Richard Gere’s favourite Richard Gere movies: “It’s very hard to follow up a film like that”
Richard Gere‘s list of favourite movies to which he has lent his inimitable talents is simultaneously surprising and illuminating. For example, many of his fans may be shocked by the absence of beloved classics like An Officer and a Gentleman and Pretty Woman, or even later hits like Primal Fear and Chicago. Instead, the movies that mean the most to the man himself are much less culturally well-known, with one in particular being so obscure that only his most die-hard supporters could name it.
Gere’s first favourite movie was an anomaly in his career: a film he loved that also did well at the box office. Sommersby was a 1993 romantic drama that Gere produced and starred in alongside Jodie Foster, and it made $140million on a budget of $30million.
“If I’m pressed to select one, Sommersby is the film I really like,” Gere once told The Daily Eye. “I produced it myself and felt very strongly for the script about a farmer who returns home from the American Civil War, but his wife suspects that he’s an impostor. It did great business; it made everyone a lot of money.”
In this era, Gere struggled to reconcile the worlds of art and commerce, which is likely why he remembers Sommersby so fondly. For example, he didn’t think too highly of Pretty Woman, Internal Affairs, and Final Analysis as artistic statements, even though they were commercially successful. With Sommersby, though, he got to make a film that fulfilled him artistically and made good on its investment.
Gere’s next favourite has a ton of sentimental value to him, because it was the first movie he ever made. Interestingly, though, he also counts Days of Heaven as the greatest picture he was ever a part of, and admitted that it always hung over his career from then on. “It’s probably, unfortunately, my best film,” Gere mused to Rotten Tomatoes in 2017. “It’s very hard to follow up on a film like that.”
The star revealed that being picked for Badlands director Terrence Malick’s sweeping period drama was life-changing for him, and he also believed it was the first movie that saw Malick embrace his own artistic voice. “It was the first film that Terry Malick made that kind of became Terry Malick in that movie,” Gere claimed. “It was also the first film of mine at the Cannes Film Festival. So, everything about that film was important to me as an actor and as a person.”
Gere’s third favourite is undoubtedly his most left-field pick. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer is a political drama released in 2016 that made a scant $5million at the box office, but was well-received by the critical community. Gere played against type as Norman Oppenheimer, a Jewish fixer who does favours for New York’s political power brokers, and soon gains influence on the Israeli Prime Minister. When he is implicated in a bribery scandal, though, suspicion falls on Norman too.
“Norman is probably the least obvious casting choice of me one could ever make,” Gere chuckled. “I think because of that, it ended up being such a terrific experience. Sort of completely working in another territory.”
Gere revealed that his performance as a Jewish man was so convincing that he met a fan who accused him of hiding his ancestry for his whole career. “You know, when I first started, some woman came up to me — I remember this very clearly — and said, ‘Your name is really Gara, isn’t it?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And she winked at me and said, ‘I know you’re Hungarian.'” This, of course, wasn’t the case and was simply a testament to his acting skills. Still, he quipped, “So, now, clearly, I’m Jewish.”
