The Eye Set Visit - Part 1 of 2

It's a warm, summery day but downtown Los Angeles has been transformed into a rainy gray afternoon solely for the purpose of doom and gloom. A ghostly horror movie, The Eye (a remake of Hong Kong's horror hit), is being filmed, and what's a supernatural thriller without a little storminess?

Today, they're shooting a scene with star Jessica Alba bundled up in warm clothing as she dashes to catch a cab. Take Alba out of the equation, and it's not very exciting — still, her costar Alessandro Nivola has come to take a gander even though he's not needed today. "I get to work with Jessica," he says to the small group of assembled press, "and there's no naked scene in the pool, so..." [laughs]

Nivola, who most recently appeared in the dour drama Grace Is Gone, describes The Eye as "a thriller about a girl who has been blind most of her life and gets a cornea transplant and has real trouble making adjustment to the seeing world and starts hallucinating.

"I play a neuropsychologist that she goes to see, to try to ease her transition. He is initially just kind of fascinated by her disorder and then you know starts to fall for her a bit and ends up sacrificing, uh jeopardizing, his career to try and help her track down who the donor was."

Nivola says he was attracted the "boyfriend role" because of the director-duo's 2006 French language film, Ils (Them). "I was real impressed with the movie [David Moreau and Xavier Palud]  had done. It was also a thriller and they had a very almost old-fashioned style about it where, you know,  nowadays everything is just trumped up so much, every two seconds there's an edit. [Whereas] they had the confidence to hold these shots for much longer and they created a reality in the world of the film that I think is crucial to the fear factor in these kinds of movies. Because, if you're able to dissociate yourself too easily with the world of the film it becomes easier to... it becomes harder to imagine yourself in that kind of same circumstances and the more real it is the more scarier it is and they had a knack for that.

"It was important in this movie, because my character is not involved so much in the horror element of the story and so it's really important that the scenes with Jessica to, you know, play out in a specific and believable way."

The actor says he'd never worked with two directors previously. "I never have. It's all the rage. [laughter] I'm never going to work with one director again. Yeah, I didn't know how that was going to work and I kept asking them, you know, when I met them and they couldn't seem to explain it to me. But once we started it was obvious how it worked, with these two at least, because they're sort of opposite personalities.

"David is a very extroverted sort of charismatic, persuasive guy who, despite his broken English, has an easy time talking to the actors and to corral everybody on the set and he's very dynamic that way. Xavier is much shyer and quieter and very visual. There was a sort of yin and yang to their dynamic together and they didn't seem to argue much. I think the only time I heard they'd had a fight was when we'd been filming nights all week and Xavier was afraid to have David drive him home because he had nearly crashed the car the night before. Other than that it seemed to go pretty smoothly.

"I spent a lot of time with them. There wasn't much to do in Albuquerque [where much of the film was shot] so we hung around their house most days with our laptops open on the piano trying to find the lyrics to all these songs that we butchered. I got the sense that they'd spent a lot of time together, they'd grown up together for quite a few years and they had very similar taste in movies. When we'd watch things together, they both tended to point out the same kind of visual things that they liked and so they had obviously a kind of easy language and rapport together. I don't know why it's happening so much, I guess it's just like it's such a hard job that once people realize that you can do it with someone else they may as well go ahead. Although apparently they're sharing the fee so..." [laughs]

Remakes of Asian horror movies are nothing new. "The challenge," asserts Nivola, "anytime you're making a movie in a tried and tested genre, is that it brings something that feels different about it and you know, I think, from what I can tell, they've set out to make a movie that — as I was saying before — has some kind of feeling of reality.

"Increasingly, the horror movies that I've seen are devoid of any kind of attempt to create a reality in the film. It's just one ghoulish moment after another and I feel like this was a perfect movie for Jessica, [because] she has ambitions to be taken really seriously as an actress, and she hasn't up until now, had the opportunity to do a role that enabled her to play a real character and to behave in ways that didn't involve action and comic book heroes and all that kind of thing.

"I think the nice thing for her is that you know she's very unadorned [in this role], she's not caked with makeup, she has a very real look and she is such a beautiful girl that, you know, there's something that comes across very natural. There's a feel about the movie that is understated in a way. I think that she's able to talk and behave like a real person, and she does it in a kind of very classy way and a very simple, quiet, understated way. I feel like it's going to be important for her."

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Staci Layne Wilson reporting