The Movie ‘Room’ Really Made a Super-Small, Prison-Like Room. Here’s How They Did It

Creating a small, simple room turned out to be the biggest challenge of production designer Ethan Tobman’s career.

The 36-year-old Montreal native, whose credits include the recent Jack Black comedy The D Train, faced a daunting task when he joined the new drama Room, about a young mother, Ma (played by Brie Larson), who’s kidnapped by an abductor known only as “Old Nick” and then trapped in a tiny bedroom with her 5-year-old son, Jack (Jacob “Jake” Tremblay). Since so much of Room takes place in a drab, cramped 10-by-10-foot space, Tobman had to design a set that would not only convey the quarters’ claustrophobic conditions, but would also be visually compelling.

“This is the smallest set I’ve ever built, and the hardest,” Tobman told Yahoo Movies. “It’s the most time I ever spent building any one environment, and as a result, every square inch was dissected, criticized, refined, and experimented with.”

Tobman broke down and methodically approached the herculean task of trying to assemble a tiny room that could act as one boy’s entire world — a process that he explained in depth to Yahoo Movies last week.

Where did you start when designing the room for Room?
When Lenny [director Lenny Abrahamson] first propositioned Emma [writer Emma Donoghue] to make this movie, he said he wasn’t interested in an unreliable narrator or flights of fancy. We wanted to stay real despite the narration and Jack’s imagination. [So] the first move was, I literally locked myself in a room for two days and studied captivity, almost as an abstract. I studied police station photos and then expanded to [photos of] prison solitary confinement, the Holocaust, gas chambers, and then urbanization in places like Tokyo and Hong Kong, where people are living in 5-foot-by-5-foot apartments.

On the very first day of pre-production, our director of photography, Danny Cohen — who has shot some very big movies, like Les Misérables — and Lenny met in Toronto for two days. I was determined to build a makeshift room for that very first day. We thought that we were going to have to force the perspective [by making a bigger room] and pretending the room is smaller than it really is for the purpose of shooting.

But when we built the 16-by-16 box and stood inside, we realized it was gonna give [the fact that it was larger] away; you want to be able to see three walls at once. And so we kept creeping the walls in and in, and eventually we were at 10-feet-by-10-feet, which was the size written in the book.

A sketch from Roomthebook.com

What materials did you use to build the room?
I approached it by thinking of it as an inverted Rubik’s Cube: Each [wall] was made out of tile, 1-foot-by-1-foot squares together, and you could pull one out at any one place and peer in. Most of the time Brie and Jake are alone in that room, and the crew is outside. That created an extraordinary authenticity and intimacy. They would sometimes be in that room for eight hours at a time. We were able to put two cameras in at once without Jake even being aware we were shooting.

How do you light a space that small?
There are two sources of light [in the room] that are practical: a skylight and a light in the kitchen. You cannot light a movie with one window in a ceiling and one light in a kitchen. So the head-scratcher was [how] to develop sources of light that were on the one hand practical, but did not distract from the reality. We ended up building all the objects [so that they could] emit their own light. The toaster, the stove, the lamp are literally lighting the scene. Generally speaking, the things were only on when we were looking at them.

You fit a lot of furniture into a room that small, and it was all sort of ingeniously arranged.
The only way Ma can survive without going insane is to keep things extraordinarily organized, rigid, and scheduled. Everyone would react differently in that situation, but it makes sense to me that she’s developed a highly regular, scheduled regime so she won’t go crazy.

Once we figured out the basic layout of the space physically, for camera and for performance, my decorator and I then decided we were going to try to spend a week or two in [the kidnapper’s] head. We [thought about] what his income would be, what his education would be, what his Internet access would be, what his geography — in small-town Ohio or thereabouts — would be. [We guessed] he would only find himself shopping at Home Depot, Lowe’s, or Walmart. He probably wouldn’t shop online. We pieced together the cheapest way to achieve the goal of keeping someone captive with air, water, heat, and with no sound emitting.

And we found an old bed because the other places he would have gone was yard sales or church sales, or he might Dumpster-dive — which is how we found the sink.

The set of ‘Room’ (A24)

There’s also a lot of handmade art on the walls. Who made that stuff?
We got everything that may have been given to Ma by Old Nick — twine, bags, scotch tape — and we started making art with it. After, we made some dinosaurs and drawings and wind chimes and dream catchers. When Jake and Brie arrived, Lenny and I discussed having them create art together to help them bond. We needed to get them to bond really quickly. Jake and Brie spent two days making artwork with all the materials we gave them and using some of the objects we gave them as inspiration. So it’s a mix of stuff we made and they made, and particularly what Jake made.

We see Ma sprucing up the place, but the room isn’t all that clean — and understandably so. Did you think about how much dirt there would be?
We tried to show that every surface has been scrubbed. She only has one garbage [can], and really only has two ways of cleaning: [using a rag] or one used toothbrush. What we agreed upon, as a group, was that Old Nick is a phenomenally lazy individual. He’ll do the absolute bare minimum that is required to keep this person alive, for the sole purpose of [her] pleasing him. We were careful about not making the place look too clean, but not making it look like depressing squalor. There are scratch marks and rub marks and places where dirt has been removed. But it’s also constantly fighting to get in.