CONTRARY to the charming innocence of her on screen persona (“America’s sweetheart” and all that), Sandra Bullock is a lady who knows what she wants. As a newcomer just beginning to make ripples among the Hollywood casting agencies, she was invited to audition for a thriller called
Speed. Things were going well as the producer, Joel Silver, sat her down and asked: “Do you want to do this film?”
“I remember going, ‘I would like to do it but I would love to talk about the character,’ and it was almost like I had said the biggest joke,” she recalls. When Silver finished laughing he gave her the role that made her career.
Move forward a few years to the making of the turkey that was the sequel, Speed 2: Cruise Control, in which the female star had more than a sneaking suspicion that this time things were going badly awry. She would be out bobbing in the Caribbean ocean surrounded by cameras, yelling into her mobile phone over the where-abouts of a minor essential to the film-making process - the script.
“They kept saying trust me, trust me,” .laments Bullock. “And as an actor you do want to trust, you want to go to a director and say, ‘Here I am.’ Sadly no one blames the director, it’s whoever is doing press for the film who kind of gets their ass kicked.”
These days Bullock is as much a mogul as she is a sweetheart. Seated in a swanky London hotel room, the 38-year-old actress exudes an unmistakable air of resilience. While she’s famed for her kooky, tomboyish appeal, underneath lies a hard interior. Not that she’s difficult, far from it. There remains something very gracious about her in person. Even before a single question has been asked, she is sending herself up, sinking back into the hotel sofa and swinging her legs in the air as if the whole thing is about to swallow her.
She’s in town to spread the word on her latest movie, Two Weeks Notice, a safely packaged romantic comedy in which she and Hugh Grant walk the prickly path to true love - a project she put together as producer (after taking that role on Miss Congeniality). And when she says producing, she means producing.
“I have executive produced; when I didn’t have time, I oversaw the script and the cast and made sure I was there if needed. From the minute [DIRECTOR]Marc Lawrence wrote the script, we .developed it, we got the people we wanted, what kind of budget, which studio we wanted, casting, location scouting, hiring a director of photography ... It’s about having real control not cruise control.”
She laughs at her quip, but the process was exacting. “You kind of take on the general role, which doesn’t help the acting much.”
Bullock the producer and Bullock the actress didn’t always see eye to eye. “It was every single day. Bullock the actress wanted 12 more takes and I was going, ‘We need to get out of here or we are going to lose the location over here.’ Just sometimes the actress-producer could ask for things a normal producer couldn’t.”
The effort has paid off. Two Weeks Notice has been a big financial success in America, with the public won over by the fusion of cinema’s two most charming twitterers.
It was around five years ago that Grant and Bullock decided they would like to do a movie together. Numerous meetings and abortive scripts later they agreed that Two Weeks Notice was the vehicle. They really hit it off. “When I first met him I thought that I like this person as much as I like the work.”
The two have played the game for the gossip columns, skipping across the stage hand-in-hand at last year’s Oscars. But if the rumours of a romance were unfounded, Bullock and Grant were only too happy to encourage them as a marketing ploy. “Hugh is better at it than I am,” she says. “And I like watching him do it. I had never, ever been in the spotlight as I was making this film. It just came with a lot of attention.” She says that any time the pair went anywhere they were either deemed to be in love, hating each other, “or about to have children”.
Such newspaper interest should hardly be novel to Bullock. While the actress has managed to keep her romantic life carefully hidden, each movie has generated rumours of trysts. With Speed 2 it was Jason Patric, with A Time to Kill it was Matthew McConaughey. Bullock serves as Hollywood’s perpetual bridesmaid whom the gossip columnists are just dying to marry off.
Reluctant to let the subject of her relationship with Grant go, she adds: “The reason we got along so well is that we never consummated the relationship. Why can’t a male or female get along in the workplace? I guess its unheard of in Hollywood.”
As popular as this Virginia-born actress may be - and she is still the second most bankable actress in the world after Julia Roberts - she has never had much time for the Hollywood scene. The daughter of two opera singers (she denies she has any singing talent herself), Bullock prefers to decamp to her ranch near Austin, Texas, .between her increasingly infrequent movies to dabble with her sideline of architectural restoration. “I have an office in LA, but I just don’t need it.”
After this day of promotion, she has to give the nod to the artwork for the DVD release, and then the film is over and done with. “After today my life goes back to private,” she concludes.
Like most stars, Bullock has experienced the ups and downs of success. For every Speed there is a Speed 2; for every new movie there is the danger of stereotyping. These days it seems that audiences only accept Bullock only in comedies - the thrillers 28 Days and Murder by Numbers made little impression at the box office.
“So not my problem,” she almost shouts. “When I did the first Speed I was the action girl, then I did a thriller and I was the thriller girl. Then I wanted to do a comedy and I had to beg for an audition. I’ve learnt that success comes in a very prickly package. Whether you just accept it or not is up to you. It’s what you choose to do with it that matters.”
And if there is one thing that Sandra Bullock doesn’t want, it’s that tag “America’s sweetheart”. She does a mock-exasperated look before answering. “There are a lot of sweethearts - I didn’t pick it. I take it because the people know that I love what I do and I’m lucky to be doing it, and I have a great time.
“With the people I work with sometimes I am not so sweet because the people are not .so great. But I’ll take it. ‘America’s bitch’ ... .That does not have quite the same ring to it, now does it?”
