A Mother’s Love
As a parent you fear not preparing your children for the world Sandra Bullock is one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, but she will always put family first. She talks to Donal O’donoghue about being a mother, the impact of #Metoo and her plan to make a film in every genre
Long before she became an actor, Sandra Bullock knew her true calling. Motherhood, says the 54-year-old, is her natural t. She knew this long before her two children, Louis (8) and Laila (6) came into her life, but becoming a mother in 2010 when she adopted Louis (Laila arrived in 2013) changed everything. Outspoken, charming and very famous, Bullock is one of the biggest stars in Hollywood and the latest to make the move to streaming TV, mainly because it ts her family life. “I’m not sure if I connected to the lm because I have children or because they did more work on the script,” she says of her latest production, Bird Box, in which she plays a mother trying to keeping two children alive in a broken-down world.
We are in Berlin for the European premiere of Net ix’s post-apocalyptic horror. Germany is familiar territory for Bullock whose parents (Helga, a German opera singer, John, a US soldier) met in Nuremberg in the wake of WWII. She lived largely in Europe up to the age of 12 when the family relocated to Arlington, Virginia. In high school, Bullock was the odd person out, this “oddball tomboy who is halfGerman”, and ever since, she has used her comedy and her charm to get along. “For me, she is an amazing combination of forcefulness, directness, charm and humour and something which is very, very vulnerable,” says Bird Box director, Susanne Bier.
Today, Bullock opens up with comedy. “ ese are our dead birds” she says pointing at stu ed budgies in a cage (a key part of the plot). But we get the other Bullocks too: tearful when talking about her two children, emotional when discussing the destruction of the recent forest res in California (“this is just show business not real life business” says the woman who
donated $100,000 to the cause) and prickly (“I would consider that question sexist” she says when a journalist asks her character’s age). Mostly though, she is happy to shoot the breeze on the lm she helped to green-light, one of the few Hollywood stars with the clout to do so.
“I was told, ‘Read this script, Sandra Bullock is interested in it’“, says Academy Award-winner Bier. “So I read it really fast, as I was really keen to work with her.” Bullock is not only popular but also very pro table. In 2010, the year a er e Blind Side, which banked $309m at the box-o ce and won Bullock a Best Actress Oscar, she was the highest-paid actresses on the planet. In 2013, the year of Gravity (another Best Actress Oscar nod), she earned more than $40m and her lms have grossed approximately $5 billion worldwide. Yet, since Gravity she has made just a handful of movies, including Minions (voice), Our Brand is Crisis and this year’s Ocean’s 8.
“ e most important thing to me is what is under my roof at home,” she says (Bullock lives with her partner, the photographer Bryan Randall). “If that is not OK I can’t go o and do my job. I only take on work that allows me to be a present parent. But with streaming it’s allowing more parents to work from home without giving up what is most important, which is family.” Bird Box (based on the bestselling novel by Josh Malerman) allowed that leeway, but it was also the subject matter that piqued her interest. “To me, Bird Box was a metaphor about being a mom, about being a parent and how scary it is to be a parent sometimes and all the horrible things and fears that you have every day you wake up.”
e actress has admitted that she can be overly protective of her children. “I’m learning daily,” she says now. “I make a lot of panicked mistakes, but as a parent you fear not preparing your children for the world. I have to share the hard facts with them, which in our case is the fact that my children are African-american and I have to have those conversations. But I just want to be not so scared so that when I go to bed, my thought is ‘please let me be a better parent in the morning because I’m blessed to have the children I have and I know this journey is a one-time thing.’”
Bird Box portrays a dystopian near-future, but Bullock will not be drawn on the speci cs of the largely unseen evil forces. “History has a tendency to repeat itself,” she says. “My two parents lived through a war. My mother was German, my dad was American, opposite sides in the war, but they had to endure and how that a ected their parenting I nd really helpful now that I’m a parent myself. So yes, Bird Box
can be seen as re ecting the political climate. But is it also about the internet or something otherworldly? Aliens? We have all these di erent points of view and questions about why things are happening today, but the world has always been unsettled.”
Bullock says that there is no di erence between working with male and female directors. “Basically genitalia,” she says to a utter of laughter. “(Susanne) has a vagina and that’s literally it. I have worked with female directors before and they had vaginas too. You know what a great director is? It’s someone who is unafraid to direct and unafraid to let their actors act. Susanne is not afraid to sit back and let people bring to the table what they need to bring to the table and she is also really good at hearing you. She doesn’t walk o in the corner crying, she is tougher than many male directors that I’ve worked with and she is an artist with a very speci c vision.”
Bird Box was lmed in the immediate wake of the #Metoo movement and its impact was apparent on set. “What was interesting on Bird Box, because it was helmed by a woman, was that I did see a lot of fear in our male crew members,” says Bullock. “One day I had to say, ‘Guys you are allowed to joke, I will tell you when you’ve gone too far’, but there was a fear about what is appropriate and what is not. It was a fearful time. I think that it has loosened up a little bit, but sometimes the pendulum has to swing the other way for things to change.”
Earlier this year, Bullock spoke about her own experiences of the power imbalances in her industry, saying that very early in her career, she asked to be red from a lm production when the advances of a person of authority could no longer be laughed o . She didn’t name the person, except to say that it wasn’t Harvey Weinstein, who she has never worked with. She knows the more subtle limitations imposed on women in Hollywood, as in 2004 when she was looking for investors in a lm about female boxing, Million Dollar Baby, but no one was interested. Later, long a er Clint Eastwood helmed the lm that bagged four Oscars, Bullock would say that she realised it was her gender that was the impediment. But things have changed, or so she believes.
At one point in this interview, a journalist attempts to ask her whether ageism is still an issue in Hollywood. “Used to be,” she says before the question is completed. e journalist fumbles (“Used to be” repeats Bullock) before
Sometimes the pendulum has to swing the other way for things to change
stumbling towards a follow-on query, asking ‘How old is that character you are playing?’ “I haven’t the slightest idea, obviously someone who could still have kids,” says Bullock. “Does it matter how old she is, because I would look at that as a sexist question.” “Sexist or ageist?” asks the journalist. “Sexist and ageist, both. You didn’t ask how old Tom was,” says Bullock, who as Bier and others recognised is more than just the wise-cracking girl next door.
So what’s next for Bullock? “I’ve decided that before I die, I want to do every genre just to say I did it,” quips the actress who has already ticked o thriller ( Speed), comedy
( Miss Congeniality etc), sci- ( Gravity) and children ( Minions) among others. But reallife family drama will always be her priority, what goes on under her own roof and in the world beyond the Hollywood hills. “Look, you want to promote Bird Box but there are bigger, more important things happening right now than everyone wanting to see this lm,” she says. “In California, families are su ering who have lost everything in those res. is is just showbusiness. ere is life business happening and that is profound.”