Jessica Alba gave an insight into her busy life as an actor, entrepreneur, mom and, most recently, prolific producer in a revealing talk about her career at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia on Friday.
On her second visit to RSIFF, Alba took part in the festival’s “In Conversations With” series, and broached all aspects of her professional life, including sharing her thoughts on The Fantastic Four film franchise (both old and new), but the emphasis was on her recent work as a producer with her two-year-old production company Lady Metalmark Entertainment. Asked why she wanted to produce, Alba said she had spent 12 years on her business, the personal care giant The Honest Company, and after handing over the reigns to a new CEO, she was left with space to return to the entertainment industry. “I [wanted] to go back into the thing that really is my passion, and that’s storytelling. I think there’s nothing more powerful than a medium that opens people’s minds, [that] open people’s hearts.”
Pushed on why she felt the need to create a production company, Alba added that when she was growing up, she “didn’t see a ton of diversity in storytelling,” but she was at pains not to apportion blame for that situation. “I don’t blame Hollywood for the reason why [you didn’t have diversity]. You have a lot of white guys in charge, and they feel most comfortable telling stories through their lens. They are just comfortable with that.”
Alba said women in leadership roles in corporate America, entertainment and politics were still underrepresented, and she sees that as “white space opportunity.” “[Women] are 50 percent of the population, we control 70 percent of the household income. I believe that we need to have more entertainment that speaks to us,” adding that she was looking for entertainment that has “maybe a little less of women that need to be saved all the time.”
Through her production company, Alba has enacted change that reinforces her words. For the 2024 Netflix action hit, Trigger Warning, in which Alba starred in and produced, she revealed that the majority of the key department heads and creative leaders on the production were women, including director Mouly Surya and cinematographer Zoë White, as well as the people dealing with casting, production design, art direction, set decoration, costume design and makeup.
As well as the way women were portrayed in entertainment, Alba was also keen to change perceptions of Latino people through her production company. She said the stories of Latinos “are still very much defined by a bias of what we are and who we are. There are a lot of stigmas and stereotypes around Latinos. [Hollywood] really loves to tell stories about cartels, drugs, and domestic workers. We’re a lot more than that, but again, if that’s the only way that they want to see us, and that’s the only way they do see us, it’s very difficult for them to expand their minds. So it takes people like me, where I’m in a position to be a producer, to be able to support filmmakers that look like me, that look like you all here in the audience, to be able to tell really authentic human stories.”
Alba also revealed a bit of news, albeit scant on details. The actress said she was working with her Sin City and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For director Robert Rodriguez again on a new project, “a really fun action movie” that was “a family dramedy, inside of a heist movie, with an all Latino cast.” Alba added that it was actually herself and actor Michael Peña who first pitched the project to Rodriguez, and that they were now in the process of pitching it to studios.
Elsewhere, Alba revealed that she had been working on a project with Saudi Arabia’s most famous female filmmaker, Haifaa al-Mansour, for a few years. “We have something that we’re cooking together, a really tender and beautiful story. It’s a tender story about an aging parent and a daughter,” she said of the project with the director behind Wadjda and Mary Shelley.
The conversation then moved on to Alba’s past work, focusing on the key projects of her now four-decade career. The crowd was keen to hear details of her casting for the James Cameron TV show Dark Angel which catapulted her into the mainstream, and there were also fond reminiscing about Honey. But when asked about her two Fantastic Four films, Alba revealed that she enjoyed the experience overall of playing Sue Storm, there was one “awful” nude scene on the bridge in the first film that she said dreaded filming and found “humiliating.” “I grew up with a pretty conservative family, and I am a pretty modest person. I dreaded that scene for weeks. I have a lot of whiplash from those days,” she said.
Asked if she had seen Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Alba said she hadn’t had a chance but plans to do so soon. “I usually watch those movies with my kids, and if Sonic was out, my son wants to watch it 85 times in a row. When it comes to movies that are for the family, my kids dominate what we watch for sure. But I have to convince him because we have to see it! I love Marvel, and they’re so fun,” she said.
The Red Sea Film Festival runs until to Dec. 13.
