Jessica Alba tells Steve Pratt she studied a blind singer to prepare for her challenging role of a violinist who sees horrors when her sight is restored.

SCARY movie The Eye gave Fantastic Four star Jessica Alba two big challenges - playing a blind girl and playing the violin.

As Sydney Wells, she finds herself seeing bizarre and horrific images after a double corneal transplant to restore her sight.

Her research included visiting two blindness orientation centres and learning basic Braille reading and to walk with a cane. "I learned how people live in their homes independently and self-sufficiently, being blind, " says the actress, who is expecting her first child.

"I labelled everything in my house so I could walk freely around without sight. So I did a lot of practice that way and also spent a lot of time with a woman who's around my age and a musician herself - a vocalist - and has been blind since she was three. She travels the world on her own, doesn't have a guide or a dog, is doing a Masters programme at Boston University, takes taxis, subways, planes, everything. She's living her life like anyone else, but she's blind.

"Just observing her and spending time with her, she was pretty much my inspiration for my character."

That preparation helped Alba get around while filming scenes where she wears opaque contact lens and the post-surgery contacts that covered her entire eye, leaving her with no peripheral vision or even partial vision.

Learning the violin was very hard. She calls it "the most difficult instrument on the planet". She did six months of violin training with three different teachers, women who'd been playing since they were young. "They all play in orchestras and are accomplished musicians and they still practise eight hours a day. I just simply don't have that amount of dedication, to be honest, " admits Alba.

She practised the violin, still wearing her Sue Storm outfit, between takes while filming the second Fantastic Four movie. "I was hacking away on my violin in front of my poor animals. They probably suffered the most, my dogs, because they were in the trailer with me all the time and they'd either cover their ears or run to the back of the trailer they disliked it so much."

The Eye continues the Hollywood trend of remaking hit Asian horror movies. This one is directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud, who made the French film Them. For Alba, the role of Sydney was the most interesting female role she'd read for some time. "A lot of these horror movies are girls running away from a guy who's going to torture them, or is torturing them, or kidnapping them, " she says.

"There's much more of a victim stance when it comes to the female character, and usually involves crying and screaming. This was playing blind, a violinist and someone losing their mind. I thought that was much more interesting to play than crying and screaming."

The release of The Eye follows hot on the heels of another thriller, Awake, in which she's in hospital too - although her fiance is the patient, finding he can feel everything that's going on during his heart transplant operation. "It's purely coincidence there's surgery in both films. They happen to be coming out at the same time, " she says.

Her pregnancy coincided with plans to have a rest after working for nearly two years non-stop. "I was going to take a break after finishing The Love Guru and coincidentally I was pregnant, so it just kinda worked out. It was during the (Hollywood writers) strike so things were slow in the business anyway, The timing just seemed to fall into place. I have one more film coming out in the summer, but other than that I'm not really sure what the future holds."

She believes that being a mother will change the roles she takes. To say such a lifechanging experience isn't going to influence decisions would be crazy, she feels. "I'm already a different person and the baby hasn't come yet, so I'm sure that when the baby is here my priorities will shift even more. Spending time away from your child and at work has to be well worth it."

Since starring in James Cameron's TV series, Dark Angel, she's had a good run of screen roles in films including Sin City, Fantastic Four, Into The Blue and Good Luck Chuck. But she doesn't worry that her motherhood will result in losing her place on the Hollywood list. "I'm not too concerned, I know how fickle and silly this business is. It takes one movie to put you back up and you can have five that are great movies that noone sees and you're down in the gutter again and you can't pay someone to give you a film.

"It's so fickle that you must live on with your life and keep your priorities straight, otherwise you'll just go insane."

Alba feels she's only just starting as she reckons most actresses hit their stride in their 30s and 40s. "I'm hoping that will be the case for me, " she says. "This is the beginning of my career, my journey, into this business. I've done many different things, I'm hoping it it will continue to stay exciting and the variety will be there.

"This year in particular I want to get something in development to produce. That's my next goal I'm setting. It would be nice to do stuff that isn't so commercial and have to rely on box office so much. For me as an actress it's to have more creative, more complex characters and you can make bolder decisions and not have a studio telling you what to do."