming. So, there was a lot of shedding of layers of the onion. But it certainly didn’t feel like “Oh, this is an impossible book to adapt!” In many ways, the camera can show you a child’s perspective on the world beautifully. And so there are those moments when the camera tilts up at the skylight or something, and you think, “Oh yeah, this is just how the child is seeing it!”

BM: What was your reaction when you finally saw the completed film?

ED: I saw rough cut of the whole thing last March, when I saw it with the people from A24 [the film’s distribution company]. Afterward, one of them said, “Well, how did you like it?” and I burst into tears. And then I suddenly thought, “Oh no, he’s going to think I’m distressed because I hated it!” So I was like, “Good tears, good tears!”

BM: And audience response has clearly been very positive.

ED: I’ve been amazed! I thought people would like it, but I didn’t realize it would be taken quite so seriously—it’s an overwhelming experience. And you know, I’ve not had a stupid question from anyone in Boston so far… I hate to generalize about cities, but the standard of smart here is very high.

BM: I can be remarkably stupid during the day, I can assure you! I come alive at night, when most people are fast asleep.

ED: Well, I appreciate that you crawled out of your coffin for this!

BM: Well, kudos to you. You wrote a wonderful book, and penned an exceptional film!

ED: Thank you! This was lovely! Next time, we’ll do the interview at midnight!