British Esquire (May 96)

"I've never been happier in my entire life," says Sandra Bullock. Sitting about an hour outside of L.A. on the set of her producing and screenwriting debut, Making Sandwiches, a stellar half-hour opus which she also happens to be directing and starring in, she's poured into jeans and a t-shirt.
Sandwiches, which continues America's grand and curious tradition of lunchroom romances- remember Nic Cage and Bridget Fonda in It Could Happen to You?- is nearly over. It's the second to last day of the film's 2-week shoot, but the world's sexiest auteur is not so much exhausted as almost frighteningly elated. "Whether this turns out to be something I want the world to see," she says, "or if it stays in my closet, I don't care." If only Stallone had had the same attitude, we could have been spared Judge Dredd. Making Sanwiches tells the story of Melba, played by our ebullient triple-hyphenate, and her husband Bud, a role filled by Matthew McConaughey.
Everything's fine in Bud-and-Melba Land until an upscale coffee shop pops up across the street in their heartwarming small town and, as only an evil coffee shop can do, threatens their idyllic relationship.
"It's about how we need rituals to give value and meaning to our lives," Bullock explains. "Once their rocked, once our partner changes a little bit, we feel that automatically means a lack of love. I have that feeling all the time. I spend most of my time trying to be this exceptional person that'll fulfill every person's wants. In my friendship's, in my relationship's, too. But you know what? You can't please everybody. It's really important to keep things small and simple and real."

The screenplay, Bullock confides, just rolled out of her in a few days last autumn when she was staying with a family member in the hospital. She's producing it through her company, Fortis Films. Note for non-classics scholars: the name means strength and perseverance in Latin. Two qualities the ambitious Bullock displays in spades. The project has been staffed almost exclusively with long-time friends from the movie business.
"These people have big studio jobs and they all said, 'We'll do this for you,' " Bullock marvels. "That's what made me the most proud because I knew then I'd been an OK person."
Was there, one wonders, any doubt about her OK-ness in the first place? There's no time to find out, though, cause right now our actress-slash-producer-director-writer has some difficult pickle work to attend to. Actually, she's got to insert the thing-don't ask- and is having a tad of trouble getting a grip. "Pickles are so difficult to work with," she sighs. But even this minor calamity gleans its own cosmic lesson. "You grab to tight, they slip right out of your hands. Pickles are a lot like life that way."

Bullock's own life, of late, has packed its own brand of pickle-esque difficulty, mostly on account of her blindingly rapid ascent to major stardom.
A trio of films: Speed, While You Were Sleeping, and The Net launched her almost immediately into celebrity hyper-space. A phenomenon she accepts with disarming- and wholly uncharacteristic for Hollywood- humility. "This whole year and a half sort of went out of control without my permission," she says. "Somewhere between Speed and the release of Two If By Sea something happened. I was in Nova Scotia filming, when I came back everything was different. It went from 'You're the chick that drives the bus' to 'Aren't you Sandra Bullock?' almost overnight. The fact that people remembered my first and last name was totally amazing to me. I wanted to take them out to dinner for remembering."

Of late, the 30 year old admits taking a step back and "just trying to chill". Over New Year, she and a batch of pals hopped to Hawaii where they rented a house. She needed a rest after a busy year.
She has a fistful of new films slated for release this year: the aforementioned romance Two If By Sea, the legal thriller A Time to Kill, and the period love story In Love and War. Amazingly, in an industry built on The Cult of the Swollen Ego, what appealed to Bullock about each of these projects was the fact that they weren't built around her new-found star power.
"I'm more interested when it's not all about me," insists Bullock. "I don't want to become an enigma, or a product of myself. I'd rather just drop out for a while and develop projects behind the camera than go that route. I'm not cut out to be a superstar. I don't have what Jim Carrey has, or what Demi Moore has. I just don't have it."

What, then, are her Big Screen Priorities? She answers without hesitation. "I like to work, and I like to be creative, and I like to have fun." In the upcoming Two If By Sea, our heroine plays the fed-up girlfriend of a bumbling art theif played by Denis Leary. Leary, an old buddy of Bullock's, wrote the script as well. The comedy received less than stellar reviews in the US, where it sank without a trace, effectively ending Sandra's string of box office hits. Which, oddly enough, is pretty much fine with her. The key word here is relief.

"I'm telling you, ever since Two If By Sea, this weight went away," she declares. "I was becoming this thing....It scared me, what I was getting ready to have to live up to, and thank God it got nipped in the bud.
"I learned a lot about what not to do," she continues, when asked about just what she got from the experience of rank failure. "If you're going to have a film that's your baby, make sure that everyone sees it as their baby, too. Sometimes you have to relinquish control if you want to get that baby made.
And that's what happened to Denis."
Though she's got no regrets about the parts she's played, Bullock readily admits to still being locked into the New York SAM- the Struggling Actor Mentality. SAM victims, regardless of their evident success, just can't seem to stop jumping on every job offer that comes down the road. Most recently, she's jumped on the role of Ellen Roark, a perky law student in director Joel Schumacher's adaptation of A Time to Kill, yet another big screen rendering of a work by America's fave no-brainer legal scribe, John Grisham.
"The whole film was about getting into those clothes," she laughs, explaining that Ellen, like so many lawyers today, favored low-cut tops and skin-tight jeans. "I put on a few pounds in Nova Scotia, so we had an incentive program.
There was literally a row of 5 different jeans: Me Now, Me If I Eat Too Much on the Film, Me Where It Would Be Nice If We Got, Me Where It Would Be Great If We Got, and Me Where It Would Be ROCKIN' If We Got."
She smiles, shuts the Styrofoam lid on her scarcely touched takeout hamburger, and adds with just a hint of pride, "We got to the second-to-last pair." Happily, at the moment she's so svelte she could probably fit into her Rockin' jeans without breathing. In a curve-broadcasting black top and slinky skirt, Sandra Bullock looks thinner than she ever has on film. "It's called the stress diet," she says, referring to the insane Making Sandwiches schedule.
"I'd realize at the end of the day I've had 2 cups of coffee and a handful of nuts and that was it. But I've never had more energy in my entire life."

With A Time to Kill in the can, Bullock's taking the spring to edit Sandwiches in New York. While there, she'll show her face at a few award events, an experience she describes, with a hearty sigh, as "soul-draining". Post-Manhattan getaway, it's off to sunny Italy to play the real-life Red Cross nurse who had an affair with young Ernest Hemingway- in the person, oddly enough, of young Chris O'Donnell- in Richard Attenborough's In Love and War.
"I asked him if I could call him 'Dickie' and he said that was fine," Bullock laughs. Either way, the Oscar-winning director suprised her recently by showing up on the set of Sandwiches for a visit. "If you look at his films, he's pulled amazing performances out of people, and I want him to dig down and pull something out of me that I've never done. I'm really looking forward to how hard it's going to be."

Acting aside, Bullock is pulling down a cool $10 million for the Hemingway weepie, her highest paycheck to date. Not, mind you, that filthy lucre had ever been a motivating factor. She is an artist, after all. "Even when I was hand-to-mouth, waitressing in New York, I felt like I always had enough. I never look at money and rely on it. I let other people worry about it. I want to make sure that everything's paid off, that everybody's taken care of, and that's all I need." Of course, should she ever need a few fiscal tips, there's always dad, a former voice teacher who made sure to school his daughter in dollars and sense.
"Daddy's made me incredibly aware of what needs to be done and how to do it," she says. "It's a little scary when you have to switch gears in that department, but I don't want to end up going, 'I have nothing to show for everything that I worked for. I can't take care of my family and nobody wants to hire me...' Because you know that's going to happen. My shelf life is maybe four or five years and then what do you have?"
As if to answer her own question, she nods toward the editing bay, now stacked high with Making Sandwiches videotapes.
"I'd like to be around for a long and have this whole side of the business to bring me through things, instead of just being a product in front of the camera."

Polishing off her third latte of the day, Bullock tosses her paper cup in a perfect arc into the wastebasket, behind which lean a collection of framed but unhung posters from her pre-Speed days. They're all her: Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, The Thing Called Love, Demolition Man, The Vanishing, even Love Potion No. 9.
Oddly, even though she was the star of Potion, Sandra is nowhere to be seen on the actual promo. A fact, when noted, that elicits a facetious chuckle. "They just didn't want me, because I refused to get in a skimpy little dress and high heels. So they got this girl." She gestures, shall we say, with a certain finger at a micro-skirted creature who has, at least once in her short life, probably been referred to as a 'bimbo'. Said bim is cooing earnestly in the willing ear of Tate Donovan, the actor who subsequently signed on as Sandra's main squeeze for a few years.

Imagine it, two leads in a Hollywood movie actually falling for each other! "I know, it's a total cliche," she says, clearly less than thrilled to be discussing the whole episode. "It was everything that I didn't want, but nothing's ever hit me on the head like that before. There is nothing I could do to prevent it...." "It's like, if all you do is work for Xerox, and you go to Xerox conventions, you talk to other people who love Xerox, and then you meet a great guy who happens to work for Xerox. There's no difference between that and this, except one's public."
That, of course, and the niggling fact that Xerox folks rarely have to kiss their co-workers on cue as part of their job description. A detail she shrugs off. "So you test the merchandise before you actually have to purchase it." The mark of maturity, however, is learning from our mistakes. Which accounts for the official Sandra Bullock Two-Week Rule, her way of testing the oft-potent biological need that can flare up between co-stars. "Casting directors," she explains, "are amazing dating services. They find two people who have excellent chemistry. So I always tell people that if you have that tingle like 'Oh my God. do I love this man?', give it two weeks. By the end of the second week, you'll see them picking their nose or something. It runs out after two weeks, so embrace the chemistry in the work and get over it, or you're just going to be having affairs every time you walk on a set."
One lucky swell who survived the Fourteen-Day Test is the grip she met two years ago on the set of The Net. They're still together, though she'd really rather not give his name. It's no picnic, waging that eternal struggle between public persona and private life.

"It is a hard battle," she says, her voice growing suddenly somber. "I'm trying to keep it even more quiet and protected than I was before." Still stinging from a spate of tabloid stories about her private life, the actress shakes her head sadly. "I realize how just a casual mention affected people's lives. These people did enough damage to last a lifetime, and I feel responsible for that. I know I'm not, but I feel really, really responsible. So now I'm just trying to keep the faith that what was meant to be, will be." One of the things they never teach up-and-coming thesps in acting school is how to handle that much-dreaded, yet frantically sought-after commodity: Overnight Fame. It's a subject, for better or worse, in which Sandra Bullock has had a crash course. So what advice does Bullock have for those young actresses with the experience still ahead of them?
Her answer, offered without a second's pause, is at once suprising and typical. "Learn how to laugh at everything you do. If you get great reviews, laugh at them. If you get slammed, laugh at that. Either way, it has nothing to do with you..."

© 1996 by Esquire