Sandra Bullock on her return to acting: 'I was content to be permanently broken'

"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," which opened on Christmas in a few theaters for an Oscar qualifying run, is Sandra Bullock's first movie since her Oscar-winning turn in "The Blind Side."

It's also her first movie since the scandal that ended her marriage to Jesse James, which broke right after her Oscar win in 2010. She wasn't sure she was ready to come back with this movie, based on Jonathan Safran Foer's post-9/11 novel, but the role and director Stephen Daldry won her over.

"I was perfectly content to be permanently broken ... time-wise," Bullock tells the AP. "I honestly didn't think I was in a place where I wanted to work or wanted to step out of where I was. I wasn't prepared. But the opportunity was louder than my head."

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" wasn't exactly the easiest movie to come back to: Bullock's character is the wife of a man (Tom Hanks) who dies when the Twin Towers collapse, and whose son (Thomas Horn) then embarks on a quest to find something his dad left him.

"What a way to get back on the horse," Bullock says. "t was hard, but it was what it's supposed to be."