New interview with Jessica!

NEW YORK STATE OF MIND: "G21 INTERVIEWS: Jessica Alba"

NEW YORK, NY, USA - Having initially made her mark in "Titanic," director James Cameron's quasi-science fiction TV series "Dark Angel," 23-year-old Jessica Alba makes"Sin City" her true Hollywood debut. Since Robert Rodriguez's comic book-based film "Sin City" is creating such an incredible buzz -- not just for males stars Bruce Willis, Clive Owen and Benicio del Toro -- but also for its cast of hot women such as Rosario Dawson and Alba, who plays a tough stripper with a risqué lasso routine. Not only has such an ensemble come together, but they are wearing some of the hottest, most suggestive outfits seen on screen in a long time, especially for Alba. Though she had previously done a relatively tame (and lame) hip-hop teen dance flick, "Honey," she hasn't been seen being this provocative before.

G21: Did working in front of the green screen (to place the CGI) let you be more creative?

Alba: All I did was go on these little stages and imagine things, but they were in small rooms, so the difference is you still had to shout and project your voice, but everything was little bit bigger and with Robert, it's very specific. He fine-tunes your performance so it's kind of a marriage of film and theater. I'm not very experienced in theater. The only training I ever had was David Mamet's theater company, the Atlantic Theater Company.

G21: How was it to take direction from both Robert and the comic book's creator, Frank Miller?

Alba: It was very self-indulgent because we just got to talk each director's ear off about our characters, and we really like talking about characters we play and ourselves because we're all kind of narcissistic.

G21: After doing all this work, what was it like seeing yourself for first time with the effects in place?

Alba: I just felt like I was a little pea, a little line in this music, and that was beautiful from beginning to end. I wanted to rewind it and see the whole thing all over again because I got to have all the images that I wanted in my mind. It was so visual and overwhelming and all the characters were so specific. It's great.

G21: Can you watch yourself?

Alba: I'm critical of myself, so I'm waiting for my part to be over and can get on with enjoying the movie. That's sort of my thing. It made my skin look nice.

G21: How did you prepare for this movie, learning the lasso, and doing the dancing that you did? Alba: I work out anyway just because it's healthy to work out and women have health problems; especially in my family. So I do it anyway and I went to strip clubs to see how strippers do it. I realized that I wanted a choreographer and Robert said no, and I was like "Ahhhh, OK" and he's like "Just feel it. We're going to play music and you're just going to feel it."

G21: Robert had Salma Hayek do the same in "Dusk 'Til Dawn."

Alba: Salma Hayek in "Dusk Til Dawn" did the sexiest dance I've ever seen on camera ... ever. And he's like, "It'll be like that", and I was like, "Like that? Are you serious? I have to live up to something." Like it's iconic, there hasn't been a sexier dance ever, and she wasn't naked.

G21: She was very nervous too?

Alba: And she was gorgeous. My heart was beating so fast. I was so nervous. And then I had some Texans teach me how to rope and lasso.

G21: In the comic book your character was topless. Why did you want to play the character and not do it topless?

Alba: She was bottomless too. I wanted to do this movie because Robert Rodriguez was directing it, first and foremost. I didn't really know it was a comic book when I read the sides, when I saw that he was directing something. I just tell my agent every month, "What is Robert doing?" And Lee, one of my agents, has a great relationship with Robert so he said, "You got an opportunity." And I was like, "Excellent."

I took that opportunity and ran with it. I auditioned the old fashioned way, went in for the casting director, put myself on tape and he had to approve. And it was like a week of "Does he think I suck? I don't care if I get the role. I just don't want Robert to think I suck." And he didn't, so he came down and I read with him and I looked at the graphic novel and saw all the pictures. I then found out she was a stripper and was bottomless and topless and nudity was an option.

G21: Was it really an option?

Alba: Absolutely. Robert said that we could do it if we wanted to and obviously it would have been more authentic. But I felt like dancing around with a lasso and chaps was going be sexy enough. For me, being nude, would have been distracting and I really couldn't be bottomless for my dad. He would disown me. He would freak out.

G21: Your relationship with Bruce Willis' character was weird; he was both a father figure and possible lover?

Alba: Nancy doesn't think of him as a father, she thinks of him as her knight in shining armor. So I just came at it from that, and she just waited until she was old enough to really be in love with him and have that relationship completely. She always looked to him as her soulmate from the beginning. She's kind of an old soul from when she's a little child, talking to him and reasoning with him, saying that she's trying everything and going to write him [when he went to prison for saving her] so I didn't think it was creepy at all.

G21: Is making "The Fantastic Four" very different?

Alba: Doing "The Fantastic Four" couldn't be more different. "Fantastic Four" is a family movie. I play a scientist, who has a problem expressing her emotions, and her DNA was altered and when she does express her emotions she goes invisible. So when she's screaming she goes invisible, when she's having a melt-down she goes invisible, and is completely frustrated. And the man that she's in love with ignores her and she goes invisible. So that's very frustrating. It's a huge movie for Fox and there's a lot of pressure that it does well. So, it really couldn't be more different.

G21: What about "Into The Blue"?

Alba: I did "Into The Blue" a long time ago. Jim Cameron had been talking about maybe doing a comic book that involved scuba diving. Fathom is sort of like this girl underwater. I had been talking to him about possibly doing something like that, and this movie came up and I hadn't scuba dived in seven months, and they were going to give me a decent paycheck to scuba dive in the Bahamas for five months; I was like "cool". Honestly, that's why I did that.

G21: You have had three major movies getting made and coming out in the next few months. Things are changing for you this year?

Alba: I've been doing this for 11 years so it definitely isn't an overnight thing. I don't entertain or act for myself or else I would just act in front of the mirror, so I actually like having an audience and people being affected by stuff that I'm in. I love entertaining and they all happen to come out this year and the more, the merrier.

G21: What is significant about being Latin?

Alba: I don't know about Benicio's experience, but it's a lot different for me because I only used to get breakdowns for Maria, the janitor's daughter, messing around with the white kid and it was such a classiest bizarre thing 'cause I grew up in the United States. My mother's white, my father's Mexican and my father is very dark and my mother is very fair. I came out how I did and they always want to pigeonhole you and it's bizarre; we're just people living in society. I never think about it until people make me think about it.

This industry has definitely made me think about me being a Latin girl, up until I was 18 and I did "Dark Angel" and Jim [Cameron] basically said, "You are the future of the race." That basically was what Dark Angel was -- where you are just a mixture and you're not going to talk about it. It's done and you are just a human being going through the struggle of whatever you are going through on your journey. Now it's very liberating working with people that aren't going to pigeonhole you as the janitor's daughter.

G21: Is there a boom now for Latin women on the big screen?

Alba: I don't know. It's not like there's always been Hispanic artists out there, but now it's JLo and her clothing line and Eva Mendes getting a lot of lead roles in certain things. It's just more women that are actually part of what's happening right now and there are African Americans, Latinas, Asians with Lucy Liu. It's a female boom if nothing else, and I actually do feel part of that. I feel very fortunate because I was 17 when I signed on to do "Dark Angel" and not a lot of girls can be the lead of a one hour drama like that.

G21: Were you surprised that the television show got cancelled so quickly?

Alba: Yeah.. We were picked up on Friday, and on Monday, we were cancelled.

G21: Was there any explanation?

Alba: Politics.

G21: Do you think you'll ever go back to playing Max?

Alba: Jim [Cameron] talked to me about doing a movie, so I don't know. I think that it's done. It was so hard trying to keep up the integrity of the story and the character, with the studio and the network. So, I don't know. I don't think so.

G21: Who do you look up to in your own life?

Alba: My grandmother and my family, my parents. My grandmother had five chi ldren, she ran a restaurant that they owned and put my grandfather through college without even thinking twice about it. So, I think that she's an incredible woman.

Source: http://g21.net/nystate49.htm