Interview: Fede Alvarez and Stephen Lang for Don’t Breathe

Stephen Lang on Blindness

Blindness is a condition that we can experience but never know the ultimate in being trapped within it. What preparations as a performer made you empathize most with being blind?

Stephen Lang: There are many other conditions for which that statement would be true, of course. From a side door, you’re actually talking about acting. (laughter) But yes, of course, blindness is a very particular one. It, of course, needs to be approached with great respect for many reasons, not least of which is times we live in.

When you want to learn about something, what is the first thing you do…you go to the internet. What I found – and what surprised me about it, even though it makes perfect sense – there were many instances of blind people doing extraordinary things they. Things that we would think they couldn’t do. They were jumping out of airplanes, skiing, and cooking shows. That’s not what I was looking for, I was learning how “to be blind”. What I was looking at were people have worked through a condition that those of us with sight would look at with a certain amount of despair. What I was seeing was something that was aggressive and positive, and it was just a good, immediate thing to understand.

What other characteristics were you trying to understand in his particular blindness?

Stephen Lang: Well, for one thing, he was once a sighted man, knew what it was like to see and is now deprived of it. There is no question that he went through the bleakest despair, and with the other factors in his life. He’s kind of Job-like in the woe that’s been heaped upon him. In terms of the blindness, at some point you have a choice: I’m either going to jump into the abyss or I’m going to learn to live. If I’m going to live, I’m going to be resilient, and I’m going to be all that I could be. So there is a lot of strength in the guy. He does in some way to begin to positivize his condition.


That leads you to his execution. You do that by first defining the parameters of your life, your realm, your kingdom, and you become so experienced within those walls that you can operate with economy, efficiency and total confidence. In so doing, learning the geography of the house. By doing that, you accomplish two major aims. You project a mastery over your circumstances, which is vital for the whole ethos of the film. The other thing it does is sell the blindness because you’re moving in straight lines, you’re moving with confidence. It’s like playing hyper-sighted, in a way, when you’re actually not

Did the contact lenses help? I know you probably couldn’t see much out of them.

Stephen Lang: They do eliminate a good amount of your vision. In a sense, they operate like that ‘red string’ around your finger to remind you to go buy cantaloupe. “Don’t forget to be blind.” (laughs) And also, we were working in low light conditions, so I would say that somewhere between 50 and 75% of my sight was eliminated in the first place. Then became the leap of faith to eliminate the rest. Also, he [Fede Alvarez] was there all the way to, “Hey, tilt your head,” or, “Jut your chin.” All the stuff that would physically help to see.