I Can Do Without Gore, Says Jessica Alba
Jessica Alba admits that shooting her latest horror movie was one of her most intense experiences yet. The pregnant actress reveals to Rob Driscoll what it was like playing a blind woman – and why she’s pleased there was no bloodshed
SHE may have shot to fame alongside Ioan Gruffudd as a Hollywood superhero but Jessica Alba’s latest movie experience was far less glamorous.
For horror movie The Eye, not only did she have to play a top-class concert violinist, but also a woman who has been blind since childhood.
So intense was the filming experience that Alba endured “a lot of sleeplessness” during the shoot.
In preparation, Alba spent six months learning to play the violin, as well as visiting blind orientation centres and mixing with blind people.
It’s all a far cry from the glitzy, glamorous image conveyed by the glossy Hollywood movies that have made her famous – the two Fantastic Four movies (which saw her pucker up to Cardiff-born Gruffudd), Sin City and Into The Blue.
But then, despite huge success as one of the industry’s hottest young female stars, Alba is, in her own words, something of a perfectionist when it comes to the day job – and also a realist.
“First and foremost, I’m an actress, so if I’m playing a violinist no-one’s saying I have to be absolutely note-perfect all day long while we’re filming,” explains Alba, who will be 27 on Monday .
“Obviously you’re not going to pick up an instrument that complex in so short an amount of time. But I wanted to get it right. I couldn’t have the audience think that I wasn’t playing. I practised so much. And we were shooting nights, so my days ended when everyone else’s started. It’s kind of impossible to sleep at seven in the morning with the sun spilling into your room!”
Alba is expecting a child in May with her film-producer fiancé, 28-year-old Cash Warren, whom she met while making Fantastic Four. Other heavily pregnant starlets might not have turned up to promote their latest movie, but you quickly get the impression that The Eye is a fairly substantial project in the Alba canon – and indeed very different from her usual, more mainstream fare.
“It was the most interesting female role I’ve ever read,” says Alba. “And it’s certainly not your average, typical horror movie. It’s more about a young woman who is faced with things that she really cannot explain, and who fears that she is losing her mind and her grip on sanity.”
The film is, in fact, a remake of a cult 2002 Chinese supernatural horror movie. Alba’s character, Sydney Wells is an acclaimed violinist, blind since a tragic childhood accident, who decides to undergo a double corneal transplant, in the hope of regaining her sight.
The operation is successful, and Sydney can see for the first time in 20 years. But her happiness is short-lived as she starts to be haunted by inexplicable shady visions and frightening images alien to her own life and circumstances. “Are you seeing dead people?” asks her doctor in a knowing reference to The Sixth Sense. Of course she can – and this is what has made the film such a hit at the US box office.
California-born Alba has turned down more than a few “slasher” movies before now, but she considers The Eye to be several notches above that cynical, money-grabbing genre.
“A lot of horror movies have girls running away from a guy who is torturing them or kidnapping them,” she explains. “There’s always much more a victim stance when it comes to the female character and it usually involves crying and screaming.
“I found The Eye a far more fascinating and complex scenario. It’s not about gore, it’s about suspense and psychological tension. When I read it, I realised it didn’t need to have people’s body parts being ripped apart, it didn’t need cursing and it didn’t need sex. I thought it was a complete, terrifying experience without those things that would make it an 18-rated movie.”
Alba does, however, claim to be an avid fan of more traditional Hollywood horror. “One of the first movies I ever remember watching was Nightmare On Elm Street – I think I was about four and a half,” she confesses with a laugh. “It gave me nightmares until I was 13. My parents didn’t know, nor did they approve, obviously. I was a sneaky child, I hid behind the couch and watched the whole thing. Later that night, I insisted on sleeping in bed with them; if I was going to be sucked into the bed into some netherworld, I was going to be with them!
“Later on, I loved movies like Psycho, The Birds, It, Poltergeist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Ring – those kind of movies are more my speed than people getting mutilated and chopped into bits.” Alba started taking her violin lessons for The Eye while she was shooting the second Fantastic Four movie. “I had to train for months just to learn how to hold the bow and instrument properly and that’s only half the battle,” she grimaces. “I’m playing complicated classical pieces in the film, so I had to learn how to play the actual notes.”
Equally challenging, of course, was playing a woman who is blind. Alba spent time living at the New Mexico Commission for the Blind, where she learned basic Braille reading, and received training under the guidance of a certified orientation mobility instructor.
“I also spent time with a woman around my age who’s a musician herself and who’s been blind since she was three,” reveals Alba. “She travels all around the world on her own, and she doesn’t have a guide or a dog. Just observing her and spending time with her, she was pretty much my inspiration for my character.”
After Alba’s extensive musical preparation for the role, might a back-up career as a violinist beckon? “Never in a million years,” she laughs. “It’s the most difficult instrument on the planet. I did six months of extensive training with three different violin teachers, and these are women who’ve been playing since they were three years old, all of them. They are all in orchestras, and they still practise eight hours a day. I just simply don’t have that amount of dedication, to be honest.”