Richard Gere names his most overlooked movie: “It’s one of the best films I’ve made”
Richard Gere made some runaway hit movies in his day, films that no one involved thought would be anywhere near as popular as they ended up being. Chief among them, of course, was Pretty Woman, a romantic comedy about sex work that somehow managed to sidestep all the thorny questions about power dynamics and the realities of the business and became a classic rom-com. From a budget of $14million, it made back more than $463m at the box office, which doesn’t even account for the three-plus decades of adoration it has enjoyed in the interim.
However, as Gere fans know, the Silver Fox contains multitudes as a performer, and Pretty Woman barely scratches the surface. He started out in the theatre and got his breakthrough in film with a stellar first few years. He appeared in Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr Goodbar in 1977, Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven in 1978, Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo in 1980, and Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman in 1982, a quartet of attention-grabbing hits that made him a star. In later years, he went back to his musical theatre roots with Chicago and became a figurehead of the white collar thriller genre with Internal Affairs, Primal Fear, and Arbitrage, to name a few.
Gere has been a high-profile star for decades now, but that doesn’t mean that all of his films have been given the credit they deserve. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter podcast Awards Chatter, the actor singled out one film in particular as the one that got away – 2006’s The Hoax.
“I love that movie,” he said, adding by way of explanation, “I think Miramax was being sold to Disney, and Disney didn’t really care about it – whatever. But I think it’s one of the best films I’ve made.”
Directed by Lasse Hallström, The Hoax tells the real-life story of Clifford Irving, a writer who pretended to have co-written an autobiography with the business mogul and Hollywood producer Howard Hughes. In fact, he had never met Hughes, and the whole book was an elaborate fabrication. Although the film received positive reviews, it bombed at the box office and hasn’t developed much of a following in the years since.
“Lasse Hallström did a wonderful job, it was a wonderful script, wonderful actors,” Gere said, adding, “It was just superb.”
It is strange that the film didn’t fare better, if not at the box office, then at least with home viewers. It wasn’t the sort of movie that people would necessarily rush to see at the cinema, but it’s a well-crafted, satirical drama with an excellent cast of character actors. In addition to Gere, there was Alfred Molina, Julie Delpy, and Stanley Tucci, a list of performers who deliver every time they’re on screen, no matter the movie.
Unfortunately, The Hoax never received much attention, and it remains one of Gere’s unfairly overlooked movies alongside films like the 1993 Civil War mystery Sommersby, the 2014 homelessness drama Time Out of Mind, and the 2016 political drama Norman.
