Behind the Scenes 
The Starlet—Sandra Bullock
Hollywood’s girl next door is now our girl next door.
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The two now play it very cool in public. When McConaughey appeared at Austin’s Paramount Theatre in March for the world premiere of The Newton Boys, Bullock was also on hand, but she arrived at a different time with another man. As we ride around in her Expedition, she tells me she has come to Austin after months on a movie set in L.A. to relax for the weekend and visit her four dogs, which live with one of her Texas friends—but later I learn that she’d flown in with McConaughey the night before I met her for lunch and attended a wedding with him after our interview.
Regardless of the true nature of their relationship—and if they do have a romantic one, they should be applauded for keeping it secret for two years, an eternity by Hollywood standards—McConaughey gets credit for bringing Bullock to Texas. “He showed her the romance of the state,” says Obst, saying no more. Bullock will say only that she first set foot in Texas in the summer of 1996, when she was on a road trip with a “friend.” They stayed at the Austin Motel, the kitschy dive with the big red electric sign out front, and bar-hopped through downtown, ending up at an R&B club, where they danced until two in the morning. When she returned to L.A., she stuck a postcard from the Austin Motel on her refrigerator door and stared at it every day.
During that period, Bullock was in a mini-slump. Her two most recent movies, In Love and War and Two if by Sea, were panned by critics and fans alike, and she sensed that her next film, Speed 2, was going to be a disaster. It was. “I was making decisions based on fear, based on other people telling me what I should be doing,” she says. “I was trying to please everybody. I was trying to be all those perky adjectives that people had been attaching to me. I was not trusting my own instincts. I needed to get away. I needed to find a place where I could go to the convenience store and get a Slurpee whenever I wanted and not have to talk about the film business.”
Then the script for Hope Floats hit her desk. “Talk about life imitating art,” Bullock says. “Everything that was happening to this character paralleled what was happening to me. Here was a woman who left one life behind and came to a small town to find out again who she was.” The only trouble was that the movie was set in Arkansas, but after Bullock signed on as the film’s star and co-executive producer, the first thing she and Obst did was move it to Texas. Serendipitously, they found in Smithville an antebellum house sitting at the end of a road, just as the script called for.
Then Bullock found her own house—or her realtor did. It was a little stone structure on a lake, a short distance from Austin. “I had always had this picture of where I wanted to live: a place by the water with lots of grass and, literally, a stone house,” Bullock says. “And here it was. It was the first time I had ever had heart palpitations over real estate.” In the past few months, she has been restoring the house and building another, larger home on the property, using old stone and weathered planks and beams from nearby farms “so that it will look like it’s been there for a hundred years.” On her travels around the country, she pops into flea markets and antiques stores and ships back to Austin whatever she finds that she thinks will look good in her house. “I’m never going to have to worry about getting dirt on a Louis XIV couch because there won’t be a Louis XIV couch,” she says. “I want this to be like a great huge farmhouse.” That means a few goofball Bullock touches, like a rolling beer cooler (“so at parties in the back yard, the beer can always come to you”) and a saddle that hangs from the living room ceiling and lights up like a disco ball. And she maybe wants to buy a pig, a real one, because, she says, “they have such a quiet grace.”
Only recently has she told her Hollywood acquaintances where she’s moving. “I didn’t want them to move here too,” she says. Although she is keeping one small production company in L.A., she’s started another in Austin, where she wants to be a vital part of the film community. “The people I have met here are incredible artists because they never bend,” she says. “They do what their vision tells them to do.” She has already funded and produced one short film that was shot in Austin, and she wants to do more: In fact, she says she is going to take a year off from acting to work on her own projects. “I’d like to find a movie that would cost about $1 million,” she says, “get all the actors and actresses I love working with, develop the story from beginning to end, and just go out and shoot a great guerrilla film.”
But that isn’t the most interesting idea she has for her new Texas life. She’d like to find a piece of land with a giant wall on the lake just up from her property. “I want to set up a movie projector, use the wall as big movie screen, and then let people pull up in their boats, drop anchor, and watch old films,” she says. Coming soon from Sandra Bullock: the nation’s first drive-in theater for boats.
WE FINALLY ARRIVE AT THE SALT LICK, a venerable barbecue joint southwest of Austin that is Bullock’s absolute favorite. She pets an orange cat sitting by the front door and then asks a waitress for a table in the back by the fireplace. It’s still early—the Saturday afternoon crowd hasn’t yet arrived—and no one seems to recognize her. She orders a turkey sandwich with beans, coleslaw, and potato salad. After taking a professional-wrestler-size bite out of the sandwich, she moans and then murmurs, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” Other diners cast sidelong glances at her. Bullock is acting like Meg Ryan in the famous scene from When Harry Met Sally. “My God, this food!” she says, still chewing. “It’s the best. I mean, the best!”
A few minutes later, she orders peach cobbler with ice cream—her metabolism must be amazing—and she eats it like a horse, making smacking sounds and laughing so hard at jokes about her appetite that she snorts. Two tables away, an old man in a fishing cap turns to watch her. He stares at her glowing complexion, her absolutely liquid-brown eyes, her cleft chin, and her loopy grin. Perhaps he realizes he’s looking at a woman who can get $12 million to star in a single movie. Or perhaps he’s just appreciating someone he believes is another pretty Texas girl, her smile like an open door with the welcome mat out front.
“I’ve looked for a long time for a place I could call home,” Bullock says as we get up to leave. “I think I’ve found it.”
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