Empire Magazine (September 97)

It would be a breeze to get used to the lush aquatic beauty of L.A.'s Marina Del Rey, where the Speed 2: Cruise Control crew are incarcerated for a couple of days doing the press push. Small boats, too stunted in growth to have featured in a cruise liner disaster flick, bob skittishly in the harbor. High up in the plush Ritz Carlton Hotel, 31-year-old Sandra Bullock is standing by the balcony, wondering how much longer she must talk about boats and her fear of water (now overcome), and whispering conspiratorially with her publicist. Laconic as ever, 30-year-old Jason Patric is slumped in a chair eyeing Empire blankly, dressed in anonymous plain blue turtleneck and jeans. He might just as well be saying: "Now don't you come bothering us." There's a palpable sense of ennui in the air and a visible pallor on their faces. They're tired and vaguely disinterested.
It is strange though, because earlier this morning, while under the glare of the TV cameras, Patric was the bon viveur, making mischeif by suggesting to TV reporters that Bullock became a bit of a drunk on the set of Speed 2. He'd also been ribbing hacks (some of whom were buying it) that there were actually scenes in the film with Keanu Reeves. And "Sandy Buttocks" had been charming telling how "insanity" has lured her back to Jan de Bont and the Speed franchise. And as soon as Empire asks a question the rapport kicks in once again and the suprisingly easy Sandra/Jason double act sparks into action.....

Empire: So, I think we should start with the drink problem.

Sandra: (To Jason, laughing) "Oh, you are such a crap! I know this came from you.

Empire: This from the Jason Patric who got Heineken at 10 AM from Sandra to deal with the interviews.

Sandra: "To loosen him up a little bit."
Jason: "That apparently is how she loosens and relaxes."
Sandra: "A bucket of Heineken?"
Jason: "She thought I could use that."
Sandra: "Well, I can pound down the alcohol, I guess."
Jason: "I've been trying to deal with this one day at a time. Let's leave it at that."
Sandra: "I'm just at the beginning right now. I intend to get completely blotto. I'm going to go downstairs and do bodyshots. You know, that was the thing about my stand-in. I would come in the morning and do my close-ups before I started drinking. I usually wouldn't start drinking until about 11.
You want to see my face every once in a while."
Jason: "Some people do."
Sandra: "To show that I was there."

Empire: Just to earn the money? Do you just do the poster?

Sandra: "Totally. The longest I ever showed up was for the poster." Jason: "And don't we look good on that?"

Empire: And what about drugs?

Jason: "Actually, there was very good dope supplying." Sandra: Was there? I didn't want to bring that in. The alcohol I figured would be a good, you know, liquid liquid." Jason: "Yeah, I figure since we're a PG-13 maybe we should just stay with the alcoholism."

Empire: What of the off-screen relationship?

Sandra: "No, it was onscreen. Totally blocked and rehearsed."

Empire: What about Keanu Reeves?

Sandra: "It was a threesome. It's true."

Empire: But you're Jason Patric and you are very moody and serious?

Jason: "Oh yeah."
Sandra: "He's very moody, serious and difficult to work with."

Empire: And what of the on-set tensions? Were you worried, Jason, about the money you were getting?

Jason: "I was pissed. Not pissed as in drunk like you English guys. I mean angry. And I'm not an angry guy."
Sandra: "You do maudlin. He starts off with maudlin guy."
Jason: "No. Happy drunk guy first."
Sandra: "Then he goes maudlin drunk and then angry drunk."

Empire: So Sandra, you've slept with all your co-stars?

Sandra: "Linked with only two of them."

Empire: Why not with Bill Pullman?

Sandra: "Because he was married. A problem for me, I don't tread there. Uncharted territory......"

Of late, it's been easy for Bullock to clutter up the mind. She's been in there somewhere for most of the 90's, jockeying for attention with Julia Roberts, Winona Ryder, Uma Thurman and Liz Hurley. But it's easy to see why she stands out now. There is something compelling about her. Sure, like many of the movie stars we indulge, she's a babe and she's sexy. You've only got to see her smolder alongside top women's totty Matthew McConaughey in A Time to Kill to recognize it. ("He is the best thing to happen to me, a real powerful force in my life.")
It was reconfirmed in July when the readers of Empire decided the former star of such lackluster outings as Demolition Man and Love Potion No. 9 had now climbed to the top in Empire's 100 Sexiest Movie Stars Of 1997 poll. It's not the first time a poll has bestowed this accolade on her. Suprisingly, she doesn't see it this way, herself.

"Aesthetically, it takes care of the battle right there. It is not how you think about me. But I would like to play something like that, where you are a babe. But that was the great thing about the first Speed, it changed the female stereotype in an action movie."

People have always loved this suprising modesty about Sandra Bullock- especially women (note to men: women love dissing female icons like Meg Ryan, Madonna or Patsy Kensit). Bullock comes across as intelligent, honest, funny, pretty and talented. If you were looking for the last time an actor hit upon this magical formula, try Lauren Bacall. Or maybe Audrey Hepburn.
Suprisingly, Bullock doesn't have tantrums. Sure, she did sack her business manager and lawyer last year. But not in a fit of pique but because she wanted to get more directly hands-on.
She was setting up a production company, Fortis Films, and was embarking on her directorial debut- a short she was working on with McConaughey called Making Sandwiches. She decided to bring her dad and sister into the respective business roles.
Family bonds are clearly a strong factor for Bullock. She always talks affectionately of her voice coach father and German opera singer mother Helga, who took young Sandy around Europe and flung her into small roles during a peripatetic childhood.
"But I am of the 90's version of family values. Families are not constructed in the way we idolize them. On one scale you're dealing with divorce and on a more difficult scale you've got same-sex marriages and single-parenting. "So I like it when I read an alternative in scripts to the family nucleus. If I could find a husband as an ideal mate and raise children, that would be fabulous, that is what I hope for. But to say that is how everyone is to live their life and show that on film is wrong. It's limiting. You're telling people who don't have that perfect set-up that they'll never amount to something like that person who has that perfect set-up. That has hurt so many people."

A lot of her new film Hope Floats, an emotional drama featuring Gena Rowlands and Harry Connick Jr. (Fortis Films' first production and Bullock's first as producer) explores this in the most difficult way. "It looks at the dysfunction and pain of establishing a foundation for yourself out of fantasy rather than reality. Owning who you are rather than trying to outrun your family because they embarass you and are a horrible example for you. You will not be able to live any longer if you can't go back and start from scratch. You can run for the rest of your life but it will kill you. Anyway, family, what is that?"

Blimey, not much blueberry pie in that analysis. But then that is what people get wrong with Bullock. While she is quite happy to continue the myth that she is some kind of Cinderella figure, internally she is clearly deeply involved with the darkness of humanity. She hasn't proved this as the multiplex yet, which is why she doesn't enjoy the same respect of, say, Susan Sarandon, but her moment might be coming. First, she plans to take a big break from high profile movies.
"I could only do a film like Speed 2 once in a while. Anyway, you're not losing me. I think I am going to make better choices by taking time off and doing the things I want. If I kept going at the rate I was, I'd do everyone a disservice. I wouldn't be there 100 percent. It's a mistake a lot of people make and I was very close to doing it because you feel you have to drive yourself. Work suffers, you suffer, life suffers."
This is all a little contemplative for a star who is famous for not taking herself too seriously, whose idea of discussing her formative acting experience involves her recounting getting her "skirt stuck in my knickers during this moving scene in Chekhov's Three Sisters and having the whole audience laughing at my butt."
She is unusually self-aware. In some strange, hard-to-pin-down way, she exists just outside of her seismic iconography. Other stars often march right in there to live (and often get lost) in their characters and their myth. With Bullock, she's tugging us by the arm and saying: "Do you get it? I'm laughing and you're not excluded." You detect she's always got one eyebrow raised. For shorthand, lets just call it irony.

"Irony is my greatest weapon," she agrees. A weapon she deploys when journalists chime in with the inevitable shagging questions. Why the fascination with her love life?
"Everyone keeps asking me about that question because there hasn't been a relationship..." she trails off.
"Just answer your uncomfortable question," insists Patric.
"No one's interested in a marriage that is doing really well or a peaceful anything. It's just part of the game. If that is what everyone thought I did, that is unfortunate because I don't have that much time on my hands."
"I see it differently," adds Patric, "you are a famous attractive woman and movies by their very essence are sexual; strangers go into a dark room and have light washed over them. Movie stars are made because people want to sleep with them, be it Gary Cooper or Grace Kelly. So in real life, people have those same fantasies and attach themselves to someone like you. Audiences want to know more than they get in two hours, to continue that connection."
"Well, there you have it, thank you!" cheers Bullock, clapping.
"Is that on tape?" laughs her co-star.
"He's so smart. But you know there is a comfort factor among human beings that I think I have. It is not Americanized, though, which sometimes lead people to assume something else. Which is okay. I'm not going to stop conducting myself in this way. I know I am not doing anything wrong. People have been doing it for hundreds of years- satirising, that is. Who cares? If it has no validity, it lasts for two days but since I'm not coming out and saying, 'No, that is not true', it has a lot of legs. It sells newspapers."

Jason Patric is a rather more problematic part of the Speed 2 equation. He bit into the fame game with Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys nearly a decade ago (about the time Bullock was heading from one smart Broadway performance into the arms of TV, with a disastrous spin-off to Working Girl.) Patric delivered a tidy performance, and his nice face and innate sexiness was not easily forgotten. This should have signalled a promising future. And yet he spurned it (read: he didn't do the projects his agent, publicist, and the media expected.) He dared to say he wanted to be a serious actor, took small theatrical assignments and the odd film such as dark thriller Rush, which everyone generously ignored.

"If someone dangles that brass ring and you don't take it, not only do they not understand it but they also start feeling bad about themselves and questioning their own lusts or greed."
Patric is quietly warming to his theme, releasing his resentment with some relish.

"So they want to stamp you as an aberration rather than coming to terms with themselves. But truth is, they need you. But they are not thinking long term. That guy is going to have his job for five years. He wants to capitalize on me if I have something to give him.
"It suprised me because I was prepared for mediocrity and all the difficulties of making movies but I didn't expect resentment that came my way for simply not working. I wasn't getting on a soapbox decrying Hollywood. I just spoke honestly and I was amazed at the resentment in Hollywood, from business people and the media because I shunned their help in raising my career. That made them feel useless."
"Which is so suprising to me," interjects Bullock in his defense, "because in this profession we are desperately looking for people with conviction, honor, fortitude- whether you agree with their stance or not. And you get those in such small doses, it frightens people because they don't understand it."
The media exacted its revenge on Patric in 1991 when they woke up one morning and discovered Keifer Sutherland's fiancee, Julia Roberts, had run off with the groom-to-be's best friend, Jason Patric (Roberts and Patric no longer speak). It was open season and the press bit as hard as they could. Patric confounded his estranged relationship with the mudrakers by regally saying nothing.

"I can go out there and try to prove them wrong but I won't stoop to that level just so I can make more money. Which is what it is really about. If I can convince people that I'm as accessible as (Adopts irrating accent for emphasis) Tom or Brad or any of those people, then I am supposed to be better- but I am not going to do that because it is wrong."
Sounds a little like Patric protests too much. It can't be all bad being Tom or Brad, can it?
"The truth is I can get away with it and be good enough. Someone down the line is not going to be as strong, not as smart or have the same oppurtunity and will be devastated because they didn't conform. So if I can be a living example without being a martyr, if that is possible, then that makes me feel a lot better."

When Patric turned up alongside De Niro, Pitt and Hoffman in the high profile Sleepers in January, he caught everyone by suprise. Suddenly journalists wanted to know what his current relationship with supermodel Christy Turlington was like and why the British-filmed Incognito had run into troubles when director Peter Weller walked after just four weeks. Sulky Patric decided to let them go figure.
"Maybe they should have closed the production then, but contractually you can't back out," opines Patric now, "but John Badham came in and made the best of it."
With a blank page on their hands, and amid the news that Jan de Bont's set was beset with problems such as sea sickness and the small business of Hurricane Lily threatening to sink the production, they invented some choice stories that Bullock hated her co-star and that he, in turn, resented her.
"Somehow," sighs Patric, "if you're a public figure and you're rich, it is somehow okay to invade your privacy or poke fun. But to celebrate someone's woes is bad, not out of feeling sympathy as an actor- because truth is we're going to be alright- but it is bad for society for that to be okay. It's bad for humanity."

Speed 2 is the bringing together of two elements at a pivotal time. This really could be their moment. Post-Sleepers, Patric should be erasing the wilderness years with a co-star who is determined to promote him ("If I could work with Jason on every film I would.....") A faintly ironic twist given that in Speed there was the sense that Reeves had generously allowed his fame to spill over onto the nascent Bullock, and now she is using the sequel to pass the favor onto her new co-star. Whether he'll make the most of the oppurtunity remains to be seen.

© 1997 by Empire Magazine