Sandra Bullock: “I was perfectly content to be permanently broken”

I don’t have any interest in going to see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (or Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close, as I keep mistakenly calling it). It’s not that I don’t like Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks – I like them both a lot, and I wish they had worked together on a “lighter” project, because then the film would be must-see. I just think that the subject matter – 9/11 drama – is still too much for fictional feature films. Give me a documentary about 9/11, sure, I’m there. Around the tenth anniversary, I watched a ton of documentaries, and they all made me cry, from the one about the construction of the memorial, to that epic Showtime 10-part series, to the one about the two French brothers who were making a documentary about a newbie fireman on what happened to be 9/11. Sobbing, weeping, sobering, mesmerizing. But I think the feelings are still too raw, and people don’t want to see the events of the day fictionalized, sensationalized, packaged in a neat, overwrought drama with a bow.

Anyway, Sandra Bullock hasn’t been all over the place promoting the film, and Tom Hanks has barely been anywhere. I don’t think Bullock even did any magazine interviews, did she? But she’s got a new interview with the AP, and… it got to me. The quote everyone is talking about is the “permanently broken” statement, but what got me was Sandra talking about a scene in which Tom Hanks’s character calls her from one of the towers. GAH. I just teared up.

Sandra Bullock wasn’t looking to return to acting when Stephen Daldry called about “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” Bullock’s last film, 2009’s “The Blind Side,” was the kind of career apogee of which most actresses dream, winning her a best actress Academy Award in what essentially amounted to a coronation of Bullock as America’s most beloved female movie star.

But the accomplishment – which would normally be followed by a wave of projects to capitalize on the momentum – was soon marred by public scandal. Bullock’s husband, “Monster Garage” host Jesse James, was revealed to have been unfaithful. The fallout, which led to divorce, was covered relentlessly by the tabloids. Bullock still went ahead and adopted a baby boy.

When Daldry, the director of “The Hours” and “The Reader,” approached her about “Extremely Loud,” Bullock wasn’t sure she would return to acting at all.

“I was perfectly content to be permanently broken,” she says. Recognizing how that might sound in print, she smiles at the unintended hint of her personal turmoil, and adds “time-wise” to clarify the break as one from moviemaking.

“I honestly didn’t think I was in a place where I wanted to work or wanted to step out of where I was,” she says. “I wasn’t prepared. But the opportunity was louder than my head.”

The chance was to play a supporting but key role in Daldry’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel. In it, Bullock plays the mother of an uncommonly bright, precocious child (Thomas Horn), whose father (Tom Hanks) dies on Sept. 11. It’s a particularly wrenching story about grief and reconciliation.

“What a great way to get back on the horse,” says Bullock, who was staying at a hotel 20 blocks from the World Trade Center on 9/11. “It was hard, but it was what it’s supposed to be.”

It took some courting. Daldry visited Bullock at her house, and when he asked her what she might bring to the role, the actress was frank.

“I said, `I haven’t the slightest idea,'” she says. “I was like, `The well is deep. It’s your job to stop it or get it.'”

Bullock and Daldry have a charming, easy manner with each other, showering one another with compliments. Asked why he pursued her for the part, the British director quips, “She’s cheap as chips.”

“I have watched just about everything you’ve ever made,” says Daldry. Bullock, whose self-deprecating humor is undimmed, doesn’t miss a beat: “I’m so sorry.”

“I needed a partner in the project, somebody that would be a leading lady and look after me, look after herself, look after the character, look after the kid and look after the creation of the whole process,” says Daldry. “Sandy was literally like a partner on it for me. We would write and rewrite and focus down.”

One of the film’s most striking and emotional scenes is a flashback to Bullock’s character speaking on the phone with her husband, who is calling from atop one of the burning towers.

“The thing that made it so poignant for me was that Tom Hanks showed up that day,” says Bullock. “He sat in a room not far from where I was and made that call every single time. Every time I pick up that phone, it was Tom Hanks on the other end of the line. My husband who is calling because he knows he’s going to die, giving me some gift, some joy, some jewel – something that he can leave me with so he knows I’m going to be OK.”

If Bullock, 47, was hesitant to return to acting, she’s now appears fully back. She recently finished shooting another highly anticipated movie: Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity,” a space thriller co-starring George Clooney.

[From The Associated Press via HuffPo]

Is it possible to feel a wave of sympathy for a rich, privileged actress that I‘ve never met? Because Sandra just got another sympathy wave from me. I think she’s still raw too – she got burned so badly with Jesse James, and I think that she simply picked up her son from the ashes and that’s all she thinks she deserves at this point, you know? Like, it feels like she’s given up on men, on relationships, on anything to do with that part of life. Poor Sandy.

Photos courtesy of WENN.

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48 Responses to “Sandra Bullock: “I was perfectly content to be permanently broken””

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  1. Jag says:

    She still looks sad. Does anyone else think she had a slight mid-face facelift? She has been looking just the tiniest bit tweaked.

    • HadleyB says:

      She does look sad still, in her eyes.

      She’s been having work done for a long time, ala Christie Brinkley so it ‘s not obvious like a whole Madonna make over.

      I mean, she’s almost 50 — no wrinkles, sagging at all so yea she’s had several things done but it looks good.

    • mln76 says:

      I realized recently that the tightness in the face wasn’t sadness as I thought this year but an inability to move her face at all do to lift, botox etc. Oh well I still think she’s a classy lady. She’s handled this whole humiliation with a particular level of dignity despite the absolute trashiness of it.

  2. LB says:

    I don’t like all her movies. But I genuinely like her as a person. As much as I could know her as a person anyway.

  3. Jackie says:

    i’m not a fan of her movies, but that’s gotta be rough for any woman.

  4. Messenger says:

    there will be books written and films made on this most horrendous of tragedies but to those of us who lived through the carnage it is not something we care to revisit on screen as entertainment. every day we experience the loss in people gone, jobs gone and a city that will never be the wild and beautiful place it used to be. for those of us who love nyc we do not care to see the towers being bombed and a sobbing sandra bullock no matter how effective. it is still too soon. new yorkers should get to decide when this tragedy can safely pass into the realm of historic events. at this moment in time, it is still a reality we experience every day. i hope those involved in this project donate the money they made to the memorial and all the funds set up for the heroes families. that would be redemptive for them and make this movie somewhat easier to bear.

    • mcmiller says:

      I whole-heartedly agree!

    • WTF says:

      I appreciate your comments. I go back and forth on whether or not I agree though. I feel like as Americans we are so rushed and fast and busy that unless something is presented to us again and again there is a danger that we will forget.
      I personally can’t go and see these movies. Like I can’t watch movies about the Tuskegee experiment, because I lived through it. But I do want them to make movies about it. I want people to talk about it and be reminded about the loss and the sadness and the bravery.
      Like I said, I go back and forth but I understand what you are saying.

      • Messenger says:

        thx wtf and mcmiller for your responses…one need only watch the memorial service every year to see that these wounds aren’t even close to healing. to make a movie going there showing the towers is just such bad taste and excrutiating to watch. you neednt worry anyone will forget..”we will never forget.”

    • LittleFATMe says:

      These are two very different tragedies, but: I feel the same way. I have never been one to watch or read or enjoy any movie or book about the 9/11 it hurt my heart and I am WAY down here in New Orleans. I have memories of that day and they are my own and I will never forget. In 2005 my life was changed by Hurricane Katrina, it was strange because EVERYTHING was gone and poisoned and wiped away in my city and the surrounding areas, but not that far out people just had damage. Those people and the nation talked about the storm constantly, everywhere I went. A year later a woman in Barns and Noble was flipping through a photo book – a freaking photo book of images you couldn’t escape and STILL people bought photo books. She was saying something about the people who live there needing to get on with there lives, now I got a new job less than 6 months later – my boss from before had killed himself due to the storms aftermath – I was “getting on with my life” but I was still displaced and lost and hurt the pictures and documentaries and books just kept ripping of the scab this woman felt I should no longer have. They still have walking tours through bits of places left damaged and when each anniversary comes I leave the TV off and stay pretty much in bed, not in grief but in an effort to escape the media and people who will make me feel that grief all over again.

      • Cait says:

        Seriously. I live in Uptown NOLA, and it seems like approximately eleventy billion films/tv shows set around The Storm That Must Not Be Named exist. I love that our film industry has rebounded locally, and God knows my neighbors and I hold Treme watch parties (whilst still mocking David Simon’s neocolonialist perspective of our city), but…it’s still very raw for us. It’s hard for any city that’s encountered such a shocking tragedy to watch that recreated in a fictional medium. It reopens those wounds, and oftentimes, it cheapens the experience of those who were impacted directly.

  5. Jayna says:

    God, I love her.

  6. SolitaryAngel says:

    She DOES look terribly sad; that spark she used to have in her eyes, that glow that surrounded her is gone. I feel for what she’s gone through, but I won’t be seeing this movie either.

    • Cathy says:

      You’re right that sparkle she used to have in her eyes all the time is gone. That douche bag Jessie James really put her through the wringer.

  7. Sasha says:

    She looks better in these pictures than I’ve seen in a long time. Even the flat ironed hair works for her!

    On a different note – how the hell did such a lovely, talented person end up with that waste of air JJ? Superficially speaking, the boy ain’t even nice looking!

    • Eleonor says:

      I think it’s the same reason Clint Eastwood has a famewhore for wife, as we have recently discovered.

  8. LittleDeadGrrl says:

    I like her as a light actress but this kind of thing cannot be pulled off by either one of them. I just don’t think they have the acting chops or the seriousness needed not to make it overrought piece of tripe. Won’t be seeing it.

  9. Franny says:

    I don’t know how having your husband cheating with so many dirty dirty chicks wouldn’t break you and kill your spirit. She’s one of those actresses you just want to have succeed. what a moron.

    And I can’t even imagine getting a phone call from a loved one telling you they are about to die. I’m sitting here basically crying because the thought of that is too horrible to imagine.

  10. Bite me says:

    Stay strong Sandy

  11. LeaR says:

    What got me was the interview she gave a few weeks before learning about Jesse’s mistress. She said that her relationship with Jesse was the first time she’d really let down her guard with a man & how for the first time, she felt she was with a man who had her back.

    I mean…ouch. Obviously, emotionally open, wear-their-hearts-on-their-sleeves people can feel major heartbreak, but it must be a special kind of excruciating if you’re the kind of person who has trouble trusting people & letting them in – you finally took that leap of faith and in return, you got betrayed in the most epic way imaginable. I wouldn’t blame her if she never fully trusted a man ever again.

    • Amanda G says:

      Your first paragraph is exactly why I will always have sympathy for Sandra. She was publicly humiliated during what should have been a great time in her life.

      I agree with Kaiser every bit about that 9/11 movie. It’s still too soon. In fact, I don’t know if it’s ever going to be appropriate. That day is still burned into my brain.

    • ShanKat says:

      Very well put, LeaR.

      I wish she could drop it, because I find her waaay more interesting than her dramz with that scabby old reality TV loser.

      (And her ombre hair is faaabulous…not too light on the ends.)

  12. lisa says:

    She made a bad choice. She thought he was someone he was not. or she tried to make him into someone he was not. She is not the first nor the last woman this has or will happen too.

    I like Sandra but felt that she put on blinders. She had to know something. But that is the past. She has a child and that child deserves to have a parent that is whole. She needs to get out and enjoy life. Date or not, but don’t let this experience be the period in your life. She is not dead. Life is not over until it is over.

  13. NotaBitterBetty says:

    I feel for her, talk about betrayal on a devastating level. I’m still holding out hope for her and Keanu. Now there’s a man who wouldn’t let her down.

    • LeaR says:

      Me too. And unlike that other fangirl OTP (Kate & Leo), I could actually imagine them being a good couple.

    • JM says:

      I also keep hoping for a Keanu relationship. Both have had their hearts broken,enjoy each other’s company and do their best to keep their private life private.

  14. Shaz says:

    I don’t think potentially great husbands flock to Hollywood. If they did Sandy would have the best.

  15. Deltona lakes says:

    I like Sandra bullock but have to admit she turned me off somewhat when she made the comment she wanted to adopt from the US. It shouldn’t matter which country a baby in need comes from. I would have respected her more if she said I wanted to adopt no matter what race and left it at that. Just seem that she wanted brownie points from Americans. Since we know her movies dont do well overseas. And i’m
    an American from NYC.

    • Lucy says:

      Are you frickin serious…first of all, she did adopt from another race, her son is black and she is white. Adopting from another Country is not another race…and secondly, I don’t know if you have looked around the good old USA these days, but there are many, many, children right here who are in desparate need of adoption…Personally, I applaud her for adopting from the USA…

      • Lucy says:

        and before anyone jumps down my throat…let me say that I don’t care where anyone adopts from…I am just happy when a child is adopted to a loving family…but I work in the “system” and I see so many kids here at home that are in such need…and to dislike someone because they adopt from their own country is just crazy!

      • Sab says:

        Totally agree.

    • Sab says:

      I don’t feel her comment was meant to disparage people who adopt from other countries. Considering the fact that she adopted from the US, and considering the interview was about her particular situation, I see nothing wrong with stating her personal view. Saying she adopted a child from the US to score “brownie points” with the American public is just insulting, crass, and cynical. When someone asks you about your personal view on a subject very close to your heart, you have the right to express your opinion. No one asked her about other adoptions, they asked about HER adoption.

  16. Laura says:

    Glad I’m not the only one who thinks she looks like she’s had some work done.

  17. Lucy says:

    Definetly tweeked! I saw the trailer for this movie when I went to see 50/50 with my son…I started crying at the trailer, my son was moritified and I said No way was I going to see that movie…I don’t need to pay money to feel depressed! I do feel bad for SB…Sometimes when you love someone so much, you want to believe that they are the person that they present themselves to be…its not denial, its faith, its hope…unfortunately for her, JJ was a better actor than she is!

  18. Luci says:

    I know love is blind, but Jesse’s business, appearance, and body tatoos screams slimeball. He must have been very good in bed. He certainly had (has) enough practice.

    • Roscoe says:

      I think that’s incredibly harsh and judemental. You can criticize Jesse James as much as you like; he deserves every little bit he gets – he’s a complete douche bag.

      But, to then extend those criticisms to every other person who happens to be a mechanic or tattooed or has a certain appearance is not at all fair. My best friend is heavily tattooed and she’s one of the most sweet-natured, generous and beautiful people I’ve ever known. Let’s not make generalizations based on one jerk’s appearance and actions.

  19. Mitch Buchanan Rocks says:

    It seems she is publicly milking the JJ thing and it has kept her in the public eye – stop whinging about JJ get back on that horse Sandra and date a regular dude, life’s too short to spend it in the past or on what might have been which wasn’t. Also wonder if she still sees Sunny.

  20. Anna says:

    She needs to stop talking about it. Honestly that lying bastard restarted her career. I thought she was going to disappear like the rest of the Oscar winners. Seriously though, how did she not know she was married to the very definition of SCUM? Ridiculous.

  21. anonymoose says:

    wonderful makeup! perfect lipcolor!

  22. sandy#1 says:

    very classy woman, she could capitalize on her divorce and drag it out, pity party, she has not, she has real talent, although i don’t like most of her movies, i respect her.

  23. Victoria says:

    My father’s entire clan is from NYC. Grew up right on Franklin Avenue and were friends with the Serpicos. I lost people on 9/11 as did many of my friends. I brought United 93 but never could watch it until recently. I’m going to see this film, because I love Sandy, the majority of her films, and Tom Hanks. Most of all, I want these stories about 9/11 out there so people don’t forget. Many people always say they won’t forget, but sometimes we do. And the memory of that day and what happened should never be forgotten like any other world/life changing event.

    • Jollytr says:

      Very, very well said Victoria! Hanks hasn’t won Oscars for nothing and is known for his passion and commitment to the idea of “lest we forget” he champions and challenges us to remember the sacrifices so many have made. He wouldn’t do anything crass or insensitive with this movie … and neither would Sandy. They both will bring dignity to such a difficult project. Sometimes movies are so much more than entertainment … think of Philadelphia or Schindler’s List.

  24. blasted1 says:

    Well, to me she looks like someone who is sadder and wiser. Some of us DO get so badly burnt that we opt out of love for months, years or forever. I hope she has a good career. Her salvation is her son and any other children she may have or adopt. God knows, my kids saved me and our love will never die.

  25. Veronica says:

    I really did love what you had to say in your first paragraph of this article. Thank you.

  26. Veronica says:

    …And reading this interview makes me like her more.

  27. BG Boone says:

    For some reason I feel compelled to contribute this note just to express my admiration from afar for Sandra Bullock. Having never paid much attention to Hollywood stars or icons for almost entire adult life, suddenly it dawns on me that there is this very attractive actress who seems to possess a charisma unlike any other I’ve ever taken notice of before. Perhaps others might think here’s just another old geezer pinning away that no other charming stars exist out there. Not so. There are many.
    So, yes, there are many attractive actresses out there, but Sandra seems to have another dimension, and it’s not entirely physical. Women tend to say it much better than men on various blogs about her,…but a common remark about her is that she is attractive in a girl next door sort of way, but that particular cliche is subtly misleading, because I would say she is strikingly attractive because of an additional charismatic quality that makes her very likable, almost endearing, even from afar. But much more importantly, she clearly telegraphs modesty, humility, and good humor in any interviews I’ve ever seen. She has a guileless, almost quirky sense of humor and a winning smile, which is absolutely among your most likable if not endearing attributes I’ve ever seen in a Hollywood actress. She is also very intelligent and articulate in a way that really seems to differentiate her from other actresses. She seems so like other people I knew growing-up in Virginia. I think many middle-class people identify with her. She is not pretentious, but truly seems authentic.
    She fits her characters very well, but it strikes me that with her not only does art imitate life, but life imitates art, particularly with respect to relationships. No doubt, she doesn’t need complete strangers to tell her this, but it is very transparent that public display of her ex-husband’s betrayal hurts deeply and with uncanny irony. She must be very courageous in overcoming her misfortune and strong enough, no less, to dedicate herself to a child as a single parent. As everybody comments, she definitely deserves more than she has received, and I hope that she gets it someday soon. At least she has the comfort of knowing that she has been incredibly successful, but as the cliché goes: it’s better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.
    Flattering letters like this must seem oddly out of touch with her reality, for who knows what she feels? And who has a right to judge anybody’s career and personal life choices just because they are the scrutiny of the news media and tabloids? It’s really none of our business, nor do any of us a have a better hold on the right judgment or a more righteous opinion. Perhaps all we should say is this: know, Sandra, that from a distance you are admired and seem very special. Lucky would be the companion who finally wins your heart and trust for good. Do not go silently or alone into that good night!