A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
In his new film, “Time Out of Mind,” Richard Gere plays a homeless man who struggles to navigate personal — and bureaucratic — hurdles after he is evicted from his New York City apartment.
Gere is a true movie star most recognized for his portrayal of a wealthy attorney in “Pretty Woman.” For his latest film he chose to play the sort of person who is often overlooked — if not completely ignored — in public life.
But playing a homeless man was more than just another role for Gere. He’s also the producer of the movie. In fact, he bought the script some 15 years ago.
Gere recently spoke with The Frame’s John Horn.
On the film’s script
It was a spec script that was written by an English writer in 1988, on this subject. It’s almost unrecognizable from what we ended up with. But there’s something there that I thought was incredibly powerful. And, in the end, I don’t even think it was about homelessness ... I was looking for something that spoke to the yearning that we all have for our place, for being thought of as precious, for our tribe, our family, our community — something that we belong to and cares for us as we care for it in the deepest possible sense. And how big is that community? Are we all in this together or not? I wanted to deal with those things, which had nothing to do with plot. They had to do with the human heart at its deepest level.
You didn’t have a lot of money to make this movie. Is that because people wouldn’t fund it? There was no other way to make it?
Well, you’ve seen the film. It’s not a normal movie. It’s not a genre movie in any way whatsoever. Our intention was to make something very special and only make a movie that would please us. And hopefully there would be other people that were pleased by it. But it wasn’t going to fit a category. And I didn’t think it was appropriate for us to make a $50 million movie about a homeless guy and a community of homeless people. It should feel like something we found on the ground and noticed for the first time. There were three, actually four, investors who stuck with it. And right up to the last day we weren’t actually sure that was going to come through. It was a very precarious production.
What does that say about moviemaking in general? You are talking about an epidemic [of homelessness] in the United States and around the world. This is a movie that is looking at the victims of this epidemic. And yet people didn’t think it was an important movie because it wasn’t commercial? Is that ultimately what it comes down to?
Well, I don’t have a problem with that. We made it for under $5 million and that got us 21 days of shooting. But we had top people working on this, top to bottom. No one got paid, but it was top talent all around because they responded to it. From the craft people to the camera to actors, etc., it was all there. We made it with the budget that we have and that was the appropriate budget. Filmmaking has radically changed. And maybe just not filmmaking, but many of the creative arts have changed... In the ‘70s, when I started making movies, this might have been made by a studio. The system that makes commercial movies now doesn’t allow for these. It’s just not how it’s done. But even with that system, the independent way, this was like in the fringe of independent movies. We were aiming for something special.
I want to talk about a scene toward the end of the film. There’s a very long shot that your director, Oren Moverman, and your cinematographer, Bobby Bukowski, do, where you’re panhandling. You are saying, “Spare change? Help me out.” You have a wool cap pulled over your eyes. And I suspect I, like a lot of other people, would have walked right past you. Can you talk about shooting that scene and what you saw in the people who looked at you and didn’t see you during that scene?
We shot down in Astor Place, which is a very busy place in New York. New York is New York — any shot in this movie is as it is. People are not aware that they’re being [filmed]. And I didn’t know if this was going to work. Oren didn’t know. We were hoping we could get 30-second or maybe one minute takes before I got recognized and the shots were ruined. So I remember this was a very fragile, anxious day when I came out to Astor Place and stood there. I fairly quickly realized that no one was paying attention to me. And my first impulse was, well, I was invisible. No one was making eye contact. And then as I relaxed into it and was feeling the situation, I realized I wasn’t invisible, I was actually a black hole. And everyone around me, from blocks away, I could feel was terrified of being sucked into this black hole of despair and failure. And beyond that, I think in a very subconscious way, people feeling how tenuous their own sense of well being is — how close we all are to losing it, mentally, psychologically, physically. We’re living on a razor’s edge, all of us.
Did the making of this movie change you as a person, in the way you saw the world and the way you saw your place in it?
Yeah, I think there were a couple of things. The shot you were asking me about before, not only for me, but for Bobby Bukowski who was shooting it, Oren Moverman, our writer-director. As we were doing that shot — and we were shooting digitally so we could do long takes — we shot for 45 minutes with no one paying any attention to me. On a block that, as Richard Gere, there’s no way I would be standing on that corner. Circumstances and projections are 99.9 percent of our experience in the world. We’re living in a total echo chamber of our own minds. I mean, I was the same guy you want to have an interview with today. I’m on a red carpet and people want to take my picture and talk to me. I’m the same guy that was on that corner. The only difference was I had a bad haircut, I had the clothes of someone on the street. Now is that how we deal with reality all the time? Based on those superficial things? How extraordinary. Now, I knew that intellectually, but maybe this is one of the first times that I so profoundly felt that deep in the marrow of my bones.