Jessica Alba faces her toughest role yet in 'The Eye'
- From: Ablang <ron916@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2008 14:25:34 -0800 (PST)
Jessica Alba faces her toughest role yet in 'The Eye'
Roger Moore | Sentinel Movie Critic
February 1, 2008
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/orl-alba08feb01,0,4772650.story
Jessica Alba learned a little something about acting "discipline" when
she did that TV show that made her a star, James Cameron's Dark Angel.
"Three-hour-long workouts, every day, for two years," she says of the
2000-2002 sci-fi series that had her playing a super-buff super
warrior, all curves and spandex.
Tough? Sure. But that was nothing compared with what she had to put
herself through for her latest, The Eye, which opens today. She plays
a blind violinist who has her sight restored, only to see dead people
in addition to the living ones. She had to be convincingly musical.
She had to be convincingly blind.
"I've never done anything this hard in my life," says Alba, 26. "Every
orchestra musician I talked with told me, 'Oh, it's the hardest
instrument to play,' and they were right. Everything was a challenge,
from the positioning of the violin on my neck to bowing. And I'm
having to learn to do this with my eyes closed!"
For the fourth Alba movie to come out in the last 12 months, she had
to find a little prep time. And not just to watch the 2002 Japanese "J-
horror" film she was remaking, either.
"The directors [David Moreau and Xavier Palud] are huge classical-
music fans. First off, they gave me all these Mozart and Beethoven CDs
to listen to.
"Then, I looked at lots of tapes of [violinist] Anne-Sophie Mutter. I
picked up a lot of things from just watching her, the way she holds
her head, her posture when she's holding the instrument, her bowing,
the look she gets on her face. So passionate!
"Then, I took six months of violin lessons. That was the killer.
Vibrato [a pulsating variation in pitch] just, oh, it gave me the
hardest time.
"Then, I visited the New Mexico School for the Blind and Visually
Impaired and the Braille Institute's Los Angeles sight center to learn
about blindness, to observe.
"I met this great girl, Jessica, a blind student at Boston University,
followed her for a long time. Blindness is not a limitation to her,
not that I could tell. She was focused, meticulous, wants to be face
to face with you when you talk. If she's wearing sunglasses, you can't
even tell she's blind. She speaks three languages and has a level of
determination about her that just inspired me."
All because she wanted to follow her thriller, Awake, and raunchy
comedy, Good Luck Chuck, and superhero adventure, Fantastic 4: Rise of
the Silver Surfer, with a horror movie.
"I'm a fan of the genre," she says. "But not those movies where women
are just victims, you know. Tortured or whatever. This is just a good
old-fashioned ghost story, with a new twist. Scary!"
Alba's frequent inclusion on lists such as People's "50 Most
Beautiful" and Playboy, Maxim, E! and Stuff's "world's sexiest" and
her determination to work all the time have made her an easy target of
the resentful. And critics. Many of her recent films haven't earned
the best reviews, prompting the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation to
nominate her for three "Razzies" this year for her last three films.
But they -- we -- won't have Alba to kick around much, soon. She's
pregnant, and if nothing else that will cut back on her productivity.
"I don't know if I'll want to go straight back to work after having
the baby, or not," she says of the child she is expecting with Cash
Warren. "We really are just winging it. I have no plan, no idea how
I'm going to work the career around this motherhood thing. I do know
this, though. Whatever I choose to do, professionally, it'll have to
be something I'm so passionate about that I can't not do it."
.
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