Blindness is based on a book by Jose Saramago, the Portuguese author. Is Jose Saramago like the most widely-read author in Brazil? Kind of. Not everyone has read him, actually. But because he is a Portuguese writer his books come out very quickly in Brazil. Paulo Coelho’s probably the biggest. But Blindness was one of Saramago’s biggest novels in Brazil. I really loved the book, obviously. I had read it in 2004. I really liked the book. I spoke to Fernando and the project kind of got started this way.Can you talk about the story a little, through Saramago’s vision? I think it’s the way that Saramago writes, it pulls you in… it’s very personal. You create your own world from it, your own sensibilities, and your emotions go along with it; they’re carried by his words. There are not a lot of paragraphs. Yeah, it’s super dense! I remember staring at monolithic blocks of text! He writes without soft stops. Yeah, it’s really dense! You fall deeply within the story and get into his world. Saramago takes a feeling and really concentrates it. The way he tells that story particularly shows how we’re not seeing. Was Blindness shot entirely in Sao Paulo? Not just there. We were also in Toronto and Montevideo. How do you act blind? That’s very interesting. We watched videos for the technical parts of it. We rehearsed with blindfolds on, then took them off, then put them back on, etc…. Fernando really wanted us to understand the idea of it, he wanted it to look and feel natural, obviously. Is seeing the most important of all the senses? For myself, I believe a lot in the eyes, and in the connection between the actors through the eyes. So it was interesting, having that challenge. You wore the special contacts that make you blind? Did everyone else do as well? We decided to be without them 80 percent of the time. There were some scenes for which we decided it was better, especially the emotional scenes, because it was important to focus, in case you happened to look at something by accident. Meirelles used a lot of whiteness for the film adaptation. It’s interesting, because going in I would have expected more black, more darkness. Well, Saramago’s book describes blindness as white, as a milky whiteness, like seeing through a glass of milk. It’s very poetic. Your character, the girl with the dark glasses is a prostitute? Did you go into this movie with the intent to play a blind woman or a prostitute? The character didn’t have a first name. Saramago never names his characters. He treats his characters as equals, in a way. He doesn’t want to limit the characters. The prostitute was one of the few characters with a little bit of a past, you know some things about her. We didn’t want to create too many impositions on the character, that was very important. Were you at the last Cannes Festival for the film? Yes, I was there. That was my third time, but second only in person. I couldn’t go one year. The first time was for Lower City.