“The Disaster Artist” recreates scenes from “The Room,” and you won’t believe the attention to detail
Actors have recreated specific moments in film many times before, but only a handful have had the unique challenge of recreating specific moments from The Room. (You know, the best-worst movie from Tommy Wiseau.) And those handful do so in The Disaster Artist, which tells the story of the making of the 2003 cult classic — which is about a love triangle between Johnny (Wiseau), Mark (Greg Sestero), and Lisa (Juliette Danielle).
In The Disaster Artist, James Franco plays Tommy/Johnny (James also directed the film, out Friday in limited release), Dave Franco plays Greg/Mark, and Ari Graynor plays Juliette/Lisa. They recreate scenes from The Room, and with really specific attention to detail (you get a taste of it in the trailers, so no spoilers!). Like, crazy specific attention to detail. So much so that Graynor says the process was “one of the most technical things I’ve ever done as an actor.”
“Usually, as an actor, when you’re playing a character, you try to get inside the inner life of that character and what they’re thinking and what they want and what they’re feeling and you try to express it in the most natural and realistic way,” Graynor told HelloGiggles. “[The Room recreations] were really quite technical, wanting to do them justice [and] trying to do it as closely as they did it.”
“That was such a different experience because it was not getting inside the character or the scene, being like, ‘What was she feeling here? What is Lisa saying here?’ It was really trying to match, almost exactly, what they were doing and then you just realize that the rhythms and the behaviors and the way that was expressed was totally antithetical to all the instincts I would have had if I was just playing that scene.”
No really, she would’ve played the scenes completely differently on her own — and if you’ve seen The Room, there’s no doubt why.
But, that wasn’t the challenge here: “The goal was definitely to recreate those scenes as closely as we could. The exercise was not to reimagine it in our own form of expression. It was really like, how do we get this as close [to the original]?”
To get there, Graynor watched the scenes she was mimicking “probably 100 times,” and she and her costars would watch the scenes on set, right before shooting.
“Then, we would watch them side by side and we would adjust,” Graynor explained. “And we would adjust things down to, ‘Her hand is on her hip more like this.’ Or, ‘When I get up and she moves, the skirt is like this.’ I mean, we really tried to be as meticulous as we could.”
To sum this particular Disaster Artist experience up? “It was a very weird sort of parallel universe.” And we wouldn’t have it any other way.