TORONTO—Here’s a formula for potential disaster: take dozens of actors from several countries who speak several different languages and put them all into a large space. Then tell them that all but one of them have gone blind. Several bad things could happen. It could turn into a comedy as the actors bump into each other with hardly any ability to communicate. And they could be less than generous, professionally. According to Julianne Moore, who costars in the Canada-Brazil-Japan coproduction Blindness, the director, The Constant Gardener and City of God’s Fernando Meirelles, never lost control.

“I think when you see selfishness amongst an ensemble, it is usually the director’s fault because they haven’t set the tone,” Moore says in a Toronto hotel room. “One of the reasons why Fernando is such a compelling filmmaker is that the themes in his movies are huge. There are really big ideas about who we are on a global level, not just on a national level, and yet the acting is incredibly realistic. Sometimes you think, ”˜How did he shoot that?’ I think he sets the tone, but certainly generosity is also important. I think it happened with us pretty easily for some reason. It may be just the nature of the material. You don’t walk into it thinking ”˜star turn!’ It is an ensemble film, and it is about community, so you are really going to have to misread the script to think that.”

On the set of Blindness—which kicks off the Vancouver International Film Festival tonight (September 25) and opens in theatres next Friday (October 3)—several languages were spoken by a who’s who of international actors that included Mexico’s Gael Garcia Bernal, Canada’s Don McKellar and Maury Chaykin, Brazil’s Alice Braga, and Japan’s Yusuke Iseya and Yoshino Kimura. Moore says that although it’s not a common practice, making films with international casts and filmmakers makes sense.

“International coproductions are the wave of the future for independent film,” she says. “The world is getting smaller and smaller, and now these kinds of productions are easier to get made because of funding reasons. There were only three actors from the United States (Moore, Danny Glover, and Mark Ruffalo), but it felt like a total integration on the set. It was nice to talk to Yoshino because she asked me a lot of questions about what it was like to be an actress in the U.S. and having a family, and I asked her about what it’s like working in Japan. There were a lot of common issues.”

There was also one very dissimilar issue. Moore is sighted in the film but only her husband (Ruffalo) knows. She says that the other actors were focusing on being blind and used her as a sounding board when they were working on their roles. “They were all very nervous, and I spent a lot of time reassuring them that they were great. They were asking me, ”˜Do I look like an idiot?’ because I had the luxury of working without thinking about acting with a disability. I was able to tell them that they were just fine, which they were.”