Richard Gere Talks to Patch About His New Film, 'Time Out of Mind'

Richard Gere, not many people know, was born in Philadelphia, in 1949. The star of such noted films as Days of Heaven, An Officer and a Gentlemen, Pretty Woman, Primal Fear and Chicago, Gere returned to the town of his birth on September 17 to promote his new film Time Out of Mind, in which he stars as a homeless man in New York City.

While in town, Gere participated in some charitable work related to homelessness along with Project HOME’s Sister Mary Scullion, and also, along with the film’s writer/director Oren Moverman, sat for a roundtable with a group of local journalists. Patch was there.

In the film, Gere plays George, a middle-aged homeless man attempting to live his life in New York while attempting to re-connect with a loved one from his past. The film is unique in multiple ways- it approaches homelessness from more of a character-study point of view than as a social problem, and it also plays with some nontraditional camera angles, including shots through windows and other non-straightforward filmmaking. And the it’s not only the aesthetics- the film is also mostly plotless.

“This isn’t ultimately a story of a homeless guy, it’s the story of a guy,” Gere said. “This is the story of a human being who’s looking for his place in the universe. And it’s not that different from all of us. We’ve all got jobs, we’re really lucky working, but I don’t think any of us are every unaware that we’re trying to find our place in the universe… that’s really the story to me.”

The script for the film, Gere said, was actually offered to him over 15 years ago, and while he rejected the idea back then, he thought of the project often and eventually bought the script.

“The original script was written in 1988,” Gere said. “But amazingly how relevant, how sadly, it still was” While Gere saw many flaws in the first script, he later read a book called “Land of the Lost Souls: My Life on the Streets,” authored by a homeless man known as Cadillac Man, and decided that was the way to approach the material.

“It has to be real, it has to be in a moment, and you have to take out all the dramaturgy, all the sense of the narrative has to go in some direction because you’ve already decided what the ending is going to be.” So he brought the project to Moverman, who re-wrote it and ended up the sole credited writer, although original writer Jeffrey Caine gets a “story by” credit.

In the meantime, Gere and Moverman visited homeless shelters, places familiar to Gere from his work with the Coalition For the Homeless.

“The movie became one of process itself. Let’s start with a guy with no backstory, let’s put him in the last moments, the last tethers he has to reality and a social structure that he can count on, and let’s see what happens. And that’s the movie.”

Moverman also directed Rampart and The Messenger- both starring Woody Harrelson- and wrote the musical biopics I’m Not There (about Bob Dylan) and Love & Mercy (about Brian Wilson.) He described his style in the movies he’s made so far as “strict, point-of-view, f—‘d up male experiences.”

“I do think if the solution to all that ails society is women, I’ll make movies about the problem- which is men,” he said.

We specifically asked whether it was a coincidence that the film had the same title as a Bob Dylan album, as Moverman wrote the Dylan film and Gere appeared in it. The short answer: Sort of.

“It was [Moverman’s] idea,” Gere said, “but let me set it up, because he threw it out there, and I said ‘you can’t do that, it’s a Bob Dylan album.’ But then he told me, ‘actually, it didn’t start with Bob Dylan.’”

“Well, I’ll tell you the truth,” Moverman said. “The original script, by Jeffrey Caine, which is long gone, was called ‘Vintage Muscatel,’ but that wasn’t gonna work for us. Then I wrote this version, and my instinct- and it’s a bad instinct- I called it ‘Dirge.’ And everybody read the script and said ‘great script, stupid title, it sounds like death.’

“And I said, ‘No,no, there’s a jazz thing about it, it’s a funeral song…’ but they said ‘it’s death.’ So I started looking at dirges, and I saw a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. called ‘Dirge Without Music,” and in ‘Dirge Without Music’ there was a reference to “Time Out of Mind.” So of course, Dylan came up, and ‘Time Out of Mind’ is a concept I’ve always loved, but we researched it, and it actually comes- like all great Dylan, it comes from Shakespeare, ‘Romeo and Juliet.’”

“it’s a very famous speech, it’s the Queen Mab speech, by Horatio,” Gere said. “And I played Horatio, but I forgot that this was one of his lines.”

“And then it turned out that it was also rooted in British law,” Moverman added, and it means “in time immemorial,’ something that exists beyond memory and beyond time. And this is really where we sell the character, so it made sense to us.”

In addition to Gere, the film also stars Ben Vereen, Jena Malone, Steve Buscemi and Danielle Brooks.

‘Time Out of Mind’ opens Friday at the Ritz Bourse.