Has Sandra met her match?

November 11 2002

It's eight years since Sandra Bullock seized the wheel of a Los Angeles bus and stole Speed from under the nose of Keanu Reeves. The role of feisty, funny Annie Porter made Bullock's name. No one who had seen her sparky, supporting roles in the early 1990s was surprised she became a star. What is surprising is that she has remained one.

Bullock is an A-list woman in Hollywood, despite an astonishing number of mediocre films. Speed 2 was an unmitigated disaster. And who remembers (or even saw) In Love and War, Hope Floats, Practical Magic or Forces of Nature? Not much of a return on a salary in excess of $10 million ($17.65 million) per film.

Now Bullock, 37, has two very different films in her pocket. Murder by Numbers, a moderately cerebral crime thriller, is an attempt to add edge to the cute screen image. In contrast, Two Weeks Notice, has Bullock doing what she does best, romantic comedy, and finally matches her with the master of the genre, Hugh Grant.

Bullock can be heard long before she enters the room - talking in a loud, boisterous rat-a-tat-tat. When she appears, she looks good, much better than on screen: huge hazel eyes, and skin without any trace of the plastic sheen that the camera rather perversely gives her.

Before she's had a chance to sit down, Bullock has already taken her own photograph for a passing fan, holding the woman's Polaroid in front of her beaming face and started to answer my first question.

She's so upfront that I ask immediately about her shaky CV. She doesn't flinch.

"I don't have to maintain that kind of success," she says, "because people in the industry just don't expect it of me. They expect me to have a hit every once in a while - if I'm lucky - and then to go off and 'do my thing', little independents and obscure things. The pressure is far less on me, than on other people, I can be a lot freer in my choices. It might make people angry because I'm not conforming, but it's healthier for me.

"I'm not saying that I've never felt that pressure," she adds quickly. "My biggest regrets after Speed are things that people talked me into because they were 'a sure hit' and I didn't want to do them and I did them and they were bombs. Speed 2 was one of the biggest. They gave me the old adage, 'Trust us, the script will get better, it will be fantastic' and months later I'm sitting there going 'This is terrible, can somebody help us improve the script?' and they're going 'Oh, sorry, we can't.' And who took the blame? Me."

Bullock has endured not because people like her films - they don't, particularly - but because they like her. She herself says that "I'm not a bombshell, that's not how I started in this business and it's actually worked for me".

Sandra Bullock poses for photographers at Cannes.

Although she would plainly prefer to talk about her passion for architecture - she has designed a house for herself in Austin, Texas - she makes no fuss about answering personal questions.

On marriage: "I feel I've been married twice. I've had two major relationships in my life and they were marriages to me. But now I would be divorced."

On having a family: "I could have been pregnant married and pregnant. If one event had not happened, I would still be in Arlington, Virginia."

Bullock was born in Arlington, to a German opera singer and an American voice coach. Her upbringing was, she says, "Gypsy-like", moving between the United States, Germany and Austria, where her mother sang. She often performed in the children's chorus of whatever opera production her mother was appearing in. Her childhood gave her a taste for performance, she says, but it also shaped her current perspective on work and celebrity.

"When I was a kid, the posters on our walls weren't film stars. I had Rudolph Nureyev, my sister had Baryshnikov. We weren't allowed to watch TV, nor did we have periodicals in our house. My parents were artists, so we weren't interested in celebrity. It's nice to be raised in a household where you don't put people on pedestals; where everyone has equal ground."

Characteristically, she insists on describing Murder by Numbers as an ensemble film. Directed by Barbet Schroeder, an old-hand at suspense thrillers, it stars Bullock in her most unsympathetic role to date as Cassie Mayweather, a troubled, short-tempered, sexually voracious cop. It's basically the traditional man's role in such films (think: Michael Douglas, but much prettier); which makes the casting, if not the film, really quite daring.

She agrees that in cinematic terms her warts-and-all character is quite old-fashioned.

"It makes you wonder what happened between the '40s and '50s - when there were such wonderful parts for women - and the '90s. I think the minute the action genre hit, it completely changed how women were utilised in films. It limited us. "But we're coming back. Certain women have blazed through and made money. Look at Jessica Lange, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore - brilliant actresses.

"And Julia Roberts has done an amazing job. She has single-handedly opened the door, in commercial terms, in making women a viable commodity; because, let's face it, it's a business.

"Julia was great: she came in, she wasn't the typical blonde, she was this strong woman with a great sense of humour and it was exciting. And it helped the rest of us."

It's interesting that Bullock should rave so about Roberts, for in many ways the superstar has had the career that Bullock might have had. It's not difficult to imagine her in Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride, even Erin Brockovich.

And if Bullock is secretly frustrated at living in the Roberts' shadow, at least she's doing something about it: she recently turned producer, a move which gives her more control over the quality of the films she appears in.

The most successful has been Miss Congeniality (2000), which reminded people what a fine comedienne Bullock can be. Inevitably - given endless comparisons with Roberts - she built on this to create an opportunity to work with Hugh Grant in the romantic comedy, Two Weeks Notice.

As the producer-star, she describes the film as a "truly huge" undertaking, not least because it was the first to be shot in New York after September11.

"I think we had a really big responsibility, to show New York as the beautiful place that it is - with its brand new skyline. It was a New York that has never been shot. But we were lucky, because after the event everyone was so open to us. I think primarily to say, 'Please come back to New York, it's still an amazing place'."

The pairing of Bullock and Grant aroused rumours about an off-screen romance.

"At first, I was really pissed off at the rumours," says Bullock. "I was upset because, if you're single, every time you make a movie with someone of the opposite sex, you're thought to be 'doing them'. But, after a while, I didn't mind being linked with Hugh."

If the new film captures any of the sparks that can evidently fly between the two, it may be the hit that finally hauls Bullock out of the Roberts slipstream.

-The Sunday Telegraph

Murder by Numbers is now showing.

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/11/10/1036308571747.html