Richard Gere Looks Back On The ‘Magic’ Of ‘Pretty Woman’

But it’s also a wider view of urban life where the normal occupations of people are going on all around him. The fear, desperation and hope of “Time Out of Mind” is painfully, hauntingly human.

Gere, 66, is a member of the exclusive People magazine Sexiest Man Alive club, which includes George Clooney and Channing Tatum in its ranks. The manager informs him that the friend he has been staying with has been evicted, so he, too, must leave the apartment.

No movie has ever looked like this. Its second half lightens with the introduction of Dixon (the excellent Ben Vereen), a chatterbox from the shelter whom Hammond comes to pal around with. To George, it’s clear that if she doesn’t see him, no one does.

Written and directed by Oren Moverman.

In “Time Out of Mind“, Richard Gere, best known for his sexy suavity, gets to fulfill a long-held dream of playing a homeless man. What’s next: Hamlet? In the grim, unsettling Time Out of Mind, Richard Gere gives his most uncompromising three-dimensional performance in 20 years as a once-prosperous business executive whose credit score is suddenly battered by the financial downturn in the economy, leaving him dispossessed and living on the street.

Oren Moverman (OM): I fell into it, like all good things. He’s labored with the Coalition for Homeless for years and refers to his “homeless buddies” he is gotten to know whereas researching the movie. But it only goes so far.

The script needed some updating and rewriting, so we started over with the basic story.

Gere’s acting is first rate, the kind of work we haven’t seen from him in nearly 40 years. It became a world I really felt was worth exploring.

Gere, who also produced, deserves props for ditching his eloquent, glamorous image to play a disheveled and taciturn character whose memory is so bad he can’t answer even the simplest questions about his path to the bottom.

I think there’s an extra element when you do something like this in a more or less realistic way.

And as the director told us in his interview, the visual approach employed here subtly transmits the distance the public often puts between themselves and the disadvantaged. It’s straightforward, and it’s how people like George are seen by society: On the periphery, glimpsed quickly by the rest of us. He was in character, but was still Richard Gere. “For me personally, it was very profound lesson in how superficial it is”. “They all somehow knew this movie – it had a life way beyond what we thought it had when we were making it”. It shows that any one of us can be in that position, and actually humanizes the experience. In a way, the viewer is tasked with becoming the protagonist: It is we who are supposed to grow, to change, to learn to see the homeless as individuals in need of much greater assistance, rather than as a scourge. Why was it important to you to not reveal his entire history in the film?