Sandra Bullock has come a long way since she got her start in Hollywood. But a few years into her career, she had one particularly rough experience that changed the way she saw the film industry.

Sandra Bullock on 1 of the worst moments of her career

Bullock touched on her childhood a little bit in a 2015 interview with Variety, which shaped the woman she’d eventually become. She owed a lot of her strength and independence to her mother, who taught Bullock not to limit herself because of her gender. “My mother basically raised me as, ‘Women can do everything men can do. Don’t get married. Blaze your own trail,’” Bullock remembered. “And I didn’t think others thought any differently. I always thought we are all equal, and we are.”

But the Speed star had a rude awakening when she starred in one film that went against her and her mother’s beliefs. She didn’t reveal the movie by name, but based on her treatment on set, it was a feature that she was unlikely to forget.

“I was actually doing a film about 10 years ago, and I found myself yelling and being angry. And I was like, ‘What is happening to me?’ I was literally fearful,” she said. “And I realized, it’s because I’m female. It dawned on me. At that day and age, at that point in my career, it was the worst experience I ever had.”

“Was I so naive up to this point to actually think that I was on an equal level with everybody? It was the way I was being treated, because I was female, versus the way others were being treated,” she added.

Bullock asserted that it took a while before she could get over the experience. It helped that what happened that day wasn’t a recurring incident in other projects.

‘It took a year and a half, where I regrouped, and thought, ‘Okay, this is an isolated case.’ I’ve had other subtle experiences, but nothing that blatant. It was a big eye opener, because it wasn’t just men on women. A lot if came from women as well. The blessing of that film was that it opened my eyes,” she said.

Sandra Bullock felt there were signs Hollywood was going in the right direction

Bullock saw hope that Hollywood was beginning to share her and her mother’s feelings on equal treatment when it came to women. She credited the support that female actors often offered each other for the progress the film industry was making.

“I’ve always known women in this business to support each other deeply. When someone does well, when they have success, that means there’s going be a broader landscape for the rest of us,” Bullock once told The Telegraph.

She gave examples of female-led projects that inspired other movies that centered around all female casts, from The Heat to Bridesmaids. She included her own feature Gravity in that category, a blockbuster that she couldn’t have been prouder of.

“I’d like to think at some point instead of it being a woman’s film or a man’s film, it is just a great story and both sexes can go and get the same enjoyment out of it,” she said.

“It’s entertainment, you’re not curing cancer. And I would love for it to get to a place where it’s not about the gender of the actor. With Gravity we get as close as you can to that, because there’s nothing about my character that screams female,” Bullock added.