How Sandra Bullock’s worst movie almost broke her: “I thought I was going to lose it”
Like many of her peers, Sandra Bullock almost always feels a strong connection to her characters and the worlds she finds herself in.
This is likely because many of her best films have psychological threads, like the single mother she played in Netflix’s Bird Box, which she naturally felt connected to from being a single mother in real life. It also came at a time when the #MeToo movement was gaining momentum, which gave working on set a different kind of atmosphere, having also been directed by a woman.
That said, Bullock’s thrillers often tackle real societal themes and struggles outside of their immediate contexts. In Bird Box, we also experienced intense fear of the unknown, mortal anxiety, and trusting perfect strangers. Gravity also tackled isolation and uncertainty, while Premonition addressed the bridge between psychological anguish and reality and our relationship with time.
When you look at how much Premonition was absolutely torn apart by critics upon its release in 2007, it’s easy to make a case for it being one of the most underrated and underappreciated films of all time. Yes, it quite clearly borrows from a succession of well-established and well-respected films that came before, including The Sixth Sense and Groundhog Day, and yes, its editing is disjointed at times and a little jarring, but generally, it’s a film that completely stays with you.
Granted, it was so buzzed in culture at the time that it’s hard to forget anyway, but broadly speaking, Premonition has some of the most impactful tension-building in any modern thriller and some equally as compelling acting from Bullock herself. It’s also something that’s still incredibly relevant in our modern, anxiety-riddled brains: the constant paranoia that our worst fears might one day come true.
After all, the film follows Bullock’s Linda Hanson, who has a premonition that her husband will die in a brutal car crash. With a hefty amount of back-and-forth with her future vision and the present moment, the film navigates the perils of struggling relationships and morality in hindsight, ultimately ending with Hanson unable to save her husband despite her change of heart.
It tackles the challenge with inevitability when you already have a hunch as to what’s going to happen, which is also what people probably took issue with – that her husband still died, but that they attempted to soften the blow or give it a different philosophy at the end by revealing Hanson’s pregnancy. Either way, its tone is heavy, and while on set, Bullock felt the effects of having to live through her character’s turmoil.
In fact, it probably started with Bullock understanding the premise on a deeper level – that people can have intuition about something bad happening and prophesying it before it’s actually happened. At the time, she explained that that’s why so many people find the film unsettling, herself included. But she also struggled with living with her character’s knowledge of catastrophe and having to act out certain scenes when everyone else acted normal, almost like she was caught in some sort of strange gaslight-type situation where she was living one reality and everybody else was living another.
She explained this was why she had “a really hard time” and why she “thought I was going to lose it”. She even went up to the director, Mennan Yapo, and explained how she was feeling, but Yapo only smiled and told her, “No, this is exactly where you need to be.”
Of course, Bullock retorted somewhat, and argued that it was the opposite of where she should have been, but that ultimately, her “unravelling” ensured they “played the levels right”.
