Richard Gere Takes Manhattan!
November 2, 2005
Superstar RICHARD GERE took on New York Tuesday night as he walked the red carpet for his fantastical drama
'Bee Season,' hitting theaters November 11.
The family-oriented flick, also starring the luminous JULIETTE BINOCHE, tells the story of 11-year-old Eliza
Naumann (FLORA CROSS) who feels just plain ordinary next to her university professor father (Gere), her scientist
mother (Binoche) and her talented older brother Aaron (MAX MINGHELLA).
But when she gets a chance to take part in a spelling bee, something she's sure will only confirm her mediocrity,
she surprisingly wins, sending her to the national competition.
Her win initially gives the clan a reason to celebrate, showering her with the praise and attention she deserves, but
slowly but surely it unwittingly sends the family dynamic into a tailspin and long-kept secrets are revealed.
To keep the family together, the young Eliza is forced to use her own insight and depend on the world of words and
Jewish mysticism that has long intrigued her father.
For a look inside the star-studded premiere of 'Bee Season,' watch tonight's ET!
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Gere tackles Kabala in 'Bee Season'
Simi Horwitz
VNU Entertainment News Wire
Nov. 3, 2005
NEW YORK - Richard Gere feels that "any serious work is generous, mysterious, and all-encompassing. It's about
yearning and the need to reconnect to a larger universe." Indeed, he adds, a meaningful piece of art is a "letter to
the universe."
Thus, he was naturally drawn to "Bee Season," a film loosely based on the well-received novel by Myla Goldberg
depicting a quirky - and most dysfunctional - family headed by the fundamentally decent (albeit flawed) Saul
Naumann (Gere), a religious Jew and Kabalistic scholar.
Gere is no Kabalistic Jew - nor Jewish at all. Still, he was right at home in this story awash in spiritual concerns.
A practicing Buddhist for three decades, Gere enjoyed immersing himself in Jewish studies, "speaking with many
scholars, thinkers and philosophers," he says. "I read a number of books on the subject, attended synagogues and
spent a lot of time with Rabbi Michael Lerner," editor of "Tikkun," a left-leaning publication whose Hebrew title refers
to the act of "healing."
"You can't become an expert in anything in three months," continues Gere, a 56-year-old Philadelphia native who
is clearly pleased to talk about the movie and his own world-view. "But studying the subject 1/8Jewish mysticism 3/8
stimulated my sympathy."
Indeed, in an effort to fully inhabit Saul, an accomplished violinist, Gere also threw himself into mastering the violin.
"I've been acting since I was 19 and I had enormous hubris to think that I could play the violin in three months," he
says with a laugh. "I was awful. It was painful to listen to me. My family kept begging me to stop playing." (Gere is
married to actress Carey Lowell, a former Assistant District Attorney on "Law & Order." They have one child
together.)
"Bee Season" centers on the life-altering experiences of Eliza Naumann (Flora Cross), a 9-year-old spelling wiz
preparing for the national spelling bee while her seemingly idyllic family disintegrates. Her driven father (Gere), who
is determined to see Eliza win the bee, focuses all his attention on the child - reviewing difficult words and then
grilling her - to the detriment of everyone else in the clan. Eliza's brother, Aaron (Max Minghella), has become
persona non grata, turning to Hare Krishna for solace. Eliza's mother, Miriam (Juliette Binoche), is arrested for
various acts of thievery, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Throughout, Saul grows increasingly convinced that his daughter's intuitive gift for words reveals untold spiritual
depths shared only by a handful of prophets, and that with proper tutoring, she might be able to hear God's voice.
Towards the end of the film, Eliza undergoes a conversion of sorts, evoking (depending on your viewpoint)
rapturous communion with the divine, demonic possession or an epileptic fit. In its wake, she makes an unexpected
decision.
Known for his human rights projects - specifically, promoting awareness of Tibet's endangered culture - Gere
comes to playing Saul with an impressive resume. His film credits include: "Chicago," "Shall We Dance?" "Runaway
Bride," "Pretty Woman," "American Gigolo," "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," "An Officer and a Gentleman," "No Mercy,"
a remake of "The Jackal," "Final Analysis," "Mr. Jones" and "Sommersby."
On stage, he has appeared in Sam Shepard's "Back Bog Beast Bait" and "Killers," a Lincoln Center presentation of
"A Midsummer Night's Dream," and London's Young Vic Theatre production of "The Taming of the Shrew," among
others. In 1980, Gere returned to the Broadway stage with "Bent," winning the Theatre World Award for his
depiction of a gay concentration camp prisoner.
In the recently wrapped film "The Hoax," Gere plays the real-life author Clifford Irving, who claimed to have written
an authorized biography of Howard Hughes and received a large advance for his efforts. The book was, in fact, a
complete fabrication. In the aftermath of a major literary scandal, the monies had to be returned and Irving was
sentenced to jail. Irving was also a Jew, but Gere describes him as "Saul's spiritual opposite."
"Bee Season's" co-directors, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, concede they had a smidgen of reluctance in hiring
Gere because of his star status and the tensions that might cause. "It was taken into consideration," said
McGehee. "But Richard was so right in his person."
Twelve-year-old actress Flora Cross, making her acting debut in "Bee Season," admits that initially she was
intimidated at the prospect of working with Richard Gere and playing his daughter. "It was strange in the
beginning," she says. "He's such a great actor and so well known. I thought he'd make me uncomfortable. But he
didn't at all. He made me feel like he was my real dad."
For screenwriter Naomi Toner Gyllenhaal, casting Gere to play Saul was a no-brainer. "He's charismatic and can
charm the birds out of the trees and, at the same time, he can suggest a controlling narcissist who functions as the
catalyst in his family," she says. "Richard is a compelling figure and it's easy to see why he'd be the center of his
family. Also, Richard embodies the right physicality. He looks Jewish enough and has the right sexiness. And
Richard is sympathetic, which is an important quality for Saul.
"I also thought Richard would be great for the role because he has been a Buddhist for 30 years, worked with the
Dalai Lama, and brings a level of connectedness between the story and his own spiritual experiences," continues
Gyllenhaal. "In addition, he's got a boyish enthusiasm that's infectious and generous."
Nonetheless, Gere faced some serious acting challenges. "It's easy to play a caricature and I didn't want to do
that," he says. "Saul is overbearing and the audience could write him off." Gere decided that Saul must be complex
and appealing enough so that "the audience would want to take a ride with him, give him the benefit of the doubt,
even though he is a controlling guy."
The most daunting moment in the script comes when "Saul is working with his daughter and finally says that she
can achieve 'shefa' 1/8mystical connection with God 3/8. 'I can't do it, but you can,' " Gere recalls. "It's a painful
and honest admission. His students think he's the real deal, but in the end, he's 1/8only 3/8 an academic. His
daughter has the potential to understand God instinctively."
Gere says that throughout the film, but especially in the end, "Bee Season" "taps into a non-conceptual space.
You're either on its wavelength or you're not. I find it very moving, but it's not for everyone."
He adds frankly, "I don't think the film will be successful."
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Richard Gere: Bee-ing There
Source: Edward Douglas November 9, 2005
Over his lengthy career, Richard Gere has established himself as the epitome of leading men working today, a
reputation that has allowed him to star in a variety of genres from dramas and thrillers to comedies and even
musicals. Through all of his hits and flops, he's remained fairly grounded thanks to his Buddhist beliefs, which
he's always been outspoken about.
For his latest movie, Bee Season, based on the novel by Myla Goldberg, Gere gets to combine his acting with a
more spiritually-minded film, teaming with Juliette Binoche to play the parents of a bright young girl (Flora Cross)
who has an affinity for winning spelling bees. Or at least that's what this film, directed by Scott McGehee and
David Siegel (The Deep End), appears to be on the surface. In actuality, it's about the dissolution of a family and
how spirituality comes into play to help put them back together.
ComingSoon.net talked to Richard Gere about this spiritual drama on his recent visit to New York to do press for
the film.
CS: When you take on a movie like this, what's the primary draw?
Gere: I supposed there's two things. Basically, I gotta be drawn by the script. Every piece of serious work
somehow has a letter to the universe, and the letter to the universe from this was mysterious and all
encompassing and generous and very much about this yearning that all beings have to reconnect, to fix. That
there's a larger universe, a less restricting one that's all embracing and that rejects nothing. So the yearning for
the larger self, not the smaller one, was the essential quality I found in this.
CS: What was it about the script that grabbed you?
Gere: Naomi's script was really, really wonderful. It was poetic and playable and literate. I read the book and
could see where this was coming from. It's a beautiful book, maybe brilliant. I thought it was an interesting
ensemble of characters, all of them searching in their own bumbling way, like we all do, searching for God. I
hadn't seen that movie before.
CS: Did you ask for any changes in the script after reading it?
Gere: No, it was a really good script. A lot of scenes were shot that are not in the movie, and it probably could've
been edited many different ways. It is the way it is based on the directors' inclination, but it was always a pretty
well-balanced, family story centered around this extraordinary little girl.
CS: For a happily married man, you tend to do a lot of films about marriages imploding. Is that you way of living
your life vicariously through your characters?
Gere: (laughs) I think most of our lives we grew up in dysfunction. I've been married twice, my wife has been
married three times, so we know about dysfunction. I think it's a reality of our lives. It's certainly worth exploring.
CS: It must've been a pleasure for you to work on a movie that's so centered in spirituality.
Gere: Yeah, the ideas were really stimulating. It was mysterious and there's darkness, you know. It's dangerous
territory to be playing in, so we talked a lot about the responsibility of doing this in a serious, responsible way,
even inserting things in the script. We said, "Look, this is dangerous territory. This is nothing to play with,
because it isn't. This is serious stuff."
CS: I would never really think of you as someone to play a Jewish character. Was this the first Jewish character
you've played?
Gere: I guess it is. I just played another one in "The Hoax" actually. Lasse Hallström directed that one and we had
a wonderful time. I just cut all my hair off, but I had kind of a Jew-Fro. (Laughter) I had a perm, dark hair playing
Clifford Irving--I just finished that one.
CS: How was it to immerse yourself in the Jewish religion? Did you actually attend Synagogue?
Gere: I talked to a lot of writers and rabbis and thinkers and spokespersons, some that I knew before and some
that I met during the process of this. In the book, this character is really a Cantor, I mean he is so hardcore
Jewish. The decision was made to make this a little more universal, so he's a religion professor at Berkeley, who
specializes in the Kabbalah. I'm not going to learn to be a teacher of Kabbalah in four months. It's really intense
stuff. What I can do is find the keys that will plug into my own 30 years of training in Buddhism, and find things
that are parallel or resonant in the work that I have done. That comes into this work somehow. There were
enough parallels between the basic tenets of Kabbalah and specific trainings of this guy Abulafia that I could fairly
easily embrace the gestalt of it without being specifically Kabbalah. They were similar enough that it kind of
hotwired into my own truths of exploration in Buddhism.
CS: Will you continue doing research into the Kabbalah and its connections to Buddhism?
Gere: I mean, I'm perfectly fine with Buddhism (laughs.) I'm particularly taken by this idea of Tikkun Olam. I don't
know if you're know the magazine Tikkun, but Michael Lerner is someone I talked to quite a bit when I was
practicing this. We were writing how to actually describe Tikkun Olam and the origin of this concept. This idea of
fixing, of healing, is an important of any genuine spiritual approach. In the movie, we talk very much about Tikkun
Olam, that the world has been fragmented, it's shattered, and our job is to put the broken pieces back together.
Buddhism talks about Tathagatagarba, and it's less about fragmenting and more about ignorance. This basic
nature that we have is clouded over with ignorance. You can remove the ignorance, and then that Buddhahood
or expansive quality, total openness, freedom, liberation, can be experienced. They're basically talking about the
same thing, but they describe it differently. One is about kind of actively rebuilding, the other is cleaning, but
they're different ways of describing maybe the same experience.
CS: Interesting. Speaking of difficult, didn't you learn how to play the violin for this movie, too?
Gere: One of the most frustrating things I've ever done in my life. One of the joys of being an actor is that you're
always learning new things, and I've been doing this since I was 19, so there's been a lot of new things I have
learned for each part. I had this enormous hubris that I could actually pull off playing the violin in three months,
and I really had convinced myself it was possible. I had wonderful teachers and I worked really hard, and I was
really horrible. It was really painful to the point where my family went on vacation and I dragged my violin with us,
and they said, "You're ruining our vacation. Please stop."
CS: Can you talk about working with Juliette Binoche and how you prepared to create the intentional absence of
chemistry you seem to have in the movie?
Gere: Well, it was hard because Juliette and I knew each from before, not well, but we knew each other,
respected each other, and I wanted to work with her. Juliette's approach to this character in this movie--and she
apologized in advance for it--was to pretty much stay by herself. We didn't have dinner after the shooting. She
was totally open in the process of making the movie and generous, but she made a decision to keep separate
from me, as we were in the movie. The story was of these two people who just didn't connect, and I think you see
that in most long-term relationships. They find a way to look okay, but if you really look at them, you kind of go,
"Wow, they're not connecting." It's very rare to see long-term marriages that are still genuinely finding fresh ways
to communicate, that haven't settled into the known. There are so many mysteries here that these people don't
tell each other, so many internal operas going on with these characters.
CS: Did you feel it was an advantage or a disadvantage to be working with younger actors who haven't done
much acting in movies before?
Gere: Well, both. Look, Max [Minghella] is not a newcomer. It's his first movie but he's hardly a newcomer. He was
born into the sea of movies and theatre; it's in his DNA most likely, and he's smart, you know. He's observant and
self-critical, and he knows when it's good and knows when it's bad. He's monitoring himself, but he's always trying
and he's always working. He has a great natural sense of self-editing, and his bullsh*t-barometer is very acute,
which is really important for an actor. I'm kind of instinctively doing this, because I've been doing this for so long,
but I know what the shape of a performance needs to be; I know how to pull the pieces out to do this on this day
and this on another day. I can organize it that way. Max is very much that way as well. He's instinctive, yet it has
not yet become spontaneous with him. Flora is day to day. It's like, "I come to play. I want to see what's required
of me." She works hard, she would have someone go over her lines with her the night before and that morning,
and she'd be prepared. I don't know if she ever understood what was happening in the process, but she inhabited
fully each day, and that's a different approach. It means you have to have a really good director to do that and
you have to trust the people you're with.
CS: And in this case, you also had two directors. Had you ever worked with a directing team before?
Gere: Yeah, I didn't know what that was going to be like. I'd met these guys before we even talked about this
movie and liked them a lot, but I didn't know how it was going to work. Once we started rehearsing it was clear that
basically David was running the set and integral to the process, but it's not confusing because Scott doesn't
insert himself into the active everyday running of the set.
CS: Has there been a person you met who really changed the way you saw the world?
Gere: So many, where do you begin? Obviously the Dalai Lama changed everything, but I've met other teachers
in the same way, many of them nothing to do with spirit or religion or anything like that. There's a guy named
Charlie Clemens, and that's a wonderful story. I saw a documentary about him that actually won an Academy
Award maybe 20 years ago. I went with him to Central America--El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua--and it was the
first time that I had so directly seen what an insane U.S. policy can do to people. He had been a doctor with the
Campesinos in El Salvador for many years. He was there right in the middle of the worst of the dirty war there, so
to see again that the U.S. government was giving right-wing death squads support, and supporting extreme,
authoritarian national guards who were killing and maiming and destroying Campesinos, it was the first time I had
been in the middle of that. His sense, his very large vision--I would tell you his whole life, but you'll never print all
this stuff. He had an enormous impact on me.
CS: Would you ever not take a part in something if someone said it was too controversial?
Gere: I've never had anyone say that to me. It's never been an issue, in fact just the opposite. People come to
me and say look, it's important to do this. Whatever happens to you is irrelevant if it's important to get this done.
CS: Are you ever concerned that when you're doing humanitarian work, the focus gets skewed more towards you
and away from the cause?
Gere: I'm not pushing anything. What I'm careful about is only talking about things I have experience in. HIV/AIDS
is something that I'm considered an expert on worldwide. Buddhism is something I've known for 30 years. The
other things I would talk about are things that I consider I know enough about to speak with authority.