The Oscar-winning actres talks to LAURA HARDING about her new movie The Lost City and why films aimed at women should be shown more respect.
SANDRA Bullock has kicked her heels off and nestled her feet into fluffy hotel slippers. She is not in the business of putting up with something irritating or uncomfortable, just because it might be expected of her.
“I thought, ‘Why have I been wearing high heels when I’m sitting?’” she says with a laugh.
Bullock, 57, has never much been one for sitting quietly and putting up with things as they are. She took on a part written for a man in her 2015 film Our Brand Is Crisis, and criticised the dominance of male critics when her all-female Ocean’s Eleven spin-off Ocean’s Eight was met with lukewarm reviews.
It is why she fought tooth and nail to get her latest film The Lost City made — a new spin on a romantic comedy adventure in the vein of the Michael Douglas/Kathleen Turner caper Romancing The Stone, but with a woman at the centre, and a somewhat useless man along for the ride.
She plays a reclusive romance writer called Loretta Sage, who is promoting her new book with her cover model, Alan, played by Channing Tatum, when she is kidnapped by an eccentric billionaire, played by Daniel Radcliffe, in the hope she can lead him to an ancient city’s lost treasure that features in her books.
“It was the possibility of what it could be, rather than what i was on page,” Bullock says as reflects on what made her wa to tackle the project.
“What could this be that hadn’t been done in a while, o hadn’t ever been done, especia with women? The prospect of how to get it there was daunti but it was like a dog with a bo and once you get it, it become little obsessive.”
Bullock has long been at t centre of films that are unashamedly about women a for women.
Ever since her breakout ro in Speed in 1994, she has bee defying common conventions proving that films with femal leads can be critically and commercially viable, from Wh You Were Sleeping, Practical Magic, Miss Congeniality, Tw Weeks Notice and The Propos to her Oscar-winning turn in Blind Side, and ventures in T Heat, Gravity and Netflix juggernaut and meme-machin Bird Box.
It was vindicating for her when The Lost City opened in the US to a better-than-expec 31 million US dollars in its fir weekend, (thanks to overwhelming turnout from ol female audiences) dethroning The Batman from its number spot at the box office in the process.
She knows content for wo is often under-valued and