Sandra Bullock: 'Why I hate romantic comedies' | Sandra Bullock
The G2 interviewSandra Bullock This article is more than 13 years oldInterviewSandra Bullock: 'Why I hate romantic comedies'
This article is more than 13 years oldJohn PattersonShe won an Oscar for a dramatic role in The Blind Side, so could this be the end of Sandra Bullock, 'romcom chick'? Plus, she explains why playing a Christian Republican was so difficult for herSandra Bullock has been doing interviews all day in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, but she's still full of energy when we meet, and is as witty and self-mocking as a fan might expect from her film roles. Oddly, perhaps, she's rather more slender and pretty in the flesh than on screen.
We're here to talk about her performance in her new film The Blind Side, which is based on a true story – the film for which she has since won an Oscar. She plays Leigh Anne Tuohy, a well-heeled, white Memphis woman who takes in a homeless black teenager, a giant, almost silent man-child called Michael Oher, then mentors him through high school to a football scholarship at her alma mater, the University of Mississippi.
The film could not have served her better, but then last year was a good year, professionally at least, for Bullock. Indeed if ever an actor had a full-spectrum, 360-degree banner year to celebrate, it was Sandra Bullock in 2009. ("Hey, every year's a banner year!" she mock-protests.) First The Proposal, a romantic comedy of the type she has been honing to a fine, gleaming point for about a decade now, made an estimated $320m at the box-office on a mere $40m outlay. Meanwhile, The Blind Side, late in the year, crossed over in its second and third weekends to a more conservative audience that often dodges Hollywood product. Directed by John Lee Hancock, it has made more money than any previous movie featuring a single above-the-title female star: $265m and counting.
As often happens in the Hollywood crapshoot, Bullock was initially underwhelmed by the part that was to win her an Oscar. "I mean, I loved the story but I didn't know how to play her – and it was a while before I got there," she says. "The director said, after about eight months, 'Why don't you go and see Leigh Anne and see what I'm talking about? It'll explain her.' I met her and was really blown away by the energy she had. I stopped thinking about it like an actor just seeing a part, and the story is what finally got me."
The Blind Side comes adorned with aspects of casting and storyline – especially its emphasis on the three F-words of the South: Faith, Family, and Football – that seem designed to court a more conservative audience. Country superstar Tim McGraw plays husband Sean Tuohy, a franchise-restaurant millionaire. The film's biggest laugh comes when McGraw, discovering the tutor they have hired for their adopted black son is a liberal, says to his wife: "Who'd have thought we'd have a black son before we ever met a real live Democrat?"
But Bullock disavows any plan to aim for that slice of the market, even when I suggest that such a move is fully in the spirit of the age of Obama, reaching sincerely across the aisle to an audience that often feels scorned by liberal Hollywood. "Nope, not on my part, and I know it wasn't on the director's part," she says, shaking her head adamantly. "[The Tuohys] are devout Christians and they're Republicans and they sure love their football. Me? I know nothing about Christianity, nothing about football, and I'm not a Republican. But John Lee Hancock had always told me this is a mother-son story that just happened to involve people that you might normally pass judgment on. I go, 'Hmmm . . . white, Southern, Christian, Republican . . . not the kind of people I feel comfortable around, because they're usually not appreciative of me, or the lifestyle I supposedly lead. So I automatically assume that they'll reject me because of all that. But this family was the exact opposite."
In the movie Bullock has a well-crafted Memphis accent and frosted-blond Big Hair, and the transformation is fun to watch – "You know, I would not make a good blonde; it's just too much work" – but the Alpha-Mom role never really strays far from the no-nonsense, stiff-necked workaholics Bullock plays in many of her comedies ("art imitating life!" she chortles).
I task Bullock with some of the things that have troubled people about The Blind Side. Some have called it "Precious for white conservatives", noting that Oher, the black teenager at its heart, is either a cipher for white-paternalist guilt or just the means by which a rich white lady finds another side of her soul. And we really don't know much more about Michael Oher at the end than we did at the beginning. In response, Bullock seizes merely on the notion that it's rightwing. "Well, of course it's rightwing. They're rightwing characters, but I want to know – what parts [of the actual movie] are rightwing? I mean the family are Republicans, so that's certainly rightwing, but otherwise I don't know what it means. Aren't we supposed to show both sides? People go, what is the hardest thing about playing this? And I go, playing a Christian Republican – and making sure I believed what I said!"
So it's not the movie's fault that Sarah Palin likes it? "Oh Jesus! Please!" she guffaws, rolling her eyes, more at the mention of Palin than at the question (I think). "If it hadn't been successful people never would have said it was rightwing, but it is successful so I think they've just gotta hack away at it somehow."
At 45, Bullock is a mega-star, but despite all the hit films she has starred in, she has never seemed at ease with the rigmarole that goes with being a celebrity. I ask her – and this is of course a while before she wins the Oscar – how the whole pre-Oscar whirl is treating her. "Leaving my house and getting on to a red carpet is always crazy for me, because you have to find a way to be comfortable in the most uncomfortable situation imaginable. How do you talk yourself down so it's all water off a duck's back? It's a world that's not mine – I just come in and do my job and then go back home."
This is, of course, self-deprecatory rhetorical boilerplate in the time-honoured best actress nominee tradition. She knows it, I know it. In reality, Bullock has been working the talk-shows for weeks now, literally morning (Good Morning America, The Today Show), noon (Oprah, The View), and night (Letterman, Leno, et al), although she is laying off a bit now that the momentum seems to be going her way. In the room next door to where we're talking is Bullock's publicist Cheryl Maisel, a powerhouse PR consultant previously associated with Tom Cruise and the Beckhams, so obviously nothing is being left to chance here. There is a machine behind this Oscar bid, as there is with all the others, but its gears and cogs grind away offstage, only dimly audible to us civilians.
Just to balance her karma, Bullock also won the Golden Raspberry award for worst actress for her third movie of 2009, All About Steve. The film was a thudding flop, reeking of the delayed-release shelf, about a slightly eccentric woman love-stalking a TV newsman.
"You've gotta take both sides," she says, when I ask her how she feels about the nomination. "If you take either one too seriously, shame on you, and if you disregard the other because it's not all you want it to be, then shame on you too. You should be a good sport about it – we're not curing cancer here."
Part of the reason why Bullock has always seemed a bit different from your common-or-garden Hollywood A-lister is her slightly unusual choice of spouse, and – until last week anyway – how private she has managed to keep her private life. Her husband of five years is motorcycle builder and stuntman Jesse James, and when we meet, Bullock knocks back questions about their life together like deftly fielded shuttlecocks; they pile up at my feet unanswered, or barely answered. When I suggest there's a similarity between Tuohy adopting Oher and Bullock (who has no children of her own) taking on James's three children from previous relationships, she waves the suggestion away with a laugh. I ask about James and Bullock's rough custody battle over the child he had with pornstar and jailbird Janine Lindemulder, and she merely deadpans, "Life sucks a lot of the time, everybody get used to it. That one had a happy ending."
This may, with hindsight, have been a bit premature. Last week Bullock abruptly pulled out of the London premiere of The Blind Side after James was accused, in a celebrity magazine, of having an affair with a "tattoo model". He has since apologised publicly to Bullock for the grief his actions caused, although he denied the "majority" of the allegations.
Anyway, coincidentally or not, Bullock didn't thank her husband when she got her Oscar. But she did thank her mother Helga – profusely and tearfully. A German opera singer who married John Bullock, an American voice coach, and died in 2000, Helga raised Sandra and her sister Gesine partly in Germany and took them along on Bavarian singing tours in which they were encouraged to perform.
This experience obviously gave her a love of performance – voice lessons, ballet, practice every day. "I think on some level, yes, it was inborn. I thought it would be theatre in New York. That's what you strive for, study for, dream of. We never had like, celebrity magazines in the house, just the Post and Newsweek, so that whole celeb path was not something we even thought of."
As a teenager living in the same northern Virginia suburbs, I used to drive right past Bullock's high school to my burger-slinging McJob, so I ask her which shopping mall she used to hang out at.
"Oh, Tyson's Corner was the nearest, but I wasn't allowed to go. I wasn't allowed to get in a car with anyone except family until I was 18 years old. My mother was real smart, she pulled the reins very tight. I wasn't allowed anywhere!"
After studying drama at East Carolina University, she moved to New York, attended acting classes and appeared in the odd student movie and off-Broadway play before being spotted. "Getting into television was a total fluke. Random audition out of Backstage magazine. You get a part in a play, someone sees you, suddenly you're zipped off to California and you're like, 'Oh this is odd, but hey, I'm working, paying the bills.'"
Her early roles weren't auspicious; one job was second-string in Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Six Million Dollar Woman. "I wouldn't trade those early parts for anything," she says. "They're all steps on the way to being right here." Thereafter she netted parts in movies large (Demolition Man) and smallish (Love Potion No.9) before her out-of-nowhere double-smash with Speed and While You Were Sleeping in 1994-5. The first briefly turned her into, as she says, "action-movie chick", while the other signposted the "romcom chick" side that has since predominated, although she's never been happy with the term.
"Usually comedy is only available to us ladies in the romantic comedy. That's why I hate romantic comedies. I want to make comedic-comedies – let's get back to being funny!"
The 90s saw Bullock co-starring with then-bankable male leads such as Matthew McConaughey (A Time To Kill), Harry Connick Jr (Hope Floats), and Ben Affleck (Forces of Nature), and since 1996, she has also produced many of her films. Although the last decade has seen the consolidation of an identifiable Sandra Bullock "brand", or so it feels, she claims there's "no brand", that it's all just a fluke.
Did she feel the world changing around her as she became better known? "Definitely. You realise after something like While You Were Sleeping that in the near future you'll no longer encounter people who don't have a preconceived idea of who you are. I saw that – and it made me sad."
Her remedy for this has been to keep her distance from Hollywood. She lives mainly an hour south of LA, and keeps houses in Texas and Georgia. Does she regard the movie business as meaningless and empty? Is she wary of celebrity culture?
"Oh yes. Because it is meaningless and empty!" she laughs. "I'm not wary of it, though – I'm just aware. It holds nothing for me, although it will hold a great table in a restaurant, when you're at your peak. If you don't have other real things in your life that you love just as much, then you will drown in it."
Surprisingly for an Oscar-winner, but perhaps less surprising for a woman who knows that "the only power you have in Hollywood is the power to say no" and who has previously, and happily, taken extended hiatuses from film-making, Bullock has absolutely no idea what she'll do next.
"There hasn't been anything around lately that I want to produce – I mean literally stay there night and day and produce. Something might come up that I absolutely love, and I'll do it, but really, there's no plan, there's no brand. It's just timing that's been very good this year and you know what? Next year it's probably not going to be so good, and there'll probably be the backlash, and the whole 'What did we see in her in the first place?' You know the way this happens – the tide will always go out, no matter what."
The Blind Side is released on Friday 26 March
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