On the Learning Curve
In “Hope Floats,” Sandra Bullock plays a young woman who peaked early in her life and couldn’t maintain the altitude--a prom queen and cheerleader in high school, she’s forced to return to her tiny Texas hometown in disgrace when her comfy life collapses, spectacularly, on a cheesy TV talk show. Upon her return, she discovers that few are impressed with her past glories.
Bullock knows the feeling.
For one thing, she too enjoyed the perks that come with being a cheerleader. “My girlfriend and I were not the coolest chicks, and we tried out and a P.E. teacher was the judge and she either felt sorry for us or saw that we could hold up the others at the bottom of the pyramid, so we got in,” Bullock remembers. “And from that day on, I felt like I’d been given the golden ring, because all of a sudden, it was like I walked outside and birds were singing, everyone was so nice to me, and for a year it was really great.
“Then, my senior year, I looked at myself; I was like, ‘What have you done?’ Because my mother was, like, ‘Don’t do it, don’t conform.’ So my senior year I kind of woke up a little bit, and I was really shocked at what I’d done because I’d conformed so much. At first it was so I could see my boyfriend at his wrestling matches, and then it became that I was enamored with this clique status--I’d entered this world that had been so shut off to me, and toward the end of my senior year, I just kinda went ballistic and abandoned that and went back to being a drama geek.”
If, as Martin Mull famously observed, show-biz is just high school with money, then Bullock is back in her senior year, abandoning the popular kids and the cheerleading squad, no longer trying so hard to fit in. She learned the hard way--with “Speed 2: Cruise Control” last year and other high-profile failures--that doing what it takes to hang in the hippest circles doesn’t always work out the way you planned.
“My learning process started about 2 1/2 years ago, I think,” says Bullock, 33. “Before, my career was in New York, doing my small films. I wasn’t making much money, and my films weren’t making any money.”
That was before she stole the show from Sylvester Stallone in “Demolition Man” in 1993, then hopped a bus with Keanu Reeves and became a household name with “Speed” the next year. Box-office successes “While You Were Sleeping” and “The Net” in 1995 soon transformed her into America’s latest favorite Girl Next Door, hauling in eight-figure paydays for movies she now concedes were mistakes.
“Two If by Sea,” a 1996 romantic caper comedy with Denis Leary, she says, was butchered due to her presence--”While You Were Sleeping” had just hit big, so the director was forced to mold his movie into an ersatz replica of that success, a transplanting of sensibilities that refused to take hold. Likewise, “In Love and War,” Sir Richard Attenborough’s 1996 drama of Ernest Hemingway’s experiences in World War I, was compromised by the studio’s insistence on catering to fans of its stars.
“The biggest disaster of that film was casting me in it, casting Chris O’Donnell and myself. Because the studio wanted ‘The Chris and Sandy Show,’ thinking people would go see that. We watched as Richard would be fighting tooth and nail and I kept thinking, ‘Why hire Richard Attenborough if you’re not gonna allow him to tell the brutality of the story? You have to let him tell it.’ If I’d known at the time, I could’ve said to them, ‘Let’s not do this, let’s stick with what we have,’ but the studio was afraid. Unbelievably shot war sequences and operating room scenes were cut because they were too dark or too bloody. I can’t go back, but I can say, ‘I worked with Attenborough and learned a tremendous amount.’
“The reasons for being where I found myself weren’t justifiable for me,” Bullock admits of her wild success. “I couldn’t understand why I was getting all this attention--it didn’t really seem earned. When your films are successful, all of a sudden it brought on this onslaught of stuff. I keep trying to find a more eloquent word, but there’s no other word--it’s stuff, clutter, that you don’t need, but you didn’t have it before.” And deciding ultimately what you do with that “stuff” is the true test of one’s mettle.
“Now, I’m in a place that I understand, I feel like I’m at the beginning again,” Bullock says. “The first ‘Speed’ took me from there, and the last ‘Speed’ brought me back to the beginning. Everyone sort of went away and didn’t care what I was doing for a while because I’m no longer the hot number, because my film didn’t make $100 million.”
Not that she’s complaining: “Actually, it was the best thing that ever happened to me, in a very odd way. It set me right back. Everything I went into from then on was with sheer determination of making it as good as I possibly could. I’m gonna put myself on the line, because I’m there anyway. People blame you even though you had no part in other aspects of the film, so I said, ‘If I’m gonna be held responsible, I’d like to be responsible.’ ”
Hence, she’s taken it upon herself to get involved in behind-the-camera production. She serves as executive producer on “Hope Floats,” which opens May 29, and, as veteran producer Lynda Obst, who worked with Bullock on the film, points out, the actress didn’t just assume an easy extra title for the credit sequences; she put in the work.
“She’s a born producer, for good or bad,” Obst says. “I don’t know if that’s exactly a compliment.”
Bullock is coming clean, searching her soul and taking full responsibility for past career missteps while relaxing in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont, which she’s never before visited. “No wonder people come here to have affairs,” she marvels. “It’s got that air of history, where you know a lot of people did things they weren’t supposed to do.”
Having fled L.A. for the more soulful environs of Austin, Texas, she’s back in town shooting “Practical Magic” with Nicole Kidman for director Griffin Dunne. Next month, she begins filming “Forces of Nature” with Ben Affleck, and she’ll end the year in Australia, producing a $3-million independent feature based on a short film she paid for out of her own pocket. She also contributed her vocal talents to “The Prince of Egypt,” DreamWorks’ first animated epic, due at Christmas.
Despite showing up for an interview in basic L.A. black--loose-fitting sweater over a T-shirt, pants and patent-leather shoes--Bullock must be the most unpretentious big star Hollywood has to offer. What else can you say about someone who spent Oscar night at her Austin home cooking and attacking her friends with those little white exploding caps. “We were laughing so hard, we saw maybe three speeches,” she says. “I had to call people and ask them what happened.”
Moreover, she’s such an avid and unapologetic air-guitarist that Harry Connick Jr., who plays her love interest in “Hope Floats,” gave her a guitar at the wrap party.
She is uncommonly loquacious, speaking volumes while circling a small, key insight. She’ll speak seriously and touchingly about how adult life is centered on dealing with loss before suddenly, apropos of nothing, jokingly insisting she suffers from Alzheimer’s, “because I cannot find my keys to save my life.”
After a profile on Bullock ran in Rolling Stone last summer, a reader wrote asking, “Is there any person in Hollywood more boring than Sandra Bullock?” It’s come to this: Plain old well-adjusted normalcy is dull, while bad behavior or provocative comments make for good ink. Heck, Bullock won’t even bad-mouth her “Speed” director, the notoriously hard-driving Jan De Bont, who’s become known for blithely placing his stars in harm’s way (Bullock forged ahead despite her fear of water while shooting the waterlogged “Speed 2”). She simply says, “That’s why I love Jan--he never thinks, ‘Oh God, she might lose a limb.’ ”
She does, however, concede that the stardom afforded her by “Speed” has proven a double-edged sword.
“ ‘Speed’ became my nemesis in an odd way,” she says, explaining how she was persuaded to do the sequel before a palatable screenplay sputtered through anyone’s word processor. “I kind of got caught up in the nostalgic excitement of Jan and Keanu and all the festivities of that--how could we go wrong, because it’s such a great chemistry there and it’s all about this interaction that made it great?”
Reeves’ infamous exit from the sequel, she declares, was “the smartest thing he ever did.” She knew the film was a dud “the minute I saw it,” which made schlepping through interviews a special brand of torture. “You can’t lie and say you aren’t disappointed because the experience I had was not up there. I just sat there and said, ‘This isn’t gonna do well.’ It’s one of those things where you read a great book and they turned it into a movie and they destroyed the fantasy of it--why? It worked so well in that form; why did you want to stretch it and see how far you can take it?
“I felt like we were hung out to dry because nobody watched our backs,” she says. “The studio executives admitted, ‘We have no idea, we never know.’ And once you work with them on that level, where people admit they don’t know, you feel so much better because you always think they know something you don’t.”
Gena Rowlands, who plays Bullock’s eccentric mother in “Hope Floats,” was impressed by the actress’ poise as “Speed 2” sunk from sight while she was working on another project. “She was amazingly mature,” Rowlands says. “It’s very hard when a film you’ve worked on doesn’t succeed. She didn’t know how it was turning out when she was shooting it. But we were right there at the time [it was getting savage reviews], and she was very frank about it. She’s a very upfront woman.”
“That whole experience enabled me to go into the heads of Fox [which handled both “Speed” and “Hope Floats”], and say, ‘If “HopeFloats” is good, please don’t screw it up, please.’ And they just sat there, like, ‘I can’t believe you’re in here asking us not to screw up your film.’ They still laugh about it. I was talking out of my rear, really, but I was talking out of fear, just saying, ‘This is how I feel about this and I want to do anything I can to help.’ ”
Producer Obst can attest to Bullock’s dedication to “Hope Floats.” In contrast with “Speed 2,” “the master she was serving on ‘Hope Floats’ was the piece, and she was ensured of that. She was jumpy, but, hopefully, all my movies are made like that. She knew that working with me was a safe place to land.”’
Bullock happened upon the “Hope Floats” script by chance--it was written by a friend, Steven Rogers, who had penned it for an actress looking hard at 40, but that didn’t matter--Bullock found it still rang true.
“It examines the period of time where you just feel your life is changing, either you’re growing up or you’ve changed your perspective. It came at the place in my life where I hit a fork in the road and I had to go left because going right was killing me. I remember reading it, and it was like a small breath, it had its own voice.” Obst, who knows that actors who decide to function as producers can be painfully myopic in terms of what’s good for a project, was pleasantly surprised with this collaboration.
“She was extraordinary,” Obst says. “In general, actor-producers can protect their own interests and not facilitate the filmmaking process. Sandy blew my mind--this production was not about her at all. She was at every pre-production, every production meeting. She totally assisted me in selecting Forest Whitaker as the director. She was my partner in rewrites, in shooting, in forging the spirit of the crew. I pride myself in giving great parties, but after seeing her parties, I know I’m a piker. So much about making films is about the morale of the crew.
“She made me look good. If she was a little less beautiful, she could run a studio. Instead of being this forced marriage I was fearing, it turned out to be an arranged marriage where we fell in love.”
Bullock says the trick to producing is knowing when to throw your temper tantrums--”If [executive producer] Mary McLaglen couldn’t do it, if Linda couldn’t do it, they looked to me, and this is where the temperamental actress came in to get her way.”
And Rowlands was won over by Bullock’s acting chops. “I was very impressed with her range,” Rowlands says. “It’s not an easy part--it’s a very peculiar mixture of comedy and heartbreak. She handled it wonderfully. She certainly is not limited. She’s funny and wisecracky, and brave to venture into such a hard part.
“Her work is separate from her personal life,” Rowlands continues. “She’s a very private person, and she enjoys using her humor. She’s extremely pleasant with everybody--she seems to genuinely like people.”
Her director concurs. “She has a great depth of emotion and feelings, a great sense of timing and comedy,” Whitaker says. “She has a deep well of things to share. She’s not afraid to let you in, and she lets you in really deep. She wanted to go places she had not been before, and it’s great to work with someone who’s always challenging herself, who doesn’t want to feel safe.”
The film was shot in Texas, where Obst, and, more recently, Bullock, have found homes. “My French provincial farm Texas stone house,” Bullock says, with a smile, of her home away from Hollywood. “I walked onto this piece of land, this 1930 stone cabin, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’ve had in my head all my life.’ I could reside in L.A. but I couldn’t live here.” On the other hand, she’s enjoying her current stay here. “When you visit L.A. you get to do things instead of being afraid in an odd sort of psychotic way that you’re being trendy,” she says.
To fully understand the filmmaking process, Bullock wrote and directed a short film in 1996, “Making Sandwiches,” in which she starred with her “A Time to Kill” co-star and occasional companion, Matthew McConaughey. It’s the mildly comic tale of a couple who run a sandwich shop with the slogan: “Two slices of white bread with the world of possibilities between ‘em.” In one scene, Bullock hops on a bed to bemuse McConaughey, her face and breasts slathered in shaving cream.
“That’s my joy, making as large an ass of myself as possible and having it captured on celluloid so my children can go, ‘Oh, Mom, why did you do that?’ ” Though she’s modest in terms of estimating “Sandwiches’ ” artistic merits--”it is what it is” is the extent of her evaluation--she describes the film as “the smartest thing I ever did. I decided I have this one story to tell--it’s sad that after 30 years you have just one story to tell, and it’s just a metaphor, really, a funny little stupid story about sandwich building. I wrote the script on the back of a fashion magazine. It was the best education I ever had--I learned everyone else’s job on a film set.”
Bullock says she spends hundreds of thousands of dollars of her own money on short films a year in a chance to recruit talent for her production company, Fortis Films. Likewise, she’s in constant search of promising new musical artists--and living in Austin, she has a good start. She drives around listening to “bags and bags of demo tapes,” and is lately taken to touting her most recent discovery, a bluesy singer named Shannon McNally, whom she is actively lobbying to get onto the “Practical Magic” soundtrack.
‘It’s hard to meet a girl and start up a romance. I’m sure with Sandra Bullock I’ve a better chance. . . . Does someone have JPG’s of Sandra nude? It’s something I’d like to see. . .”
“Sandra, the name swirls and the electrons curl backward to the place from whence they came, a spark flashes across the Web and the same thought enters 10,000 minds, wishing she could be mine to have and to hold and to keep, to honor, and cherish and worship till the day death takes me away.”
--from two separate Bullock
“tributes” on the Internet
Thanks to “The Net,” Bullock is the computer geeks’ dream gal of choice--there are at least 134 Web sites devoted to her on the Internet. At the time of that film’s release, Bullock revealed her interest in Web-surfing, resulting in such lavish attentions as those depicted above.
“I understand [the Internet] and I get lost on it,” Bullock says today, adding, “but it prevented me from actually interacting with human beings, and that scared me.”
Bullock jokes about having seen photos of herself with a technology-enhanced physique. Of her ode-iferous admirers, she jokes,”They don’t know me, or they’d change their tune,” then pauses for an uncharacteristically long silence. “I don’t know, it’s amazing to me how somebody could, A) think it and, B) put it out there and say this is how they feel. You have to cherish that, even if it’s bad song lyrics. My name is involved and it came from somebody out of kindness. They don’t want me dead, so it’s a good thing.
“Right now, life is good,” she says. “I don’t know why. Soon I’ll be going, ‘Please, something, screw it up,’ so I can be proud of it again.”
What would that be--”Speed 3”?
“Never in a million years,” she says, laughing. “That was actually brought up. I said, ‘Even if you offered me $20 million and threatened to stick needles in my eyes, it would still be no.’ ”