Don McKellar’s Vision For Blindness

When Toronto actor-director Don McKellar read Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness, he immediately recognized its cinematic potential.

“It’s not often I read books and think they’d make great movies but I felt that right from the first image, which is also the beginning of the movie, a guy going blind in the middle of a busy intersection,” McKellar tells CityNews.ca in a recent interview outside Musa restaurant. “I just thought it was so arresting. I felt that the book was about sight – it was about seeing, and not seeing, and that was something movies are about – vision.”

The project, eight years in the making, involved obtaining the film rights to the book, and finding the right director, which they did in Fernando Meirelles. The man who helmed such critically acclaimed fare as City of God and The Constant Gardener was seen as a good fit for the film, which centers around a mysterious epidemic of white blindness.

“Fernando’s such a visual director. It was easy to see the movie through his eyes,” McKellar notes. “This is a kind of screenplay that you needed, when you read it, to imagine a good, visual director. It had to be inventive (as well), and Fernando is all that.”

Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Danny Glover, and Alice Braga play characters that have been struck down by the illness, and Julianne Moore portrays a woman who pretends to be blind in order to remain with her husband but who can actually see.

The most frightening and disturbing aspect of the film isn’t the epidemic itself but what follows – as conditions deteriorate inside the decommissioned asylum where the infected are being housed, the worst of human behaviour rears its ugly head.

“From the beginning of time blindness has been a metaphor for other lacks of vision, and it’s almost impossible to avoid that,” McKellar says. “The blindness (in the film) is just a disease, it’s not to punish people for ethical shortcomings but it makes you think about other kinds of blindness, certainly. About lack of foresight in other ways, politically and morally.”

Known primarily for the films he’s directed (Last Night, Childstar) and acted in (Highway 61, Roadkill), McKellar is also an accomplished screenwriter, having penned the scripts for 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould and The Red Violin, among others.

One of the challenges in adapting Saramago’s work, he says, was conveying the beauty of what was on the printed page.

“Normally, when you adapt a book you have a lot of internal monologues and there aren’t a lot of those (in Blindness). It’s quite external,” he explains. “There’s a lot of action, so it’s easy to find the story, but it’s hard to suggest the sophistication of the storytelling. If you just transcribe it, it becomes very brutal and I wanted to show the poetry and the intelligence of the book.”

And though Blindness is exceedingly bleak at times in its portrayal of the human response to adverse conditions, McKellar feels there’s a comforting side as well.

“There is a lot of optimism, and I did try to put that in the screenplay,” he maintains. “I see it as very humane and with a lot of hope.”