Sandra Bullock: Speed Freak
“Hey, April. This is April. April, hi, honey!” Sandra Bullock slaps her leg, leading April – 10 quivering pounds of gargoyle-faced, bull-chested, stick-legged Boston terrier – to vault onto her lap. “April got a bath today,” says Bullock, growling fondly to the sneezing, bug-eyed dog. “You have that shiny glow that is so luxurious.” April now does what even Bullock’s most over-heated fans wouldn’t dare: She slurps busily at the star’s face. “Oh, yes, I know, I know…” says Bullock, trying to control the hummingbird-busy bundle while catching a couple of chin-to-eyebrow licks from April’s surprisingly lengthy tongue.
Bullock sits in a plain, white office amid many similarly plain ones in the Austin, Texas, production headquarters of a movie called Hope Floats. It’s an intimate, character-based film in which Bullock plays Birdee Pruitt, a divorced mother who returns to her Texas hometown to make a new life. Hope Floats won grudging support from 20th Century Fox as part of Bullock’s agreement to make Speed 2: Cruise Control for the studio. Just before April (who belongs to the film’s storyboard artist) skittered into her office, Bullock had been making it clear that the Speed sequel will be her last film, for a while at least, as the lovable ditz who makes buses fly or skids along wave tops as America’s sweetheart. “It’s not that I have clout,” she says, “but I am being given a lot of liberties right now. If I don’t make the most and the best of these liberties, I shouldn’t have them.”
Clearly, the critical and commercial blistering of Bullock’s last two films – Two if by Sea, with Denis Leary as her frenetic Romeo, and In Love and War, with Chris O’Donnell as a woefully miscast Ernest Hemingway – have taken their toll. Finally subduing the wanton April, Bullock fesses up: “I look back on certain choices that I made, and I wonder if I did it out of the working actor’s desperation to just take anything that comes along. I allowed myself, several times, to be mediocre. I’m very well aware of that, and [those films] are good reminders to look back and say, ‘Don’t do that.’ And it’s halfway out of trying to be pleasing to everybody. You find mediocrity that way. I’m not going to allow myself to be mediocre or anything that I am involved with to be mediocre.”
Bullock, who speaks in long skeins of monologue that sometimes seem not to depend on the attentive presence of another party, abruptly frowns. Still tan from several weeks afloat on the Caribbean during Speed 2 and skinnier than ever (“I just see my character in this as very gangly”), Bullock looks curiously like an Egyptian queen, with her aquiline nose, perfect cheekbones and neatly cleft chin. That is, until the dog interrupts with a decidedly unroyal fart. “Oh, April, you have gas again,” says Bullock. “Thank God she wasn’t near the flame.” Bullock pulls a stubby, flickering candle from the side of her desk to the area of toxic emission. Gingerly, she bowls the worried-looking creature through the door and shuts it. “April,” she decrees, “you are condemned.”
It’s not only flatulent canines who have found themselves on the wrong side of Bullock’s door. Last year, the actress conducted a notorious spring housecleaning of her top advisers. She fired Tom Chestaro, her manager of 12 years, and Steve Warren, her attorney of seven years. Chestaro was reportedly seeking his commission for the film deals he helped to set up (he refused to comment).
With the help of her father, John Bullock, who’s been filling her management gap, the 31-year-old actress cut a pretty good deal when she signed on for Speed 2 for a reported $12.5 million and Hope Floats for an estimated additional $11 million. The notion that one who’s granted liberties must work extra hard to deserve them is a typical-enough Bullock credo. She tends to depict the people she admires as paragons of some virtue or another. Thus her director in A Time to Kill, Joel Schumacher, is the most considerate man in the trade; her Speed 2 co-star Jason Patric is the most dedicated to the work; her great buddy (and, speculation has it, former boyfriend) Matthew McConaughey is the man with the most heart. “These are people of passion,” she says. “And, generally, I think people are deathly afraid of passion. It’s something that you can’t control, you can’t bottle it. And, it’s a beautiful thing when you’re the recipient of it or the one who can watch it. I’m really drawn to people like that.”
McConaughey calls Bullock “Redblood – as in, redblooded American woman.” (It’s a line his character uses as he wakes up – amorously inclined – with his wife in the short film Making Sandwiches, directed by Bullock.) “People say, ‘Oh, the girl next door,'” he says. “There’s a lot of validity to that – she’s not up on a pedestal. She’s not vain. She likes the windblown theory. She likes to get in there and get her hands on it, you know. She likes to get her hands on it, whatever it is.”
Bullock is getting her hands on it so often these days that she rivals April in terms of…speediness. She has worked steadily since the 1994 Speed 2 put her and Keanu Reeves on the star map. She’s in negotiations with director Griffin Dunne to do a new movie, Practical Magic, about witches. She just bought a house in Austin to go with the one she owns in Los Angeles and the loft she keeps in Manhattan and aims to use more.
And for the last few weeks, Bullock has done her damnedest to make the world ready for Patric – best known for serious roles in the likes of After Dark, My Sweet and Sleepers – as an action star and marriage-bent comic foil in Speed 2. Her tale of how Patric saved her life – the fatigued Bullock was almost shredded in a complex boat shot, until Patric intervened – has been told so often, it seems like part of the movie’s marketing campaign.
On the Caribbean set of Speed 2 in November, Bullock made it clear that her interest in Patric wasn’t motivated by romance (he’s dating model Christy Turlington) or the box office (the absence of Reeves and that bus may be a bigger problem than anyone is admitting). Bullock wants the world to see Patric’s unknown qualities as cast and crew do. “We get to enjoy him and revel in the fact that very few people get to see this person like he is,” she says. “Sometimes I tell him how frustrating it is for me to be talking about [him] and people go, ‘I don’t really get it – he’s very tense, moody.’ But Jason goes, ‘I save it for those I care about. It’s not meant for everybody else.’ And I just say, ‘Thank God there are people like Jason to remind you to do that.'”
Following one of his many soakings on the Speed 2 set, Patric muses about Bullock: “Is Sandra worthy of this acclaim and the sort of connection that people seem to have toward her? Absolutely. Hers is an intricate but very simply played-out sincerity. She does it without being fawning, and that’s her trick. I think, in general, she’s always been above the material she’s been given up to this point in her career.”