NEW YORK: To play a blind woman for her latest film role, Blake Lively took no short cuts into the darkness.
The 30-year-old actress learned to use a walking cane, wore opaque contact lenses off-camera to better understand her character and learned how to navigate the main set without her vision.
“I wanted to know the experience of filling in the blanks in my head, learning it and then opening my eyes and seeing that, no matter what I had in my head, it was so different than I imagined,” she says.
Lively stars in “All I See Is You,” a dreamy, beautiful movie about a woman who lost her eyesight as an adolescent in a car accident but regains her vision through surgery in her 20s. She begins a period of self-discovery, which threatens to upend her life and marriage.
“That happens in all relationships, where you’re in an established relationship and then you start to not see things,” says Lively. “This movie speaks to relationships, I think, whether we have the literal blindness or it’s just figurative.”
It’s the brainchild of director and co-writer Marc Forster, whose career includes varied films such as “World War Z,” “Quantum of Solace,” “Monster’s Ball” and “The Kite Runner.”
Both Lively and Forster realize that the film — featuring a woman learning to be strong and independent — comes at a time when women across the country are talking about their role in male-centered businesses and society.
“I think what’s happened in this past year, since the election, is that women have really stood up for themselves. I think we realized how much further we had to go than we thought we did,” Lively says.
Foster, for his part, hopes the film will remind people to open their eyes, see what’s actually happening and make better choices.
“We, as humanity, ultimately have to really wake up and become conscious and start seeing things,” he says. “Otherwise, we’re going to go down a path that will be unreturnable.”