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.
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.” Inspiration for the new film came in one of the strangest places — the shower.
Forster, who has always admired fine art painters, was searching for a story that could lend itself to being painted onscreen. “I pushed it aside because I said, ‘OK, you’re a filmmaker. You’re not a painter. You’re not a true artist. You’re just a visual storyteller,’” he says. But one day in the shower, with soap clouding his eyes, he realized he had a visual template.
He says he was trying to shake the Hollywood cookie-cutter approach and recapture the feel of films from the 1970s, when character studies and open-ended plots ruled. “Movies became more and more close-ended and they also had to tick every box emotionally for an audience,” he says.
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.
Foster, for his part, hopes the film will remind people to open their eyes, see what’s actually happening and make better choices.