The movie Sandra Bullock thought had no hope of success
As one of the most well-known and highly regarded female actors in Hollywood, Sandra Bullock can more or less take her pick when it comes to upcoming roles. 1994’s Speed proved that she was more than capable of carrying the action/thriller genre, while Miss Congeniality in 2000 demonstrated she had comedy chops to boot.
Her later work, however, would prove to be the highest-grossing of her career. Standing at the very top remains the 2015 animation Minions – a spin-off from Despicable Me which focuses on those bizarre yellow creatures which seemed to have stolen the hearts of every child in the Western hemisphere. Second to Minions, however, is a much more adult project released a year earlier: Alfonso Cuarón’s science fiction drama masterpiece, Gravity.
This 2013 sensation starred Bullock as an astronaut who becomes untethered from her space station after lethal space debris crashes into her. Adrift alone in space, she must make a daring and desperate attempt to get back to Earth – all while navigating the perils of zero gravity and her rapidly deteriorating sanity. It was an unreserved smash hit, earning Bullock her second Academy Award nomination and hundreds of millions at the box office.
In the beginning, however, neither Cuaron nor Bullock were confident in how successful the movie might be. It wasn’t the role that she was unsure of – the characterisation of Dr Ryan Stone had been the driving force behind her decision to take the project on. Bullock would tell Collider how, after “longing to do, emotionally and physically, what my male counterparts always got to do”, this script came to her where the female lead “was the integral part of the story”, adding, “I don’t want to say that’s revolutionary, but it’s revolutionary.”
The shooting would prove challenging in itself, but it was whether audiences would respond well to Gravity or not that remained a concern. Bullock told The Guardian, “We had no idea if it would be successful. You’d explain that it was an avant-garde, existential film on loss and survival in space, and everyone would be like: ‘Ok…’ It didn’t sound like a film people would be drawn to.”
Likewise, Cuaron, who had initially thought his movie would be a “simple story of a woman in space alone”, got more than he bargained for when the shoot extended from an estimated one year to four. “Every day we thought, ‘This is not going to work,'” the director explained. “It was a process of trial and error, and little, little hints of hope, and also a lot of mistakes. The only test screening that we had, months before the film was finished, was a disaster.”
Ultimately, the movie was such a critical and commercial hit that it remains a highlight of both Bullock and Cuaron’s careers. Whether they made significant changes following that test screening or not, this “small, intimate film” won audiences over in a big, explosive way.
