Sandra Bullock swears she doesn't reveal anything in interviews. But on the Warner Bros. lot, Jonathan Van Meter gets her talking about why she loves getting behind the scenes, what keeps her going in Hollywood, and why she's never settled down.
Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank is one of those places in California that are so deeply, quintessentially, preposterously "Hollywood" that I can't help thinking, while I am there, about how weird it must be to work here every day. Protected by Pentagon-like security, the 100-plus-acre complex is home to more than 30 huge soundstages arranged in blocks that make up the oddest little town in America, complete with its own firehouse and hospital. As I am walking through the lot one late afternoon in early December on my way to meet Sandra Bullock—golf carts whizzing by carrying dwarves in costumes—I have to linger for a minute, peering inside one of the giant doors of the soundstages where a bunch of "trees" gather dust and a "living room" that I vaguely recognize from one TV show or another sits strangely empty and dark.
The fact that I am meeting Bullock at Central Perk—which has the same name as the coffee shop from Friends but is actually a Starbucks—only serves to heighten the real/unreal aspect of the experience. As I am standing on the steps out front, I see Bullock charging down the street with her arms folded across her chest. She is wearing jeans and heels, a tan velvet blazer, a lime-green T-shirt, and a pink scarf around her neck. Her poker-straight auburn hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Before she even says hello, Bullock begins to chatter away, barely taking a breath between thoughts. She is all hyperactivity, like a cartoon drawing of a character whose arms and head are just blurs of motion.
Bullock is one of the executive producers of the George Lopez show, which begins taping an episode in about a half hour, but she is also in the final days of a shoot for Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous, a movie being filmed on another soundstage that she is both producing and starring in. In other words, she is a regular at Central Perk, and the employees treat her like the "local" that she is: the girl next door in this crazy little town. We head inside and get in line as her stream-of-consciousness tumble of words and topics—L.A. versus New York (she doesn't feel at home in either city), the weather (freakishly cold), traffic (god-awful)—continues unabated.
And this is before she drinks her double latte.
We head off down the street toward the Lopez taping, and I struggle to keep up with Bullock. Suddenly she catches herself. "Why are we walking so fast?" she says in a funny, exaggerated whisper. She takes a deep breath. "I have to slow down. We're not in any hurry." We stop just outside the door to the studio to talk and drink our coffee in the twilight. She points out her neighbors: Clint Eastwood's office is across the street and Steven Soderbergh's production company is next door. Then she goes up to a plaque on the wall of the soundstage that lists everything that has ever been filmed there. (The combination of Casablanca and Pee-wee's Big Adventure thrills her.) Bullock keeps an office here because she has a deal with Warner Bros., but the headquarters of her own production company, Fortis Films, are off the lot in Hollywood. "I'm too paranoid," she says. "I'm afraid if I'm around everyone all the time.…" She doesn't finish the thought. A few minutes later, however, she describes the writers and directors and producers who populate her neighborhood like this: "It's a little incestuous. It can become tricky sometimes. We fight because everyone's crazy to get something really good on-screen. It's not personal."
It is no secret that Bullock does not love Los Angeles. She moved to Austin, Texas, several years ago and keeps only a small condo a couple blocks from her Hollywood office. "It's like the best hotel room in the world with everything I need," she says, "but I can just turn the key and leave." More recently, Bullock's younger sister, Gesine—with whom she often works—got married and left L.A. for Vermont. "She was one of the main reasons I was living here," she says. "When she moved, it's almost like it freed me."
More than one person has told me that a few years ago Bullock went through a period of deep disillusionment with show business, something from which she still seems to be recovering. "The energy of Los Angeles can rip people completely apart," she says. "These unique, amazing, talented creatures come here, and unless you have a really strong core, you are going to be systematically tweaked, highlighted, surgically enhanced, and told how to dress. This business makes people feel like they have to get on a particular treadmill and maintain." It's another reason she moved away. "I was making some crappy choices, things that maybe I shouldn't have done, because I wasn't the best person or because I didn't know how to say no. I just wasn't enjoying it. I would look back and I couldn't remember what I did, and that's no way to live."
In 2001, when Bullock was telling people she never wanted to make another movie again, she stumbled upon a way to put her celebrity clout to good use. Jonathon Komack Martin, a friend of Bullock's, came to her with an idea about making the first-ever sitcom about a Latino family. Komack Martin's father had created Chico and the Man, which first aired in 1974 and, shockingly enough, was the last show on American television with a Latin-American star, Freddie Prinze. After seeing and loving George Lopez at a comedy club one night, Bullock became possessed. Fortis Films eventually partnered with Bruce Helford, who created The Drew Carey Show, and by March 2002 the sitcom, produced by Warner Bros., began airing on ABC. "When she believes in something, no one can shut her up," says Helford. "And because she's Sandy Bullock, everyone takes notice. She's a wonderful 300-pound gorilla for us."
Producing is, she says, "about 70 percent of what I'm doing right now." According to Lopez, himself, getting and keeping his sitcom on the air has rekindled Bullock's spark. "It gave her a new appreciation for really believing in something and going for it," he says. As Deborah Oppenheimer, another executive producer on Lopez, says, "Other sitcoms don't have a cultural accomplishment in the way this show does for a population. The Latino culture is very underserved and underrecognized." No one knows that better than Lopez, who was on the comedy-club circuit for 25 years but is now selling out seven nights in a row at the Universal Amphitheater in L.A. "And that's because of the strength of this show," he says. "But there wouldn't be a show if it weren't for Sandy."
Standing outside the soundstage, as the street lights begin to click on and the staff pour in clutching cups of coffee, Bullock seems happiest to talk about Lopez. "I feel very calm and comfortable in it and I feel very proud when I do it. I don't feel a sense of pride in many things that I do, but I think in this case it's because I can sit back and reap the fruits of my labor through other people's good fortune. I still get the ego boost of 'Ha! I knew they'd be great!' but I don't have to be the one on-camera going, 'Look at me! I'm emoting!' So this show is just a really nice place to be … right now. At this very moment. Guaranteed tomorrow something will go drastically wrong."
Inside, as the studio audience take their seats and the crew runs around in last-minute preparation, it suddenly dawns on Bullock that something has gone wrong. Not drastically wrong, but wrong nonetheless: The comedian who warms up the audience is nowhere to be found. Bullock's first response is to encourage one of the show's writers, Jim Hope, to get up and perform. He was once a stand-up but apparently hasn't done his material in years. "Do it! Jim! Go! Do it for your country!" Bullock yells. When he finally gets up in front of the crowd and begins to dance and bark like a seal, no one laughs harder and louder than Bullock. After a few minutes, the audience interest begins to flag, and I can see Bullock's wheels turning. Suddenly she bolts for the stage and grabs the microphone. The crowd roars with approval when they realize that a real, live movie star is standing before them. Improvising, she tells them they can ask any questions they'd like, and then does a kind of Oprah routine, heading up into the audience and sticking the mike in people's faces. She even sits on one guy's lap. Lopez, who's in makeup when he sees Bullock on the monitor, comes running out. As he takes over the mike and she heads offstage, he yells, "How about that Sandra Bullock impersonator!"
The fact that Bullock, who normally stays way in the background, jumped in to save the moment delighted everyone who works on the show, but no one was the least bit surprised. Right from the beginning, says Oppenheimer, "she has been completely accessible and savvy about the business. Sandy actually knows TV. You catch on to that very quickly when you sit in a meeting with her. And people who have the kind of career she has who decide to produce TV don't stay involved. They don't come to the set. They don't participate. Sandy has remained involved on every level." Or, as Lopez puts it, "How does the day contain Sandra Bullock because she doesn't fit in a day!"
As the taping gets under way, I ask Bullock—a white girl who was raised in Germany and Virginia—what inspired her to make a sitcom about a Latino family. "I gravitate toward multicultural stuff," she says. "The humor. I'm big into Latin music. Anything that's more urban, anything that's got more flavor. Being white ain't all that great." But also, she says, it had a lot to do with wanting to make Lopez a star. "I see the possible in people and what they can achieve," she says. "I want to be a manager or a talent agent or something. I want to go around and pick people and show them what they're great at. Because I see it and I know it. Like some slimy circus guy with a big cigar. I'm like, 'Come on, baby! I'm gonna take you to the moon!'"
Believe it or not, the girl next door, the hardest-working girl in show business, considers herself to be a pessimist. "I've never enjoyed success," she says. "It's probably a good thing, but I always assume the worst. For everyone else, optimism abounds, but for myself, I definitely have the doomed theory. It seems to work. Expecting the worst forces you to not be complacent."
When I mention to Marc Lawrence, the director of Two Weeks Notice and screenwriter of both Miss Congeniality films, that Bullock describes herself as a pessimist, he laughs. "She is relentlessly optimistic. It's not a Pollyanna-ish optimism, it's kind of a General Grant optimism. Never retreat. Always forward. That, to me, is an even more admirable optimism. As opposed to sinking into despair, she says, 'OK, let's go. We're going to win this thing.' And because she really means it, that kind of enthusiasm is contagious. Making movies isn't the most important thing in the world, but when you're doing it, it's a little version of going to war, and so having a general like her, somebody who says, 'We're not going to retreat,' is incredibly helpful."
In the mid-nineties, Bullock was a coproducer on a couple of movies, but the first time she became the general leading an army was on a small independent film called Gun Shy, starring Liam Neeson and Oliver Platt. She found the experience deeply satisfying and, as she suspected she might, a nice fit for a control freak. "Everything that could go wrong did," she says, "but I learned a lot." In 1996, when she formed Fortis Films, she hired Maggie Biggar, a woman she waitressed with in New York during her struggling off-off-off-Broadway days back in the late eighties. Biggar, who is the vp of production, brought in a colleague, Lillian Dean, who is today the vp of development, and the two women have remained there ever since.
Fortis, like Bullock herself, is a stealthily very successful little enterprise. Every film it has produced has been profitable, while a couple, like Miss Congeniality, have made a quiet fortune. That film was, I was surprised to learn, written for and aimed directly at little girls—and it hit its target and then some. The film grossed more than $200 million thanks to all the little Britneys and Jennifers who went to see it over and over again. (Many adults loved it, too.)
Biggar and Dean both agree that Bullock not only has a good sense of what people want to see but also has an unusually sharp eye for good material. "She has an intensely creative brain," says Dean. "I'm always interested in being in story meetings with her because she's got so many ideas. Someone will throw something out and she'll just take off."
There is nothing special these days about actors' producing their own and other people's films. But relatively few have such a knack for it. "She actually enjoys it," says Lawrence. "She'd be a fantastic line producer. She really likes the nuts and bolts of making movies: the organizational aspect of it, the budget, dealing with the studio. It's hard to fake that kind of pleasure." Most of the films Fortis has produced have been in partnership with Castle Rock, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. "What's rare about Sandy," says Castle Rock president Martin Shafer, "is that I've never worked with a star who takes the producing chores as seriously as she does. She really does two whole jobs."
Everyone I talked with agrees that Bullock has become very important to Warner Bros., especially now with the success of Lopez. "They're obviously looking at her as someone who is carrying a torch for them," says John Pasquin, the director of Miss Congeniality 2. Though, as Lawrence says, "There isn't a studio in Hollywood she wouldn't be important to. You look at the box-office track records of actors and they're famously unstable from year to year. People forget that Sandy's been a huge movie star for a while now. It's a pretty long road back to Speed. I know that Alan Horn, the president of Warner Bros., loves her."
Horn and Bullock have a remarkably good relationship for a star and a studio head partly because, says Bullock, "Alan's the exception to the studio person. He's incredibly sensitive and human." When I ask Horn about how important Bullock is to Warner Bros., he is refreshingly honest. "We are in the business of movie stars. We make the biggest movies with the likes of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise and George Clooney—solid, confirmed box-office attractions. And Sandy ranks right up there among the best of them. And she is unique, because it's unusual for someone who stars in these movies to be as effective a producer as she is. She is completely unpretentious, so there's never any spin, any sugarcoating. She's just a regular person who instinctively senses that this is a no-nonsense working situation."
When I share Horn's assessment with her, she laughs.
"Sometimes I want to kill him and sometimes he wants to kill me, but it's because we both want something. To pick up a phone and call the head of the studio and go, 'Look! I think you're wrong!' It's a nice luxury. So far he seems to be taking my calls."
As Bullock describes it, she is "one of the few women" at Warner Bros. who have had a production deal for such a long time. "When I first started there, I felt like it was such a boys' club. They made all the … what's the opposite of a chick flick? A dick flick? All the Lethal Weapons. And at the beginning of our relationship they wanted to make these films with women in the lead, and I felt like it was a new sort of thing for them, and because it was new they were very hands-off in a good way. And it's been a very nice back-and-forth.
There've been compromises, but there's always a payoff. I go, 'Come on, let's do this fun little film,' and they will help develop it. As long as it doesn't break the bank, they keep funding them, and it makes me very happy."
When it comes to being in front of the camera, Sandra Bullock may be the most ambivalent A-list movie star working today. She is an insider who insists on being an outsider. She is famous for putting everyone at ease, while she herself seems ill at ease in the world. She is incredibly giving and generous while also being exceedingly private. "Sandy's enormously complicated," says Marc Lawrence. "People think that the sunny disposition and the public persona is who she is, and that's certainly a part of her. Frankly, if she didn't have a bunch of contradictions, she wouldn't be nearly as interesting as she is on-screen. People don't flock to the movies just to see someone because they're cheerful."
The first time I noticed Bullock was in The Vanishing, in 1993, in which she played Kiefer Sutherland's girlfriend, who gets kidnapped by Jeff Bridges early in the film. It was a relatively small part, but you couldn't help thinking, Who's that? The following year, she made Speed, with Keanu Reeves, and became a star overnight for her performance as an adorable spaz. Bullock, who is famous for not being able to take a compliment, lives up to her reputation when I try to tell her that I thought her talent was obvious, even in The Vanishing.
"That's sweet of you to say," she says, "even though all I did was get chloroformed and lie in Jeff Bridges's lap." When I rephrase it, again she rejects the compliment, to the point of being insulting. "I don't see it," she says. "It was an amazing gig. It was two weeks' worth of work. A lot of it depends on whose light you're standing in. There, I was next to Jeff Bridges for a little while. And Kiefer Sutherland. And then I was next to Keanu in Speed. Anyone who sits next to Keanu gets some of that light by association." Perhaps this is one of the reasons she is underrated as a serious actor: because she projects so little confidence in her own talent. "I haven't learned how to have a proper understanding of or respect for that part of my work," she says. "Even though I do it, I don't know why I do it. Sometimes I enjoy it; sometimes I hate it."
A year after Speed, Bullock appeared in While You Were Sleeping, a charming, funny little romantic film that launched what is practically a new genre: the Sandra Bullock Comedy. For better or worse, she has become known almost exclusively as a comedian, while the dozen or so dramatic roles she has played over the past several years get very little notice. "I think people are under some misapprehension that what she's doing on-screen is just being herself," says Lawrence. "Comedy is enormously hard to do, and she is incredibly skilled at it. I've always felt, because of her ability to do physical comedy, that she is the reincarnation of Lucille Ball." As John Pasquin puts it: "She's able to make the biggest fool of herself, which is endearing."
A friend of mine who is a producer in Hollywood says that partly because of the success of Bullock's romantic comedies, "professionally, people have her squarely in her own box, and she is not really allowed out of it." But Bullock, who is 40, is aware that her romantic-comedy days are over. "After Two Weeks Notice I said, 'No more.' There's nothing else I want to say on the subject of comedy and romance combined. I had the ultimate romantic partner in Hugh Grant. So I've done that nice chapter in my life, and that chapter is closed." She takes a rare breath. "There are great love stories out there to be made, but with romantic comedies, the clichés are rampant." At this point, she says, "I'd rather go watch one than be in one because I wouldn't buy it if I was doing it now."
This spring, in keeping with her desire to defy expectations, Bullock will appear in Crash. Directed by Paul Haggis, the film deals with race relations in America through the lives of several intersecting characters in Los Angeles. Bullock has a small part, playing the glamorous but bitter and lonely wife of the district attorney. The film itself, while beautifully shot and choked with great actors, collapses under the weight of its own heavy-handedness. But Bullock's performance makes you crave a whole movie's worth of her being this good without pratfalls and romance.
Bullock recently began work on another film that should help people remember that she's more than just a comedienne. Every Word is True, which began filming in February, is written and directed by Douglas McGrath (Nicholas Nickleby) and also stars Gwyneth Paltrow and Sigourney Weaver. The film is about Truman Capote, and in it Bullock plays his childhood friend Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. "It's a very scary undertaking," says Bullock. "I'm sort of in a new phase in life where I don't want to do anything that doesn't petrify me, even if it's not well received. It's good to do things that scare the shit out of you. The thing that attracted me to Harper Lee is that she gave birth to this incredible story that was so well received, beyond expectation, but she shunned publicity. She wouldn't allow herself to be taped or recorded. There are very few pictures of her. She could have gone down so many paths, and the paths she chose not to take are what I was so moved by and envious of. No one does that anymore," she says, sounding almost wistful. "People want the fame and the accolades. The path that she took and the path Truman took are completely opposite. She doesn't want to be heralded. There is a stillness and a grace to her that I'd like to aspire to. To be able to at least attempt to play her will be really exciting. No one would expect it. Again, like no one would expect me to do Crash. Maybe that's a nice thing. It's not the lead, but it helps tell Truman's story and it's scary. But this chapter's all about scary stuff."
One of the first things Bullock said to me, almost as a challenge, was "I am literally the queen of saying nothing. People go, 'She said so much,' but then they realize 'She said absolutely nothing.' You'll see." But other than a hard-and-fast rule about not discussing her love life—she is dating Monster Garage host Jesse James—Bullock is actually surprisingly candid and, indeed, loquacious about almost everything else.
And if she has, in fact, opened a new "scary" chapter in her life professionally, she seems to have started a new one in her personal life as well. For one thing, she says, she has conquered her irrational fear of marriage, which seems to stem from her German opera-singer mother "keeping me in a house that was sort of a chastity belt until I was eighteen. So I had already missed a lot of hormonal fun that I could have had, but she was just like, 'Don't rely on a man. Do your own thing.' And I think it was almost to an extreme, but at some point right before her death she was like, 'So, you do teenk maybe you are going to get married?' I said, 'Mom! You were the one who said not to! Now that you're dying, I'm supposed to get married!?'"
Though Bullock admits to being a serial monogamist ("I tried to have a one-night stand once, and even then I ended up dating the guy for a year and a half"), she claims that she has always been the one who got cold feet. "I had running shoes on at all times," she says. "I was a bolter. I would get so scared because my idea of marriage was not a very pleasant one. And now I look at it in a different way. I threw away what society's version of it was and I went, 'Why does it have to be anyone else's version but mine?'" Nevertheless, James, her current beau, seems to be an unlikely choice: a garage mechanic with a TV show who used to be married to a porn star. It's almost as if she's dating the kind of guy her mother wouldn't let her get anywhere near in high school. For the record, there is no "fall wedding," as the press has been reporting, and she is not pregnant, "But I have to say, I'm not scared of it anymore. To me it's become a nonissue." Also, she says, "If I happened to get knocked up and I was blissfully round and pregnant—if that's my path, having kids—Austin is where I would want them to be raised."
When I ask Bullock how she chose Austin, she says, "I haven't the slightest idea. I went on a road trip. I woke up there the next day and I went, 'Wow. Feels right.' Unlike most of Texas, it's liberal and thinking. Everyone's allowed to play there: Republicans, Democrats, black, white, gay, straight. And that's really important to me." She pauses for a moment. "It's funny, more and more there's such a German influx there."
One of the essential things about Bullock—a trait that seems to define her—is that she seems haunted by the fact that her German mother and American father moved the family back and forth between Europe and Virginia a lot when she was young. It's one of the reasons, she says, that she's obsessed with acquiring houses. The stories of Bullock buying and restoring old houses that are never quite finished are legendary: There's one on Tybee Island in Georgia, a town house in SoHo, and a place in Wyoming. "At one point," says Lopez, "all of them were under construction, and she wasn't in a hurry to get them fixed. We figured it out: If she got them fixed, that would mean she would have to settle in. She always has, like, seven plates spinning."
When I ask her about it, she says, "I'm sort of trying to establish a tradition and history that I never quite had myself. If I wanted to make up my own version of my life, what would it be? I think that's what I'm doing. I'm carving out my memories and my history and my should be." This makes me think about something she said to me earlier: "I think most comedy comes from hiding something. Comedy is the exact opposite of what's going on in a person. It's everything to mask the turmoil."
Bullock admits to having had a rough time growing up. "I hated my whole childhood, hated it, hated it, hated it. There was no place for me. I was not accepted here. I was noticeably different. I was awkward. I was in the wrong clothes. I would get the shit kicked out of me constantly. My mother would be like, 'That's ridiculous. Why would anyone do that?' I'm coming home with my hair a mess, crying. Finally a guidance counselor came to my house and said, 'We have a problem. They are picking on her, and I don't know what to do about it.' And I was so angry at my mother. She was like, 'Obviously sometink you are doing.'"
That's heartbreaking, I say.
"It was at the time," she says, "but I'm so thankful for it now. Because it definitely gives you the empathetic view of humanity. If you don't get knocked around and abused, you're not going to learn to see that in yourself and what's in other people."
Ah. The source of Sandra Bullock's legendary kindness. This is the woman who, when asked why she gave a million dollars to the tsunami-relief effort, replied simply, "I was able." How does she feel about being known as the nicest person in the world? "First of all, people turn it into something that's become a bad thing. 'She's nice.' But you know what's interesting about it, I can be a total bitch like anyone else. I'm moody, I'm crabby. I just don't bring it to work. I'm sure you could interview some ex-boyfriends who have a mouthful to say about me."
When I push Bullock a little harder on this issue, she admits that she derives a lot of satisfaction from being thought of as an especially nice person. "It makes me feel good. I love it. I wouldn't change anything. I know sometimes nice becomes synonymous with boring, and I know that I perpetuate that because a) I run away from anybody who can find out what I'm doing; b) I don't live in places where anyone cares what I'm doing; c) all my mistakes and adventures I keep incredibly private; and d) in interviews I give away nothing."
"The Producer" by Jonathan Van Meter has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the March 2005 issue of Vogue.
