Julianne Moore: Blinded by the Light

Julianne Moore sits down with Premiere at Cannes to talk about her character in Blindness, the film that opened the festival.

by Karl Rozemeyer

Julianne Moore at the photocall for Blindness Courtesy of Retna

In Fernando Meirelles' Blindness, the film that opened the 61st Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, Julianne Moore plays an unnamed ophthalmologist's wife who is inexplicably untouched by a mysterious epidemic of "white blindness" ravaging a crowded city. Her husband, played by Mark Ruffalo, is among the first victims of the plague. The blind are quarantined in an abandoned mental institution, and the Doctor's Wife (as Moore is credited) chooses to accompany her husband by pretending her sight too has been taken by the virulent disease. While there, she's the only eyewitness of the horrors unfolding in the wards — food rations are withheld in exchange for possessions, and the threat of death or rape at the hands of the incarcerated or the guards is constant.

While people have been circulating the project for the last decade or so, hoping to bring an adaptation of the 1998 Nobel Prize-winning novel by Jose Saramago to the big screen, it was Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardner) and screenplay writer/actor Don McKellar who managed to convince the author that their adaptation would not devolve into an end-of-the-world zombie flick.

When the idea of adapting the book was first tested, Susan Sarandon's name was floated for the role of Doctor's Wife, but in casting McKellar's screenplay, the director and producers recruited four-time Oscar nominee Julianne Moore (Far From Heaven, The Hours, The End of the Affair, Children of Men and most recently Savage Grace). "The film is really on her shoulders," notes Meirelles. "She has to carry the film, and we knew it." Moore had long wanted to work with the Brazilian director and leapt at the opportunity when her agent let her know that she was up for the role of Doctor's Wife.

Gael Garcia Bernal and Julianne Moore at the photocall for Blindness by Fernando Meirelles Courtesy of the Cannes Film Festival © AFP

"During the process and before, we spoke a lot about two aspects to her character," Meirelles recalls. "We didn't want her to be a hero, a perfect person that people may think didn't go blind because she is good or she is special. She is not. She is just a housewife — and a silly one, in the beginning. Her world is just a little house, and she is very weak, actually." While her husband falls apart under the pressure of surviving in the squalor and fear of the institution, she grows in fortitude and courage, becoming a leader among the blind. "And then," Meirelles explains, "as she [develops], there is a point in the film where she says, 'I can do more! I can help everybody.' She feels as if she is Superman until she realizes that she cannot help everybody. She then finds this family and takes them home. At first she sees only her husband and then a whole world and then [finds] the right size."

For the role of a pampered upper middle-class wife Moore dyed her hair blonde — without the director's permission — and wore a fat suit for the film's opening sequence. Her tresses once again her signature auburn red, a radiant Moore spoke to Premiere from a salon in the Martinez Hotel in Cannes. She gushes that she cannot wait to see the DreamWorks big-budget animation Kung Fu Panda with her six- and ten-year-old kids before settling in to chat about the demands of being the star of the film that kicks off the world's most glamorous movie festival.

Was this a grueling film to make?
It was fantastic. I love Fernando. I think he is an extraordinary filmmaker. We all got along really well. The cast was great. It was actually a really pleasant experience. His work is so special. He knows what he wants. He knows what he is doing all the time. It was a pleasure to be in that kind of an environment. So it wasn't grueling at all. It was both intense and interesting but it was really fun.

There were disturbing sequences like the rape scene. That must have been a hard day.
You know, nobody wants to do anything like that but Fernando is a very careful filmmaker — he wasn't going to hurt anybody. He made sure everybody knew what was happening, how we were going to do it. It was tough on, l I think, everybody [on set]. The actors were all very careful.