Brie Larson on her Method to Work with Child-Actor Jacob Tremblay

Actress Brie Larson, who won the Oscar for Best Actress for Room, and lead one of my favorite film, Short Term 12, talked about her experience getting the role for the adaptation of best-seller novel Room written by Emma Donoghue and directed by Lenny Abrahamson.

The film is lead by Larson and then seven year-old child-actor Jacob Tremblay. As the film became a serious contented for the Oscars race, it became apparent that Larson and Tremblay had developed a very strong bond.

But how does it work? How does an adult actor, and a filmmaker deal with a child-actor who needs to play emotions and situations he has never been into, all the while hitting the marks?

Larson talked about this challenge and the organic process she, Tremblay and Abrahamson went through to make it work and hit center during her conversation at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation. (You can see the full video below)

Here is what she says:

“I was the closest person to (Jacob Tremblay). I was the one making eye contact with him and by the time we started shooting, I had spent so much time with him I was his person. I was a person that he trusted very much.

So, we realised within day one of shooting that the typical way that you would go about with an adult actor is very different than how you’re going to speak with a kid.

Because I’m used to finishing a take, and camera says ‘Mmm, you weren’t in your light properly, make sure you don’t let him block you’, and the script supervisor will come over and say ‘You screwed up this line, you flipped this.’, and then the prop person will say ‘Remember you’ve got to pick up the cup on this word, you did it on a different one this time’, and then Lenny comes and say ‘I want you to try it like this, and then it’s going to go like this…’ and it can all go in my brain and I can do it.

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A seven-year-old that’s like ‘Nooooo that’s just completely bananas’, and so I watched day one this happened where everyone was talking to him like he was an adult and it was overwhelming to get so many information from so many different people.

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And so, Lenny (Abrahamson) and I talked and decided that how it would work is everyone from every department if there was a note, technical or otherwise, that Jacob needed to hear, you’d go to Lenny, Lenny could then prioritise what was the most important to him because we knew we could maybe give him one or two notes between each take, those would get filtered over to me, and then we would just roll, and I could be the one just sort of ask him to take it back again, because if you’ve got Lenny who is behind or something saying ‘Jacob!’ (she mimes Jacob turning around and being distracted), this keeps him in this same sort of zone and just allow to continue to build trust.”

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I find it to be a fascinating sneak peek at a process that can only work when the adults involved use creative thinking and are open to invest themselves emotionally to give life to a story they are fighting for.

Inspiring.