"When I went undercover in New York City as a homeless man, no one noticed me.I felt what it was like to be a homeless man.
People would just past by me and look at me in disgrace. Only one lady was kind enough to give me some food. It was an experience I'll never forget. So many times we forget how blessed we are. We should not take that for granted. And if we can help someone in need, we should. That's why after I was done, I walked around and gave food and $100 to every homeless person I saw. They cried and were so grateful. Be the change you wish to see in the world."
Richard Gere when he drifted through the streets of New York City as a vagrant for the 2014 drama "Time Out of Mind."
They wanted to make the film as close to reality as possible. Gere posed as a homeless man in the middle of New York City so that the filmmaker could footage of a beggar ignored that was as realistic as possible. Moverman used long-distance lenses to shoot scenes in which a lone Gere, immersed in his character, panhandled at Grand Central Station. The results were startling.
“No one was paying attention,” Gere marveled. “It was this feeling of invisibility. But that wasn't really the depth of the experience. The experience was in fact more like a black hole — that people did notice me but they didn't want to get close. And not just physically close, they did not want to get emotionally close.”
In "Time Out of Mind," which opens Friday, Gere plays a vagrant named George Hammond whose unfortunate fate is teased out slowly and without sentiment. His backstory comes through only in Mover man's patient observation of his movements around New York.
The movie doesn't just capture George's story, though. It's a close-up of the soul-crushing experience of homelessness: the omnipresent assault of noise, the indignities of shelters, the sanity-shattering invisibility. But it's also a wider view of urban life where the normal occupations of people are going on all around him.
"Are we all in this together or not, is basically the question," says Gere. "Somehow, we've gotten habituated to this idea that we're in our separate capsules. It's not true."
Getting to actually experience the feeling of begging, if only for hours at a time, Gere says, was more like being a black hole than being invisible. He could feel people avoiding him, going through an "interior opera" of guilt that he notes, ultimately "has very little to do with the reality of that guy on the street corner."
It gave him a taste of "how quickly we deteriorate mentally."
None of it, perhaps, is how many would expect the 66-year-old Gere, most famous for less extreme Hollywood productions, to be spending his time. But his filmography has always been dotted with more daring than he's often given credit for, from 1978's "Days of Heaven" to 2007's "I'm Not There" to 2012's "Arbitrage."