14 DAY TRIAL // Either Jessica Alba has deliberately set out to annoy everybody in the industry or she really doesn’t realize her words can be upsetting. In a recent interview with Elle magazine, the actress blames her past movie flops on the directors she’s worked with.
Also recently, Alba said in another interview that all great actors improvise in front of the camera because the material given to them by screenwriters is not good enough.
She even went as far as to say that most of the good actors she’d met or worked with did this, prompting a response via an open letter from one of the most acclaimed screenwriter of the day, John August.
Now, Jessica is taking aim at another category of industry people: the directors. Though she has countless fans and has been praised for her funny side and good looks, overall, Alba’s films so far have been flops.
“Jessica Alba’s previous forays into funny have never been quite as promising. […] Of course, Alba’s too savvy to trash any big names, and perhaps too kind to go overboard in assigning blame. She takes accountability where she needs to,” Elle writes.
“I know I haven’t been swimming in the deep end with some of the movies I’ve done. I wasn’t trying to. I knew what they were,” Alba says. As for why these movies flopped, she has one thing to say: “First-time directors.”
The star then goes to say that some directors can be so bad as to cripple her performance just because they want her to be “pretty” all the time, like was the case with the second “Fantastic 4” when she had to do a scene when she cries.
“I remember when I was dying in Silver Surfer. The director was like, ‘It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry? Cry pretty, Jessica.’ He was like, ‘Don’t do that thing with your face. Just make it flat. We can CGI the tears in’,” Alba says.
Because of the director’s words, Jessica felt the urge to get up and just leave everything behind, quit the industry because she’d just realized she “hated it.”
“And I’m like, But there’s no connection to a human being. And then it all got me thinking: Am I not good enough? Are my instincts and my emotions not good enough? Do people hate them so much that they don’t want me to be a person? [...] And so I just said, ‘[Expletive] it. I don’t care about this business anymore’,” the actress adds.
She then started a family, which, in turn, has left a very big mark on her career: she now knows that time on set means time away from her daughter so the only demand she makes before saying yes to a movie offer is that it come with a good director.
“The time I’m not spending with my kid has to be worth it,” she says. Thus, Jessica Alba has set out to prove to the world she’s a good actress.