Richard Gere Shares Anecdotes on ‘Pretty Woman’ With Julia Roberts

Richard Gere feted his birthday with hyped-up fans at a masterclass hosted by Cartier at the Venice Film Festival and revealed some behind-the-scenes on the filming of his cult movie “Pretty Woman” directed by Garry Marshall.

Reacting to a clip of his steamy piano scene with Julia Roberts, Gere laughed and blushed about his palpable chemistry with the actor.

“No chemistry,” he laughed. “I mean, this actor and this actress, obviously, had no chemistry between them… I haven’t seen that in a long time, too. It was a sexy, sexy scene.”

Gere then went on to share that the scene had been improvised. “This was never in the script. (…) We didn’t know how we would use it later. It ended up being integral to the film,” said Gere, who also joked that he “was playing a character that was almost criminally underwritten. It was basically a suit and a good haircut.” He said the idea for the scene came up after the director asked him to imagine what his character would do during his time at the hotel.

“We just basically improvised this scene. I just started playing something moody that was about this character’s interior life,” he said. But ultimately, the scene brought depth to the plot because Roberts’ character “was able to see him in a complete different way. There was a mysterious yearning and maybe a damaged quality to this guy that she didn’t know.”

The actor, who is being honored at the AmfAR with the Award of Inspiration, discussed about the craft of filmmaking, from acting, screenwriting, lighting, dubbing and musical composition, at the masterclass.

He talked about one of the greatest challenges of his career while playing a Japanese-American character in Akira Kurosawa’s “Rhapsody in August.” Although Gere himself is Japanese-American, he said the experience of starring in the movie proved challenging because he kept thinking that he “(had) to do something to make myself Japanese.”

“So I’d spend the day doing things and moving my eyes and doing various things like this and I could see (Kurosawa) shaking his head and looking over.” Then the assistant director told him Kurosawa said “I don’t know what Richard’s trying to do because he looks completely Japanese to me.”

Gere made a big comeback this year with Paul Schrader‘s “Oh, Canada” which competed at Cannes. In the movie, which reunites Gere with Schrader for the first time since 1980’s “American Gigolo,” the actor plays a terminally ill writer and filmmaker who sits down for a final interview to reveal the unvarnished facts of his life.

Gere, who will next star opposite Michael Fassbender in “The Agency,” the U.S. remake of the French spy thriller “Le Bureau des Legendes,” said that he’s working on a project with his son, who attended the masterclass with him.

“It’s a father and son story getting to know each other and to know each other,” he said. “And I’m the father all of that young, really cute boy… Now I’m the father!”