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Being a Hollywood actress may look like an incredibly glamorous gig, but for some roles, there's more going on behind the glossy scenes than just having your make-up done. For her latest role Jessica Alba had to learn to play the violin like a professional while pretending to be blind - no small feat for any actress. Chinese horror remake 'The Eye' follows blind violinist Sydney Wells (Jessica) as she undergoes a cornea transplant and adapts to her newly acquired sight. But her comfortable life is shattered when she takes on the traits of her dead donor, including disturbing flashbacks and the power to see ghosts.
Jessica, 26, reveals the intensive training she undertook at orientation centres in Los Angeles and New Mexico to prepare for the role. "I learned basic Braille reading, how to walk with a cane and how people live in their homes, self-sufficiently," she says. "I labelled everything in my house, so I could walk freely wearing sleep shades." It seems her hard work paid off when she actually started filming, because she couldn't see much through eerie grey contact lenses. "They covered my entire eye - I had no peripheral vision and sometimes partial vision." Jessica, who is best known for her roll as Max Guevera in the TV series 'Dark Angel' and as Sue Storm in the 'Fantastic Four' movies, found that she had to totally immerse herself in this new, more challenging role. She spent time with a blind musician, which totally transformed her view of blindness as a disability.
"She's a vocalist and travels all around the world on her own, takes taxis, subways, planes, everything. She was pretty much my inspiration," she reveals. "And she was incredibly perceptive. After about 20 minutes in a room she didn't use her cane. "If you can't see, you really pick up on people's energy differently. You don't have their face to guide you on who they are so you don't judge people in quite the same way. "I had thought it was much more of a handicap, but you can live on your own, you can pretty much hold down most jobs blind. "It's really other people's perceptions that makes it an issue because she was quite happy with her life and thought it was just the way God made her." Having learnt to live without sight, Jessica then had to tackle the violin.
"It was the most difficult instrument on the planet," she says, laughing. "I did six months of extensive training with five different women who have been playing since they were kids. "They still practice eight hours a day just to stay good enough to be in an orchestra. I just don't have that kind of dedication." But she did commit to the task, practising whenever she could, even during breaks from filming on 'Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer'. "I didn't even have time to take off that suit, so in my Storm outfit I was hacking away at the violin," she laughs. "My poor dogs probably suffered the most, because they were always in the trailer with me. They would always run to the back. "I had to learn six or seven pieces, but by the time we were shooting the movie, it got pared down to two, which I curse the directors for. In a nod to movie 'The Sixth Sense', Sydney's developing vision allows her to see dead people - from the little boy in the corridor by her apartment, to the diners in the burned-out Chinese restaurant. At first she thinks she's going mad, but with the help of Dr Paul Faulkner (Alessandro Nivola), Sydney finally works out she is experiencing a real-life phenomenon called Cellular Memory, where transplant recipients display the characteristics of their donors. "Ghost stories are such a leap of faith and the audience go on this journey with you, so you want to try and infuse it with as much reality as possible," explains Jessica. "I met a guy who loved sweets and hated Italian food and he said after his liver transplant, he didn't pick up a single sweet ever again and all he could eat was pizza and pasta. "He spoke to the mother of his donor, who was a 16-year-old boy - hated sweets and his favourite food was pizza and pasta."
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