Girl on a wire: Sandra Bullock talks about her new space drama, Gravity
Gravity may be set in space, but it's more human drama than science fiction, Sandra Bullock tells Kavita Daswani
SANDRA BULLOCK WAS pretty much done with acting before Gravity came along. After all, she had already won an Oscar for her role as Texan socialite Leigh Anne Tuohy in 2009's The Blind Side. She had made films that were both critically lauded and commercially successful, including The Heat, her female buddy-action-comedy with Melissa McCarthy, that has made more than US$220 million worldwide. She adopted a son, Louis, now three, with whom she was happily and quietly nesting in Austin, Texas.
But then there came the call from Alfonso Cuarón, the acclaimed Mexican filmmaker behind Y Tu Mamá También (2001), and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). Bullock had always loved the way, she says, "he manages to distil everything down to one essence". If there was one director that Bullock would uproot her life for, it would be Cuarón.
The result is Gravity, a film set entirely in space, and almost entirely focused on the characters portrayed by Bullock and George Clooney. The actress says that even now, long after the film was completed, she finds it difficult to explain what it is about. "I would tell my friends, 'Don't ask me about it'," she says. "How do you explain it?"
On the face of it, Gravity, which was written jointly by Cuarón - who dreamed of becoming an astronaut as well as a director - and his son Jonás, appears to be a sci-fi thriller, but Bullock is adamant that it is not a typical science fiction film.
She plays Dr Ryan Stone, a medical engineer who trades in life at a hospital on earth to venture into space. On her first space shuttle mission, accompanied by veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky (Clooney), the shuttle is destroyed by flying debris, leaving the duo, quite literally, lost in space.
Already dealing with a personal tragedy, Stone now has to find the will to make it home. Combine the story with a brilliantly realised backdrop of an endless universe, and you have a compelling, edge-of-your-seat story. There is some investigation into the notion of existential voids, and the visuals are splendid. But there is also a strong human angle: Gravity has an emotional resonance, and the way Bullock portrays her character's fear and fatigue is palpable and emotionally engaging.