Richard Gere
Interview By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com
Early in our interview with Richard Gere, someone asks whether actors are just putting on a performance when they talk to the press. "Sure. Of course you are," he says. "It doesn't mean it's not true."
It's that polite but frank honesty that has turned Gere into a highly respected actor, a feat he accomplished almost subliminally a few years ago, transforming from the star of Autumn in New York and two Julia Roberts movies to the star of Chicago and smaller independent films like Bee Season. Earlier this year, he won rave reviews for his portrayal of Clifford Irving in The Hoax, and now he's following that up with The Hunting Party, a tongue-in-cheek true story about journalists in Bosnia who go hunting for "the world's most wanted criminal." It's directed by The Matador's Richard Shepard and co-stars Terrence Howard and Jesse Eisenberg.
"One of the dangers of making a film like this is you don't want to do Bosnia Lite," Gere says. "You don't want to just use this as a background for a vehicle used as just entertainment, and if that's the way it came across then it would be a failure."
Combining the gravity of the situation over there with the quirky humor of the plot was the chief balancing act of making the movie. "It's a peculiar film, obviously, because we have incredible broad humor that goes on in this, it's almost the Three Stooges, and at the same time you have something deeply disturbing and tragic going on. And I think the degree of difficulty of this - like a dive, the degree of difficulty is 9.4 on this movie - is finding a way to bring the two of those together without violating either reality structure."
Mixing darkness and humor was also, to a lesser extent, something that director Shepard tried to accomplish on his previous film. "The Matador tried to do that, that seems to be where he's coming from," Gere says. "I admired Matador, I saw there was something there: 'Oh, he's working on a different plane.' I don't know if it was totally successful, I don't think Richard thinks it was totally successful, but okay, he's really trying something unusual here."
Of course, a film with political overtones such as this one could subject the actors involved to the wrath of the press complaining about Liberal Hollywood. Gere seems to realize this but gives off the impression that he could care less; he has his own philosophy on the matter: "My whole thing is, if you know something, it doesn't matter if you're an actor or a meatpacker or a streetsweeper. If you know something, you have a responsibility to communicate it. If you don't know anything, you have no responsibility, and you shouldn't. But the few things I have knowledge of, certainly the Tibetan situation, and a few others, I have a responsibility to talk about it. Not just because I'm an actor, but because I'm a human being. Now, I get the microphone in my face because I'm an actor. But that's not the prime responsibility, it's just the fact that I'm a human being."
He has a point - as a founding member of the twenty-year-old Tibet House organization, it would be hard for Bill O'Reilly to challenge Gere to a game of Tibetan Jeopardy. On The Hunting Party, he knew that he would have to do research just as carefully. "I made a point of visiting all the places where something happened, and talking to as many people as I could, and having dinner with as many people as I could," he says. "And getting drunk with as many people as I could. To feel the texture of it. These journalists [that we portray in the film], we spent time with, and other ones. I felt pretty intoxicated with the experience of Sarajevo, and of the war."
He agrees that the entire Bosnian situation as a whole is absurdly confusing. "There's a wonderful BBC documentary that's about six hours long that was done on the Bosnian war. It was the bext explanation, emotionally and factually, that I've seen. I forget what it was called, but that's the one to see. I remember seeing it six hours straight through. Look, the ones that really know what's going on are the Bosnians. In Sarajevo. Everybody else only cops to knowing a little bit of what goes on. But everyone was taking advantage of everyone else in that area. And everyone wanted Bosnia, to take a piece of Bosnia. And the only way to do it was to kill everybody, or at least to make life so miserable that everybody would just go away."
However, Gere also has optimism that such problems can be fixed by the international community. "As soon as Clinton got serious and said I'm going to stop this, it stopped, almost immediately," he says of the warring in Bosnia. "This feeling that the international community can't control these little wars is wrong. It's just how they do it. How good the diplomats are, how decisive they are militarily." He then veers to that related, inevitable topic. "You know, what we're doing in Iraq is insane. Diplomatically, militarily, it makes no sense whatsoever. So of course it's going to fail. It doesn't mean it has to. The approach was wrong to begin with."
He goes on: "This is ancient stuff that's never been dealt with. The problems of communities living together was created by Western powers anyhow. There was no Iraq sixty years ago. So this is all fabricated, you know, it's a pretend country."
Aware that he's entered touchy territory, he steers the conversation back to the film.
"Terrence is a character, he's a real original," Gere says, noting that his co-star would call him Yoda whenever the conversations turned toward Buddhist philosophy. "And he's fun, because he's a goofball, he's like a kid. He's curious, and he's not afraid of learning anything. He's a unique goofball, and yeah, we had fun. We were in the back of that car for a month, it felt like a year, but it was a month, the three of us got to know each other pretty well."
The third guy is the not-yet-24-years-old Eisenberg, a veteran of independent movies like The Squid and the Whale and Roger Dodger. "I think he's probably the best actor in the movie, to tell you the truth. He's really good. Total natural. Really bright about how to design a character, how to make a scene work. And it's invisible with him, you don't even see it, he's totally natural."
The most exciting part of filming, though, may have been when everybody tried drinking Slivovich, a plum brandy that's widely available in Croatia, where they filmed. "It's pretty serious stuff. I grew hair on my chest. I had no hair there before, and now I have this fur. So don't drink it. You don't want the fur on your chest."
Previous interviews with Richard Gere:
