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ROOM: What's On The Other Side Of Your Wall?

By Jacob Krueger

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This week we’re going to be looking at the Academy Award Best Picture nominee Room.

It’s interesting that we’re looking at Room because, as screenwriters, we often lock ourselves in our own little rooms. Like the main characters of Room, we get bound up by other people’s rules, by our own comfort zone as screenwriters, by the movies that we have seen before. And we forget that every wall has another side, that there is actually something out there bigger than the story we know how to tell, than the movie that we’ve seen before, than the structure that we’ve been handed down, than the rules that have been imposed upon us.

And Room, in its execution and its subject matter, really shows us what it is to transcend those rules, to transcend our expectations as we write, and to transcend the expectation of our audience for what our film is supposed to be.

Now, a lot of people who have studied the rules of screenwriting might look at a screenplay like Room and say, “is this even a movie? Shouldn’t this be a play?”

After all, nearly half of the film takes place in a single room. And, even when we get out of that room, most of the action still takes place in a single location: in the living room of a home.

Although this is certainly wonderful from a budgetary perspective, this is not something we see very often in movies. In fact, the dogma tells us this is impossible.

And, of course, there are reasons for that dogma.  Movies are a visual medium. By using the power of dynamic visual action, and the power of our cuts, we draw an audience into our stories. There are a lot of reasons why these rules exist.

The problem happens when we start letting the rules rule the script, rather than the other way around. When we try to follow all the rules in a vacuum, rather than figuring out the rules we actually need for the story we want to tell.

The truth is, if you were to follow the dogma and “open up” a movie like Room, if you were to take it out of that one location, you’d damage it terribly. Because that choice would undermine the whole point of the movie, the whole theme that the writer, Emma Donoghue, is building: everything that we loved about the film.

Now, this is not to suggest that you should run out right now and write a movie set in one room. But what I would like to suggest is that the rules of screenwriting (while they may make your life easier on certain projects) should not dictate what you should do with a script. The story that you tell should dictate the rules that you follow.

There are other rules that Room breaks as well. Imagine what would have happened to Room if Emma Donoghue would have followed the dogma of “no voice over.” Imagine what would have happened to Room if she had allowed herself to be confined by the rules rather than asking herself “what are rules that serve my script?”

This is the hard thing about the psychology of being a writer, because we all long for rules. We all long for structure. We all long to understand how a good screenplay is built. And we all long to “do it right.” And often, just like Jack and Ma in Room, when we are exposed to the vastness of the outside world, to the other side of the wall, we get overwhelmed.

When every possibility becomes possible, it can become terrifying, it can become paralyzing. Whereas when we are in that small room with the door closed, sometimes things feel safe, sometimes we can feel free, even when we are not.

So, I’m not suggesting that you need to break every rule to be a screenwrit...