Casting

Sandra Bullock

Once Yapo came aboard, finding the right actress to play Linda Hanson was crucial. It was important to find someone with whom audiences could instantly identify, an actress with that unique mixture of empathy and emotional versatility. "I think it was crucial to cast Sandra Bullock," Yapo notes. "She is the most believable actress I know. She embodies the character and it was crucial to have someone that audiences believe. I felt she was the only actress that could do this."

Bullock, meanwhile, was in the frame of mind to do, as she puts it, "not a horror film, but a scary film, scary because of the subject matter, but also that element where you're walking down the stairs, and just the creak of the stairs makes everything more charged. And within the first couple of pages of 'Premonition' I just loved it. Loved it!"

Bullock was the ideal match to convey Linda's complexities. "Sandra was always my first choice, and I know she was also Mennan's. She is an extremely talented actress who has done a variety of different roles and this is her movie start to finish. This is a thriller but has all these great dramatic moments. We had to balance that very carefully. Sandra's performance is subtle while at the same time highly dramatic. She is an everywoman while at the same time wakes up in the morning looking stunning."

For Bullock, the part of Linda offered many intriguing possibilities: "Linda becomes what I think the American dream is--a house, two kids, married to your sweetheart--that sort of idealized life we think we want. Then there's the mortgage, the monotony of the day-to-day, and the separation that happens to a lot of people when the love starts to pull apart because of the pressures in life. And that's where we start the story, when these strange events start happening. You have a woman who's complacent, sort of numb, a husband who's the same, not feeling anymore, and these events bring up the question: if you had the chance to make a u-turn to fix something, would you, or would you just continue on and change your life? To reconnect or start afresh, that's the fork in the road that's presented to her."

After meeting with Yapo for the first time, Bullock knew that all the elements she loved in the script would come to fruition. "We have an excellent painter in him. He can tell a story in a way that is very unique, and very unexpected, which I think everyone's looking for."

Yapo, meanwhile, has one more thing to add about his leading lady: "Besides the fact that she is a wonderful person to work with and be around, she speaks German!"

Throughout her illustrious career, Bullock has excelled at playing comedic characters, most notably the wallflower police officer in the "Miss Congeniality" movies. But it's Bullock's inherent pathos, a kind of mesmerizing melancholy that's all her own, that was important in breathing life into Linda. "Sandra is a beautiful and talented actress but there is something more in her eyes, you know that she has experienced more than she is revealing," Yapo points out. "And that's Linda, and that's definitely a quality of Sandra's that we wanted."

Julian McMahon

The role of Jim Hanson had to be the perfect counterpoint to Linda; a good husband and father, who although worn down by his role, is practical until the end. For this character, the filmmakers cast Australian actor Julian McMahon.
"Firstly, I am a fan of 'Nip/Tuck,'" says Yapo, referring to the FX series McMahon stars in about plastic surgeons. "In his age range he is one of the most interesting actors out there. He can play anything, he can do anything, there's no problem. You believe whatever he does."

McMahon says that when he read the script, he was immediately hooked. "The first few times I read it I was just fascinated by the juxtaposition of time vs. the traveling of the characters, and what they mean to each other. Then I started getting into the whole psychology of it, and after the fifth or sixth time I read it I realized how draining the whole thing is. It's a devastating psychological thriller."

Jim, says McMahon, is the catalyst for everything that is happening in the movie. "This isn't a character I have played before: a more middle-American regular guy who is just living his life while his wife is going through an extraordinary experience. There were so many interesting things for me to dig my teeth into...the character, the script, the director and, of course, Sandy," explains McMahon.

About working with Bullock, McMahon says, "I've admired her from afar for a long, long time, so I was pretty excited to get the opportunity to work with her. And I found she is everything we think she is: fun, funny, sweet, gorgeous and a wonderful actress."

Bullock was equally charmed by her onscreen husband. "I loved working with him," says Bullock. "He knew who his character was, and what we didn't know we were going to find together. And when he wasn't there, we all wanted him back on the set because he was the joy, the energy, the spark."

Nia Long

To play the part of Linda's best friend Annie, the filmmakers cast the beautiful and talented Nia Long, who immediately sparked to the unexpectedness of the script. "I liked the fact that it was this mind-twisting story that you have to keep up with," says Long.

"I think we all have a little bit of curiosity when it comes to a spiritual realm that we can't really explain," continues Long, "so there's that fine line between seeing and believing, knowing and believing, and then saying, should I question this or accept it for what it is?"

Kate Nelligan

Nelligan was cast in the crucial role of Linda's mother Joanne, who knows her daughter is going through a rough time but isn't privy to the peculiarities of Linda's experience. She, too, was intrigued by the delicately intertwined nature of the story. "The script is very well-written, compressing time, moving backward and forward so you never know whether you're in real time or the future. It's very clever like a puzzle."

While Nelligan had to do her share of playing different versions of similar scenes because of the time-bending nature of the script--you just do it like you never did it before, because each minute of everybody's reality, except for Linda, is the only one they know," she says "she was especially impressed by how her onscreen daughter handled the Herculean task of playing the confusion and drama of living through an unexplainable reality alone.

"Sandra has as much stamina, emotional and physical, as anybody I've ever seen in my life," says Nelligan. "You have to be able to get torn up and repair yourself, and I've never seen anybody as resilient as she is. It's astonishing to me."