By Zoe Heller

The first time Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock met, it was for lunch at a restaurant in Los Angeles. The meeting had been arranged so that the two actors could check each other out before committing to work together on the romantic comedy Forces of Nature. ("It's important to meet your male lead long before you do a film like this," Bullock says. "You have to be confident that you're going to be able to find something to adore about that person.")

Affleck got off to a distinctly unadorable start by being late for the appointment. "I have a promptness problem," he admits, not very ruefully. "I am a promptness-free zone." Having kept America's sweetheart waiting for 30 minutes, he blew into the restaurant and chose as his opening conversational gambit, a monstrously rude comment about Bullock's most recent movie.

"Straight away," Bullock recalls, "he said to me, 'God, that Speed 2 was a piece of shit."' Unruffled and-rather amazingly-unoffended, Bullock responded with a spirited diss of Affleck's 1998 movie Phantoms. Affleck was momentarily silenced. Bullock laughed. And lo, a friendship was born. "After that," he says, "I think I grabbed her and lifted her up-" "Yeah," says Bullock, "he lifted me up and swung me around awhile."

Both actors cite their mutual appreciation for energetic banter as what made the experience of shooting a movie together a happy one.
"She's what you want from a leading lady," says Affleck. "She's willing to make fun of herself and you and the situation. Everyone gets along with Sandy."
"Ben and I are alike," Bullock says. "We both have bursts of manic energy and then we bottom out. When we get around each other, we push each other on, so that by the end of the day we're both totally wasted."

It's a year later now and another lunch - this time in downtown Manhattan - and they are both still in manic sparring form.
"Sandra was looking to resuscitate her career," Affleck says, poker-faced, of Bullock's decision to make the film with him. "What, and I chose you to do it?" Bullock retorts. "Well, that was a gamble. 'Ben Affleck-well-known for his romantic comedies.'"

Forces of Nature, a film that benefits considerably from the rare sense that its two stars are genuinely having fun together, casts Affleck as a slightly stuffy young husband-to-be who is trying to get to his wedding in Savannah but is persistently waylaid by a variety of mishaps. Bullock plays the woman he meets en route, an exotic, kohleyed vamp whose impulsive charm prompts him to have second thoughts about his impending nuptials. The movie, as Bullock's jibe implies, represents Affleck's first stab at playing a romantic lead. But it is also something of a departure for Bullock. Though she is a veteran of romantic comedies, this is the first time she has portrayed anyone quite so louche. The opportunity to play against her strawberry shortcake type was a long time coming, she says. "I loved being someone who wasn't sweet, someone who didn't take care of everyone. My character is smoking pot, she's a little wild - that was really liberating," she says. "It's interesting - if I had done this kind of role at the beginning of my career, would I have had the career I've had? Who knows? But I felt the most liberated I've ever felt. For once I didn't have a director telling me, 'Well, you really can't do that because we want you to be likable.'"

Bullock is weary by now of film roles that demand unalloyed sweetness, it is partly, she thinks, a reflection of recent changes she has undergone offscreen. At 33, she still looks like a cutie pie - all milkyskinned and ponytailed, with long, long eyelashes like the fronds of an exotic plant - but inside, she doesn't feel quite so ingratiating. "I just can't do certain things anymore at this stage in my life," she says. "I mean, when you've been around a bit, doing that cute, fresh thing would be faking it. It would be pretending like I was that person and I'm not anymore." Bullock has spent much of her career, she says, suffering from an overdeveloped "desire to please." As a result, she often found herself trapped in mediocre projects, not knowing how to get out of them. She would nod obediently when movie executives told her, "Trust me," and then be regretful when that trust proved illfounded. A few years ago, a run of less than impressive movies - Two If By Sea, In Love and War and the most disastrous of all, Speed 2 - convinced her that it was time to quit playing Ms. Nice Guy and start taking charge. Now, she says, she has learned to be more assertive. "I'm coming out of that place where I say 'It's okay' when it's not," she says. "I call it my martyr complex. Now, I'm like, 'You know what? This isn't fucking okay! I'm tired of doing this.'"

The process of taking control of her career, Bullock has given herself some time off to become reacquainted with simple pleasures like attending family events and hanging out with friends. "It's just an amazing holiday for me to be at home with my dogs and dealing with my laundry," she says. She hasn't acquired a new beau since breaking up with Matthew McConaughey last year and is somewhat pessimistic about her romantic prospects. She has said in the past that she thought she'd probably end up marrying someone in show business. But at this point, she says she "can't see finding anyone - in or out of the business." In lieu of romance, however, she has discovered a passion for producing. Aside from coproducing last year's Practical Magic, in which she starred alongside Nicole Kidman, Bullock's production company, Fortis Films, has made Hope Floats (starring Bullock and Harry Connick Jr.) and a new movie, Gun Shy (starring Liam Neeson and Oliver Platt), which is currently in postproduction. Increasingly, Bullock says, she finds herself less interested in acting than in the work that goes on behind the camera. "I don't need more money. I don't need more attention on myself," she says. "Producing is very rewarding. It makes me feel like a proud parent. You'll be there at two in the morning, behind the monitor with greasy hair, and then the actors will do something that just inspires you."

Bullock's avowed disaffection with life in the spotlight seems pretty sincere. She recently bought a large piece of property outside Austin, TX, where she is building herself a French provincial stone house, and she has leased her home in Hollywood to a friend. Earlier this year she turned down an invitation to present an award at the Golden Globes, because, she says, the prospect of getting up and "doing" the red carpet was too stressful. "It's extraordinary to me how much effort you have to put in before you actually leave the house to turn up at an event like that. I feel like the whole thing adds 30 years to my life. I'd rather kill myself at this point."

This is disappointing for Affleck, who has been nagging Bullock, with little success, to come and present an award with him at the Oscars this year. (Affleck was actually asked to present with his buddy Matt Damon, but both men, who shared an award last year for Best Original Screenplay, are wary of becoming a Siamese twin act and have asked to present separately. At our lunch, Affleck raises the subject again.
"Come on, Sandy," Affleck whines. "Come with me."
"Nah."
"Aw, come on. I need you -"
"No!" Bullock shouts in mock exasperation. "I have too many other things I'd rather be doing - like sitting at home, eating ice cream and watching your sorry ass on TV."

Affleck huffs and tuts. He isn't particularly eager to attend the awards show himself, he says. "But it's a tradition that if you win one year, you come back and present the next year. So it would be kind of tacky for me to say, 'No, I can't be bothered.'"

For such a new star, Affleck exhibits a remarkable degree of insouciance about life at the top. His demeanor still bears the odd trace of funky, gregarious adolescence, but for the most part he exudes precocious, cosmopolitan cool. The day before the lunch with Bullock, I visited him at his apartment, a comfortable TriBeCa loft accoutred with a bank of vintage video-game machines. There, lounging on a sofa, he spoke with casual knowingness about things like "movie-release patterns" and the "dual perspective" that comes with being both an actor and a writer. He gets frustrated, he says, by the common assumption that actors are "self-centered dolts who are only worried about their hairline and their waistline." He wishes he was more involved in the decisions that are made on a set. "I don't want to be domineering," he says. "But I want to be able to make suggestions and say my bit. You're not always included in conversations."

Bullock, who took years to acquire such self-assurance, is admiring of Affleck's composure. "He's very business savvy and artistically very opinionated," she says. "He doesn't want to please everyone, and he can express very strong feelings about a project. Ben is one of those fearless people. He has no problem diving into something and saying what he thinks - criticizing people. No one is an authority; everyone is an equal."

But for all his admirable panache, Affleck is still a new boy on the celebrity block, and from time to time his comments betray just what a steep learning curve he has been on these last 12 months. When discussing, for example, his breakup with Gwyneth Paltrow earlier this year, he expresses some of the natural astonishment that a 26-year-old feels upon finding that the vagaries of his romantic life have become international news flashes. "To watch updates of your relationships on CNN is bizarre in a way I cannot explain to you," he says. "One day, I fell asleep on my couch with the TV on. I was having this dream about everything that was going on in my life and when I woke up - there it was - my life was being reported on CNN. CNN! I mean, you think, Isn't there something happening in Bosnia by God?"

Affleck still refers to Paltrow frequently - with affection and a certain amount of wistfulness. "I learned a lot from her," he says. "She conducts herself very gracefully, she does excellent work, and she's always well-mannered and just... decent and good." Agreeing to appear with Paltrow in a recent Saturday Night Live skit that referred directly to their breakup was his good-natured way of responding to all the media attention that had been focused on them. "There'd been a lot of speculation that one of us had been sleeping with someone else, or that we weren't talking anymore. This was just a nice way of saying, 'Well, I guess you were wrong.'" It was also, he thinks, a gracious alternative to carping about privacy. It would be "spoiled," he says, to accept all the perks of stardom and then gripe about press intrusiveness. "It would be like saying, 'Well, I expect to be flown in everywhere for free, I expect to meet the President of the United States, and I expect to get free clothes, but I certainly don't expect to be gossiped about.' I mean, it's clearly all part of the same package."

Affleck considers it "rude" to totally stonewall journalists who ask personal questions, and being uncooperative with the paparazzi is, he suspects, only counterproductive. While filming 200 Cigarettes in New York, he was bemused to observe his costar Courtney Love covering herself with an umbrella every time she left her trailer, in order to foil the waiting photographers. "It's not just her - all celebrities do it. There's this thing that you have to dash from the paparazzi. I've always looked at that and felt, like, why? It's not like they're assaulting you or anything. It actually just encourages pursuit, which is, I think, maybe what people want."

Not everyone agrees with Affleck about this. His mother, who he says would much rather he were "a history professor at Swarthmore" than a movie star, thinks that her son is too tolerant of public curiosity and too open with the press. "She disapproves of the way I conduct myself in interviews," he says. "She thinks I'm too forthcoming and that I talk about my personal life too much." Bullock also seems to think that he could benefit from being more circumspect. "Ben's always honest," she says, "and then afterward there's a bloodbath."

Naturally their opposing views on the matter are the occasion for much spirited dispute, with Bullock archly reprimanding Affleck for being overexposed ("Look at me - you don't see me in the papers; I keep things quiet"), and Affleck berating Bullock for her scrupulous discretion ("Sandy won't say anything bad about anybody. You can't get her to, even in the most private moments. I'll be like, 'Come on you know so-and-so is a jerk,' and she won't do it. She refuses to").

Over lunch, the subject comes up again. Affleck has just finished giving us a blithely indiscreet account of his previous evening's adventures. As a newly single man, he has been partying pretty hard of late. Last night, he says, he got a little too jolly and ended up unintentionally insulting an actress in a bar. "Boy, I get one or two drinks in me and I am such a dumb-ass," he says cheerily. Having thus spilled his beans, he is outraged when Bullock refuses to tell us who she is going uptown to see that afternoon.
"A friend," she says.
"What friend? Who?" Affleck demands.
"Oh ... just a friend."
Affleck yelps with exasperation. "God! She's Top Secret Sandy! It's so annoying. She won't tell you anything - I mean just regular stuff about what her plans are. She's totally closed."
"Well, that's because you're so nosy," Bullock replies evenly. "You're always like, 'Who were you just on the phone to? Who was it? Where did you go last night? Who with?'"
Affleck begins to reply, but Bullock rebukes him for talking with his mouth full. Recognizing that he's going to lose this round, Affleck pipes down.
"Sonofabitch," he murmurs in defeat, as Bullock snorts with laughter. "Sonofabitch...."