Though it most certainly would’ve squashed a lesser actor, the burden of playing the one person who can actually witness a society’s descent into squalour, cruelty and degradation during an epidemic of sightlessness falls on one of America’s most capable performers. Julianne Moore plays a doctor’s wife who inevitably takes on a leadership role due to her gift (or curse) in the new film version of José Saramago’s novel Blindness, skilfully adapted by a Brazilian and Canadian team that includes director Fernando Mereilles and actor-screenwriter Don McKellar. Shot largely in São Paulo and Guelph, Blindness makes its North American premiere at TIFF. The red-headed Far From Heaven and Boogie Nights star spoke with EYE WEEKLY shortly after the movie’s world premiere at Cannes in May.

Did you feel like you were shouldering an awful lot of responsibility with this role?
It’s daunting particularly when you read the book and you realize the story is told through this woman. A lot is written like, “She thought she would do this, but then she decided no, she wouldn’t do that.” I’m like, “How do I dramatize that?” But what’s amazing about Fernando and the reason I wanted to work with him is that he tells these stories in these great, big, sweeping cinematic gestures where you see this swath of humanity yet he paints with this teeny, tiny brush. He’ll stay on a face or register an eye flick — every tiny gesture is meaningful to him. He’s interested in subtlety in a way that not a lot of people are. Because I knew that, I just tried to be in it minute-by-minute and step-by-step and not get ahead. I wasn’t thinking about my arc. It’s all in those tiny steps.

Did the fact that the story takes place in no specific place present another challenge?
What’s difficult is there is a tone in the book and the screenplay that comes from it being deliberately nowhere. You don’t know what country it is so you don’t actually have any guidelines, especially in terms of speech. It was tough but important to maintain that — it can’t be too specific to anywhere. That’s the difficulty when you’re making a fable: there is an artificiality to it, so there’s sometimes an artificiality in the language itself. Sometimes it sounds a little off or stilted or makes you think, “Where are we? Why are we speaking this way?”

And yet do you think all that non-specificity allows the movie to show something larger about the world now?
I always say movies don’t predict the future, they merely reflect the culture. In the last five or even 10 years, there’s been so much that’s happened politically and socially and in terms of natural disasters and man-made disasters, it’s kind of been overwhelming for us. There’s this huge sense of anxiety in our global culture — this film definitely reflects all that.

So what is it trying to teach us?
I think it becomes reductive if it ends up being like an “issue film.” It’s not like we’re really proposing a solution. It’s just like, “Let’s ruminate on it.” That’s definitely what’s so moving about it. It allows you to participate in it — in a sense, we’re all participating in it every single day. We’re all feeling pushed to this place. The film allows you to feel part of something, not to feel separate from it. You don’t feel, “That’s happening over there and it’s not my issue.” It involves all of us.