Practical Magic - Amas Veritas: In Depth

TWISTED SISTERS

Hubble,bubble,toil etc... Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman are taking a spell in a witchly disguise, albeit with serious lurve problems. It's a kind of soap opera with incantations, curses and a boyfriend who won't stay dead.

Catherine Scroop tries a bit of Practical Magic.

(From Empire Magazine)

"No,no, no!" Gasps a rather frenzied Sandra Bullock. "I ran into a plane. I swear! Oh my God, I never realised how people, when they see a woman with a black eye, think somebody's hit them...'

Having explained that the suspicious bruise above her left eyelid came from a mishap shooting the forthcoming Forces Of Nature (of which more later), Bullock goes on to ponder a less tangible blemish. She goes as far as to call her career "a catastrophe". Not its trajectory, mind, but its impact on her life in general. This may be why she's retiring from acting for the next year or so to work behind the scenes as a producer. (That's a proper hands-on, down-and-dirty producer and not, as she is keen to emphasise, the vanity title some other actors wield.) It may also be why, in Forces Of Nature, she dumps her perceived "'niceness' in favour of a wild-child image. And it is definitely why you should go and see Practical Magic. Because you won't be seeing Sandra Bullock as you know and love her for a while.

SANDRA BULLOCK'S ROLE IN THIS month's surprisingly unsentimental Practical Magic, based on Alice Hoffman's best seller and directed by erstwhile actor Griffin Dunne, falls into the normal echelon of her curriculum vitae - a wholesome girl named Sally. The character plays in stark contrast to Nicole Kidman's more rambunctious and seductive Gillian.

"I was looking for a wild role that really made sense for me - but this wasn't it," remembers Bullock, tinier than you'd expect and decked head to toe in the "colour of the season" (grey, in case you didn't know). She'd even considered taking the role of Gillian but "liked the arc of Sally better".

"I liked who Sally had to become by the end. She had to become Gillian. And Nicole had to become me in the sense of the balance."

The two, you see, are witches in modern America, outcasts in their town and saddled with a curse that any man who happens to fall in love with them will die. The part of Gillian was underwritten originally but fleshed out when Kidman came on board to add the Yin to Bullock's Yang.

"Gillian wanted to get out of that town," explains director Dunne," because she was ostracised and Sally wanted to be normal, to have a life that conformed."

The number two is important in the movie. More than an integer, it becomes an idea in itself, coming to represent the notion of duality and togetherness. There is what the cast calls white love versus dark love (manifested in Aidan Quinn and Croatian newcomer Goran Visnijc),good witchcraft and bad witchcraft. People are always in pairs, converging and parting. In accordance with this paradigm, the characters of the two leading ladies must lock like puzzle pieces, also uniting other elements in the story, to break the curse.

'This movie has dualities throughout," says Dunne. 'There's a black love and a white love and then there arcs two sisters and there are two aunts. It's about the light and dark aspects of our lives. It's a ghost story but it's also a love story."

"I love the love story," Bullock enthuses, "the one between Nicole and myself. It is so rare to have two women on film that support each other and love each other. It's a great,funny, sweet support system between the two of them and then there's the great love story between my character and Aidan's character. We all, no matter how successful we get - and I keep saying that - no matter what we strive for, all anybody wants is love at the end of it, and that if we don't have that in our life nothing else seems to matter."

Not that it's all sweetness and light. "It's that fantasy and reality balance that is so hard to pull off," Bullock maintains. "You can't have one without the other. It would have been boring. We would have been doing what we as Americans are blamed for all the time, which is making things soft. We needed the dark element, which really was horrifying to some people, but I thought the subject matter that was dark was incredibly important to tea the story and making the funny parts funnier."

" When I read this," Bullock says with heat, said this is a great opportunity to show two women who are completely opposite - who do the same thing in the industry and are at the same level, and who should be competing against each other - loving and supporting each other and not stealing each other's husbands in the film. When we were deciding who should play the part, I just kept coming up with Nicole."

At the very mention of Kidman, Dunne launches into a rhapsodic reminiscence of his first meeting with her.

"I knew people would be surprised by seeing Nicole in this if they saw her the way I saw her when I first met her which was ... wildly funny. I thought nobody has seen Nicole like this! She is an Aussie. She's a really funny party girl, just one of these great women and she'd always been thought of as very kind of classical and period and a highly serious, trained actress. She is all that but she's also hilariously funny so I kind of loved playing with that surprise."

DUNNE, NOW FULLY RECOVERED FROM the experience, reflects on what it was like to direct two of Hollywood's "royalty".

"Nicole is constantly pushing a little further and further. She'd come off Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut so she was used to about 70 or 80 takes. She could still be getting warmed up whereas Sandy nailed it the first two or three times. It would always be different for each of them. One thing they have in common is they react to what they're given and what the moment is - so if Nicole did something different, Sandy would bounce it right back in a completely different way. The further Nicole went,further it pushed Sandy.

"I think their approach to the mechanics how they get to where they are is very different but they had such an innate understanding what being a sister is, that their chemistry from day one of rehearsal was always there. They just love to play and they'd mix it up and try different things and they had a great rapport. They are very different in background and where they come from but somehow, even though they looked so wildly different, they acted like sisters who'd known each other their whole lives."

Did they ever give him any trouble?

"There was no palace coup," Dunne murmurs, with a playful hint of disappointment. Then admits that a coven scene, when Bullock and Kidman assemble all the ladies of neighbourhood to expunge an evil spirit from their midst, was "quite lively".

"Thirteen women screaming at the their lungs and I'm telling them to get in touch with their rage. It was scary ..."

ABOUT WITCHCRAFT, IT IS SANDRA Bullock who does most of the talking. Consider her thoughts on the notion of everyday magic:

"There are little things. A connection with somebody. You go to call someone on the phone, you get to the phone but before you dial they're on the other end. I have dreams about a friend of mine all the time. When he does stuff and I know what he did from a dream. It's a secret thrill between myself and whoever it is because, you know, you can't explain ... everyone thinks you're a freak.

"I believe, though, in people's spirit and ability to create things for themselves that go way beyond what we can explain logically. I really do. I think things happen between people and minds and across the seas that are so connected and spiritual that it's difficult to admit to because you can't explain it. I think every person has a spirit that affects others and can create miracles or things between other human beings. I just think that we don't use it enough because we're from a society where it can't be explained so therefore doesn't exist. But how do you explain this incredible belief in a higher power? We have no evidence of God except for the goodness that exists, what's written and what we practise in our organised religions. It's done on faith but we feel it everywhere. When something is good you feel it. I definitely believe that something exists out there.

"I like the more metaphoric side of what this movie was saying - about the belief in yourself and whatever powers you have, whether society believes in it or not. It always says be true to yourself and you'll be amazed at what you get back in return. 'Even if only two people believe in you, that's a lot better than having a thousand people believe in somebody you've only made up to please them.'

Erm ... okay ... so might that be the kind of thinking behind her decision to take a rest from acting and move into producing?

"It's not that I'm moving away. It's just that I have nothing else. I've done everything I want to do and can give 100 per cent of myself to, and right now there are other things in life I want to do. My soul needs it, my spirit needs it and my acting work needs it. If I don't give myself this time, I will crush my spirit. It's the same reason I moved out of LA, the same reason I changed a lot of things. I just know when I'm not my best and after I've been gone for a while I'll he able to pick a role and really know that it and that project is exactly what 1 have to do and that I'm the person to do it.

"I'm blessed to have what I've had up until this point. I'm not the kind of person that's going to write a tell-all book on the tragedies of my life;those are my milestones, those are my growing vitamins. Nobody wants to be bogged down with it. I have a great time when I work. I'm our talking about my work and I talk about my experiences when I'm around the work and nine times out of ten they're great because whether they succeed or not, you still have a really good time. Speed 2 was one of the best five months I've ever had in my life. Okay, the project was shit, but, you know.. .," she peters out, her speech finally slowing down after its previous faster-than-a-speeding-bullet pace. She resumes talking about her upcoming film Forces Of Nature,assuring Empire it will be "wickedly funny", gassing about co-star Ben Affleck's gift for insight into her psyche and taking leave of her quirky everywoman persona to play the film's "wild child". "If I hadn't ruined my career with Speed 2 this would have done it,' she laughs about her role.

"I'm very much the wild child, not the good girl. I'm playing everything that nobody would want or expect me to play - which was the greatest blessing in the world."

Another blessing was the chance to produce the two movies she's working on. The first is currently shooting in New York with Liam Neeson and Oliver Platt and is still untitled. The second, written by Michael Petrone, is called Talking In Voices and due to be directed Petrone himself in Australia in early 1999. 3 are far smaller budget than most she has star in recently and this prompts her to observe:"I see people keep doing things for money and I'm like, 'How much more do you need? How scared are you that you feel you need hoard all this?' I've been very lucky in that department, but it's unexpected. I've spent most of it funding short films knowing I'll never the money back but that to me is great ... That's why I have it," she says succinctly.

"I'm tired of hearing myself talk and tired it being about me. I really am. There's nothing left of me. So now I can watch these other brilliant people make these films that I believe in and we've spent years developing."

She can camouflage her excitement no longer "You know, we're dealing with stars' trailers and things right now - I'm on the phone all the time with their agents! You know,actors really are a pain...