Her mother, played by Kate Nelligan, and her best friend, played by Nia Long, try to be supportive, as do her daughters, played by Courtney Taylor Burness and Shyann McClure. It helped that during the confusing shoot Bullock could speak German secretly to director Mennan Yapo. (She learned the language from her German opera-singer mother.)

Bullock, McMahon, director Yapo and screenwriter Bill Kelly spoke to SCI FI Weekly at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. The film opens nationwide on March 16. Bullock discussed honestly her frustration with the filming and the stress she was feeling, and she got a bit bent out of shape when asked about her other sci-fi and fantasy films. McMahon, on the other hand, embraced the connection.Mennan Yapo, we heard that you used your German with Sandy during the filming.

Yapo: Yes, it was an immense help to have her speak German. She is fluent. There are times when I get very excited and I speak in my native language, and she understands but no one else does. She understands those moments. And yes, she understands when I am swearing in German, too. Whenever I would want to tell her something that I didn't want the rest of the cast to know, I would use German, and that worked on the set.Did you shoot in continuity of the days of the week or the way it was written in the script?

Yapo: I insisted on shooting in order for continuity of the script. If I was not shooting it in continuity, it would have been a mess. The mood that we made for the day worked; it helped everybody psychologically. You also insisted on shooting in Louisiana even after Katrina?

Yapo: Yes, we had always planned on shooting in New Orleans, but after Hurricane Katrina, we were going to move somewhere else, but they contacted us from Louisiana and we shot in Shreveport. We were working with so many people who were directly hit by Katrina. Everybody was so nice and appreciative that we were there. The people in Shreveport would leave food at the doorstep, at the house, or invite us to coffee. We had some crew members affected. There was one girl, [who was part of the crew] all her stuff was still wet and she went home every weekend to try to clean up her house and rebuild her house. Katrina was everywhere on the shoot.Bill Kelly, as the screenwriter, how did you come up with the idea for this story?

Kelly: The producer and I were talking over ideas, and I just saw Laura by Otto Preminger, about someone seeing someone alive again, and we thought, "What if someone's life was like you threw a pack of cards up in air, and how they fall is how their life was?" And then we settled on the logic world of a week.How did you keep everything straight?

Kelly:I had notebook with a chart, very much like she did in the movie, where I was scratching things out here and there because it didn't pay off.Did you come up with other endings?

Kelly: Yes, many different ways of endings. It was an evolution, this ending. There will be no alternative endings that were shot or will end up on the DVD. It evolved.Did Blast From the Past help you at all with time bending?

Kelly: No. But I'm a big Twilight Zone fan and like time-travel films.Did you ever have a strong premonition experience?

Kelly: No.Did you get to spend a lot of time with the cast on the set?

Kelly: I spent time with the cast early on, with Sandra, Julian and Mennan, and all these discussions took place and we saw the script through on an emotional level and where she's at at a certain time, as well as where all the other characters are at each time. ... I think it's a hybrid of a love story and a psychological thriller. Time is more than a gimmick, I hope. It's a tense psychological thriller.Sandy is known for getting very involved in her projects. Did she do that with this one too?

Kelly: She was really very conscientious and really challenging, and she was really great. She came up with major points, and ultimately it was extremely helpful. She was really great.You wrote this as if time were a character in the film, right?

Kelly: Time is an unrelenting and unforgiving element, and that is to me the only thing any of us have, is right now. I think the only fate we have is our actions in the moment, and the contributes to fate.Sandra Bullock, how crazy was this for you, to get the emotion? Mennan said you shot it in continuity with the script.

Bullock: OK, that is funny that you said that, because that so isn't true. You always shoot out of order in a film anyway, and then your days are out of order. I had a really hard time, and I actually take great pleasure in saying I thought I was going to lose it. I went to the director and said, "I am having a hard time, I don't know what to do," and the smile on his face when he heard, he goes, "No, this is exactly where you need to be." I was like, "No, it's not!" But I loved working with this director. I understood completely the method to his madness. How did you keep it all straight for the continuity?

Bullock: In my unraveling, in this little bubble that we had for three months, I felt like, "OK, I am going to be fine." It is just a hard thing to put yourself in a state of grief like that for three months and not think that you are going to cough up some of your own stuff. It's not healthy, but it was exciting to think, I hope, at the end he got what he needed. We played the levels right. It was getting the levels right, which was, "Is she just pure grief here? When does the grief go into denial and anger? When does she get angry at the affair?" You have to start infusing; it just was not pretty. It would be nice if it all had been linear. It would have made more sense. I don't think there is a way to shoot this film in a linear fashion.We heard that you used your German with the director.

Bullock: It was fun. I think that because I understood his nature, I got his work ethic. Once I realized the way we were going to work, and it dawned on me one day in the middle of a shot. I went, "This is what I need to be prepared for." Once I knew what to be prepared for, which was "At any moment he is going to flip it, put it on its ear, and do something else," which added in making me feel like I was going to go crazy. Not only as a perfectionist but emotionally I was getting so angry. Once I knew what that language was and understood it I felt very comfortable. I understood his work ethic, I got it, and I got that drive. The visuals between he and Torsten [Lippstock], who was his DP. Their teamwork as visualists, the painters that they became in tandem, was pretty spectacular. If you watched and sat on set—we never really left set—he said, "I would like you to be on set all the time." I tried to make that happen as much as possible.You seem to do themes with time travel or magic—

Bullock: I've only done two movies about—well, I have done one movie about time travel [The Lake House]. I have done one movie about days being out of order [Premonition], and I have done one movie about magic [Practical Magic]. I hate generalizations. I hate it when it gets looped together, because to me they are very specific and different. I want the people who made those films not to be lumped together and their uniqueness to be taken away.Of the movies you have done, do you believe in any kind of supernatural occurrences or things of that nature?

Bullock: I don't think we are the only planet that has life. I do think that there is something to human nature, if you want to call it intuitiveness, a gut instinct, people who know things that have happened. It happens to a lot of people. How you just put it ... it is almost like it becomes a scientific thing. No one has proof, that I know of, that a higher power exists, and yet a major portion of the world believes in it and relies on it in faith, and trusts in what that is. Where is the science to that? But yet you have incredible belief in that, so when someone says to me, "I have a bad feeling that something is going to happen," and then it did, I don't know how to explain it. It can't be explained by science, but I believe in that happening. I think there is something bigger than we understand, but I don't think it is supported and nurtured in people. I think people think you are crazy, and unless it can be proven by science it is not valid. I do believe that twins have it; twins know what has happened to each other.When doing The Lake House you said you were concerned about an explanation for the mailbox and went over different possibilities. Did you go through the same process with this script about explaining things?

Bullock: No, because so much of what is woven in this story is in the visual and was the director's job. My job was to have the right emotion. What would she do in this situation? It was all about me. "What is Linda going through at this point? What would she do with her kids? What wouldn't she say? Why doesn't she say anything to him, because he is going to think she is crazy?" They are already distant when the film starts; there is already trouble there. If I bring up that I am having these visions, is he going to leave me? There has been a lot going on before the film started, so we did a lot of that kind of talking. Why would she choose not to, or why would she? We said a lot of this has happened in the years preceding this very moment.

That was nice in working with Julian [McMahon] and Mennan [Yapo], is that we came up with our own story of what put us at this place. So you feel it when you see it, but you don't know it until the pieces get together and you go, "Oh my God." And again at the end, to have that feeling of "What would I have done? Would I have gone back and changed, or would I have let him die?" What would you have done? Do you hold on to the resentment? Do you try and make a new life? Do you try and make a life better than how your life ended up, or is there something worth salvaging? I concentrate on her and not the other stuff. I did not have the wherewithal to deal with that, but I knew that Mennan and Torsten knew exactly what they were doing visually in their storytelling.What about the challenge of doing a movie with so much tension?

Bullock: On one hand I got excited, because as an audience member I wanted to be the eyes of the people watching the film. If I was in the audience watching this I would want to feel this frustrated. I want to feel like I am going crazy. I understand why she is acting the way that she is. Why isn't anyone listening? What would I do? I thought it was a really interesting take on putting her complex situation into the driver's seat for the audience. I love that take, and that again goes to the writer who imagined this story from beginning to end. Go into his head. What would make him write this? I thought it was a really great point of view to take. So it wasn't an easy ride for you?

Bullock: No, I was miserable. I had such a hard time. I really had a hard time with it. I think that anyone who would have done that, when you stay at that level for three months, you are bound to bring it home. You go, "I don't know how to get out of this," and on top of it wanting to be a good actor. Wanting to give the director what he needs, "This doesn't make sense," "I don't know if I did this right," "What level do you need?" I am sure that I drummed up some of my own stress and drama. In the end I am glad it was with Mennan at the helm, because there wasn't one moment that I felt I was going to fall off of a cliff. I felt like this man was in control of the ship, and I felt really good about that.Have you ever been through anything like that on a movie before?

Bullock: On a different level, yeah. I will make myself sick on film just because you want everything to be right. I can't sleep if something hasn't been done or [is] out of place. If I am producing it as well it gets even worse. That is why I know myself well enough to take time in between before I produce and am in something again. It has to be a long time; it just takes a lot out of me. Why do it unless you are going to do it like that? I have had different hard times but never anything like this, because this you put yourself in a state. Your love has died, and your life is out of order. You don't know what has happened. That kind of grieving, I think anyone would just sort of want to go to therapy afterwards. But that basically was therapy. [Laughs.]Did being a wife now help you connect with the characters?

Bullock: Well, I have played a lot of wives and moms before this. You know, every relationship is different. There are good marriages, bad marriages, connected partners, unconnected partners. Being married doesn't change, or hasn't changed, how I would have approached it. Thinking for three months, now being married, "What if my husband was killed?", it put me in a bad place. It put me in a really bad place. Sometimes, all couples will tell you, I want to kill him, I want to kill him, but I would never want that to actually happen. In five minutes I am going to love you a lot! It put me in a place, not because I was married, but because that was the subject matter of the film. How I was trained was that I can't pretend something; if I don't feel it then I can't act it. Same with comedy, my character, Sandy, has got to feel it. It is not the way Sandy would do it, it's not Sandy's situation, but I have got to find my "as if" to get me to that place. That is all I know. I can't lie on the floor and fry like bacon, Stanislavski-style. I will never be cast as a bacon piece, so I can't imagine what that would be. I seem more like an egg girl. [Laughs.] That is just how I was trained and what I know. That is what I relied on. What message do you think people should take away from the film?

Bullock: I think there are a lot of great ones. I wish Mennan was here; he said, "It's like the American dream becomes the American nightmare." I personally came out of it ... my favorite line is the priest's line. "It is never too late to fight for what you want." That is, what you want in your happiness is not going to be what the American dream is. The American dream, I am sure, wants you to follow that path because it is easy to control. I am a firm believer that we all deserve happiness in our way. It is not going to be like your neighbor's way. Have you done everything in this lifetime to make this lifetime your own? Complacency, what a miserable place to be. She was a prisoner of that house and that routine and that run every day. The same with her laundry. Everything was exactly the same, her love lost, the touching him, he turns away, you can't speak anymore. You don't know how to get back to each other. That happens to so many people. What happened to the fun or the laughter or the connection? Why do we get to that place? Why is work or business or success or having that house or lifestyle so important? So important that we will allow it to make us dead? That is what I took. A lot of people come out having taken so many other things. You don't want to die going, "I wish I had lived the life I wanted to live, or said what I wanted to say." Or said, "You know I am pissed off at you, how dare you do this?" Start a dialogue and get it off your chest to connect, to feel something. To go through life unfeeling is not a life.What about fate and our ability or inability to control it?

Bullock: I don't know about the word. I think the word is just a hard [word] to say. [It's scary to ask] "Do you believe in Fate?" Then you can argue it and discount it, but I said earlier I can look at my life and all the things that have happened and think, "Ah, I now see why A, B and C happened." I now understand why I had to go through that, because here I sit. I do believe that rebirth and when things have finished their time. For me to get through life and think what is the purpose. When someone passes away, I hope there is a really good reason for it, because it is there to give birth to something else. If this event hadn't happened and gone away, then this couldn't have begun. That is what I love about this film; it was bittersweet. If one thing didn't happen then the next thing that was supposed to begin in this world couldn't have arrived. You can call it fate, whatever it is, but I think we have a good amount of control in what our life can be. It is up to us to make our life happy and joyful. I think there is a level of control in fate. Making that journey to that fated end, whatever you want it to be, I don't know, I can only come from my point of view. That was it for today, which will probably change tomorrow based on what I learn today.Have you ever had a premonition?

Bullock: I have pretty good gut instinct. My mother had extraordinary intuition. I think that everyone has it; I don't think we are raised to embrace it. I have had things tell me not to do something, and then I have done it and paid for it. I have had dreams thinking, "What does that mean?" And then the dream, what the essence of it was, happens. I think that happens to everyone. Is that intuition, is that premonition, is that coincidence? I don't know. But I do know there have been times that I have asked for something and then I have seen it and I look up and I go, "That's awesome." To me it is beyond my control, so I appreciate any help I can get. Whether it is the voices in my head or whether it is a neighbor, I appreciate it.What did Julian McMahon bring to the picture as your husband?

Bullock: Acting chops. Acting chops, acting chops, acting chops. And an understanding of what it is to be a father. An understanding of what it is like to be a man and be in the position where you have to be the provider. You have to do X, Y and Z in order to be a man, which is completely false, but that preconceived notion. The fact that the day has become mundane, that tweed jacket at the car shop, at the place where it is just the same thing, everything. They could have been prom queen and king, they were the sparkle in everyone's eye, and here they are. What they are is nothing. He understood that, and he was so thorough in how he approached everything. In the love scene, the love scene we did is not the love scene that was written. We got to that night and we went, "Something is not right." And that happens a lot on film. You have shot so much, and you get to this place where you go, "So much has changed." All three of us just locked ourselves in a room and talked about it and thought, "What is it that we want to say in a visual way? Emotionally?" The way that he approaches his work is so thorough. He is a workhorse; he takes his craft very seriously, and I felt very comfortable with him. I knew he was in it for the same reasons I was, and there was going to be nothing for those three months that was going to get in the way of that. I admire him a great deal for the man he is and the actor that he is, his dedication. And he is really tall; he made me look tiny. I love that.Julian McMahon, how were you able to keep sense of the script and what you were shooting that day?

McMahon: It was a very difficult script to put together, and I don't think that I ever put it together properly, but because everything was so out of order I had to kind of put together a bunch of different kinds of scripts. So I would get one script and I'd ripped out all of the pages, and I said, "This is Monday, this is Tuesday, this is Wednesday, blah, blah, blah." But what I felt that I had to do was that he had to live his life normally. With this wife of his who was kind of becoming a little strange, he's going through his daily routine, doing all of the things that he's doing, and that's why whenever you see him he's kind of moving through life like he would normally, but with this woman who is telling him, "Don't go to work tomorrow. Don't do this. Don't go there." Crazy stuff. It's particularly at a point in time when their relationship isn't really that great. It's pretty far on the rocks. So I felt like my part was kind of to solidify things a little bit in regards to the fact that we were at some point in time a normal family, and that's the way that we live our life, while she's gone all haywire. Her days are all out of order and doing all that kind of stuff. Still, whenever she came back to us it was whatever it was. It was just kind of normal life.Did you see yourself making a love story or a thriller?

McMahon: Love story.Everyone else has said thriller.

McMahon: Really? Oh, God. Thriller, to me, is like—I don't know. I guess it's a thriller, really. There is no doubt about that. I remember reading the script the first time, and it was so emotional and touching to me, this whole idea of this couple that hadn't communicated with each other for six years. They'd been living with each other, raising two children, sleeping together in the bed and not even communicating, not even talking. So that kind of void occurs when something like that happens, but this was for like six or seven years or whatever. So they're at a very desperate place in their lives without this mayhem that goes on, without the thriller aspect of it. Then they have these two beautiful children, and I said, "What do you do?" It's very difficult to turn around to your partner and go, "You know what, I haven't spoken to you for six years, but what the hell is going on?" It's easier, I think, to make a choice and go, "Let's get a divorce. I don't know what's going on. I don't like you anymore. I don't care about you." Whatever it is. "I've had an affair. Take the children." I mean, there are so many different choices that you can make, and that's what I thought was touching about the movie. They actually make a choice to be together at the end of the movie ... and then, obviously, I can't say.Are car salesmen thought of the same way as in Australia?

McMahon: I think that it was about making him an ordinary guy. I thought that the car salesmen thing was weird, and I had that kind of reaction as well, but you also have to remember that we tried to do this kind of small-town thing. I think that it's a little different in a small town than it is in a big town like this, like Los Angeles or wherever you are. So we tried to make everything as sort of normal as possible, and everything was sort of mainstream, and that was just a part of it. I always felt that it was weird, though, and not only that, but the choice of his car. Did you see his car? It was like, "Couldn't he get a better car? He's dragging it up the lot." But look, it was all kind of a part of trying to, I guess, normalize things in a very kind of bizarre circumstance, and that's the movie.So much of your relationship with Sandra's character was communicated nonverbally. Is there something that you enjoy as an actor to do it that way, or do you prefer a lot of exposition and dialogue?

McMahon: Well, both. They're both just very different things. They're both very different characters. Like my guy on Nip/Tuck, for example, doesn't shut up. You want to say to him, "Just don't say it. What's the point?" But that's the fun of playing the character. He's obnoxious, and I like that side of him, and then you have other characters who say things very poignantly and are straight to the point. This was about a gap that existed between these two people, and this inability to communicate. So inside of that comes a lot of air, a lot of space, a lot of walking around the kitchen and doing things and not even really noticing, trying not to notice that the other person is even there and trying to maybe get out of the door earlier, that door, because you don't want to see him. That's what this was about. This was a very desperate and horrible place for two people who are married to be at.Have you ever had an intense premonition experience?

McMahon: No. No.What's your role in Prisoner?

McMahon: Prisoner is a pretty kind of intense movie. It's about a guy who's this arrogant filmmaker who gets in prisons, and it's a very psychologically orientated imprisonment. It's a little trippy, like this movie is, and I guess that throughout the movie you wonder if he was actually really in prison or if it was his own spell that he put himself under. Hopefully he comes out of it at the end as a better man or at least having learned something. It was great fun. It was working with Elias Koteas, and we were stuck in a prison cell for five weeks or something. It was pretty intense.As opposed to being stuck against a green screen as Dr. Doom for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer?

McMahon: Yeah. I spent a month and a half doing that. That was intense. The last month and a half of me shooting that was me in this outfit which weighed, I think, between 40 and 60 pounds, depending on what cape I had on, which is a lot of weight to carry around. I was up on this jib about 50 or 60 feet high with a half-cut-off surfboard and put on this massive tire, and then I had like a support system strapped to my back, and I had to pretend that I was doing all of these different things.Are those situations where you say to yourself, "I am an actor!"?

McMahon: Yeah. You just wonder what the hell you're doing there, and if someone else should be doing this, but I felt like the Dr. Doom thing was so—I don't know. I didn't want anyone else to be doing that. I like doing the little things, like the hand stuff. No one else was going to do it the way that I wanted it to be done. I mean, particularly with Dr. Doom I've found—and I only found this through the first movie—everything was happening through his hands. All the metallic stuff, it started in his hands, and he was doing all this stuff with his hands. So if they need a close-up of it or whatever, it should be me doing it, because I know what I'm doing. It gives it that kind of feel. That's why I decided to get up on this green screen.The fact that you grew up as the son of a prime minister and studied law, was there a moment that you realized that you weren't going to be tied to that?

McMahon: The older I get, the more I realize that being an actor is pretty close to being a lawyer. I'm far from where I started. I'm far from where I should've been, in a way, but that's what has kind of been great. If I have a story of my life, that's what I've enjoyed about it, really. I pretty much just grew up in Sydney. I came to America once with my mother and my sisters, and we were here for a short period of time. We never went outside of Australia, and when I first left Australia at like 17 years old, just getting on the plane was exciting. Just sitting next to people that you didn't know before and getting to know people. I was one of those ridiculously gregarious people who wanted to meet the person that sat next to me on the plane, and then to go to places like America and Japan and all through Europe, just the taste of the travel is exciting, people and cultures. Then that kind of perpetuated what I wanted to do. I wanted to make a choice. I also just wanted to be away from there. I felt like growing up in the kind of public eye had certain limitations. I don't know. It was many things, kind of expectations, and I just didn't want to have expectations. So I came here, where no one knew who I was. It was nice to be able to say, "This is going to be my own path and my own steps that I'm going to take, and I'm going to own my own life, as opposed to what I used to feel like." At that period of time I didn't feel that my life was my own.