Bee Season
An Interview With Richard Gere

Richard Gere has made a lot of movies. He fell in love with a whore in Pretty Woman. He was a whore in American Gigolo. In Primal Fear he played a lawyer. In Chicago he played a tap dancing lawyer. Lately, however, his film roles tend to be dudes with shaky marriages and unsatisfied wives (Diane Lane did him dirty in Unfaithful and he had to win back Susan Sarandon in Dance With Me by busting out some moves).

In Bee Season, Gere plays Saul, a college professor and Kabbalah enthusiast who begins living vicariously through his daughter’s preternatural spelling talent. He becomes so obsessed with coaching the little girl for her progressively more challenging competitions that he at first fails to notice that his wife wanders out the house every night.

Gere: I think most of our lives we grew up in dysfunction. We live most of our lives in dysfunction. I’ve been married twice. My wife has been married three times so we know about dysfunction. (chuckles) I think it’s a reality of our lives that’s certainly worth exploring.

It’s no secret that Richard Gere hearts the Dalai Lama in a big way. His Buddhism being well publicized, one has to ask how his feelings for his faith affect a performance of a character who is just as devout toward another religion.

Gere: There’s no way I’m going to learn how to play the violin in four months. I can tap dance in four months but I’m not going to learn the violin in four months. I’m not going to learn to be a teacher of Kabbalah in four months. This is really intense stuff. What I can do is find the keys that will plug into my own thirty years of training in Buddhism and find things that are parallel or resonant in what I have done. That comes into this work sometimes. There were enough parallels between the basic tenants of Kabbalah and the specific terms of this guy Abulafia to relate it to Buddhism.

Some of the parallels between Buddhism and Kabbalah…

Gere: They would be articulated in different ways. In the movie we talk very much about Tikkun Olam, that the world has been fragmented and shattered. My [character’s] job is to gather these shards together, to heal the world. To put it back together. The broken pieces. [Buddhism] would be less about fragments than about ignorance but if this basic rule that we have, Buddha Nature, has been clouded over with ignorance, we can remove the ignorance. Expanse of quality. Total openness. Freedom, liberation can be experienced. We’re basically talking about the same thing but they describe it differently. One is about actively rebuilding, the other is kind of cleaning. Different ways of describing the same experience.

Having one boss is enough of a pain, but two? Gere talks about how working with dual directors went smoother than he initially thought it would.

Gere: I didn’t know what that was going to be like. I 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 [Siegel] was running the set. Scott [McGehee] is integral to the process but it’s not confusing because Scott doesn’t insert himself in the active everyday work on the set.

At first glance Gere’s character and that of his onscreen wife appear to be a blissfully wed couple. As the film progresses, however, it becomes clear that theirs isn’t the happiest of unions.

Gere: I think you see that in most long-term relationships 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 still are genuinely finding fresh ways to communicate. That haven’t settled into the norm. God, there’s just so many mysteries that these people don’t tell each other. So many internal operas going on in these characters.

Watching Bee Season, audiences might question how Gere’s patriarch seems slow in noticing the crumbling of his children’s lives. For that matter, he comes off as oblivious to his wife’s mental breakdown and weird behavior. All confused parties should wait for the DVD.

Gere: He’s observant but he’s selectively denying it basically. This is working for him now. There was a big scene that’s not in the movie, but we shot, in which I confront her and say, “Look, we have to deal with this.” In a way I wish it was in the movie because it showed you the fact that he was watching it. He was aware. It was a big scene. She comes in the middle of the night and he says, “We got to talk about this. You got to talk to me. It’s killing me.” It was a big dramatic, crying, crazy over the top operatic scene and it would’ve told the audience yeah, he has been seeing this, he just can’t deal with it until he’s pushed to a certain point.