Quotes

I don't want to be a personality.

When I am there [Tibet], I am very happy. The Tibetans radiate. They literally send out light. His Holiness [The Dalai Lama] generates love and compassion to every human being. He has committed himself to that. I haven't made that leap yet. I haven't given up self-aspiration. I still love making movies.

[on George W. Bush] We have a President right now who lies constantly and gets away with it, apparently.

[on agent Ed Limato]: He was the bridge between old-time Hollywood and Hollywood present. Ed was a master at orchestrating all of the feelings correctly. He had a rare ability to read a script and see what could be.

Pretty Woman (1990) is something I never would have done. Neither is An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). I had no interest in these scripts whatsoever. It was the same person knocking my door down on both of them, Jeffrey Katzenberg, first at Paramount, then at Disney, who was one of my first friends out here and still is. At the point of Pretty Woman (1990), I had been kind of out of things for a while. I consciously [had] just said, "Going off to do other things" and I fucked up my career to the point where [people weren't saying], "Well, let's get Gere to do that". I had to crawl a little bit to get scripts. Doing Internal Affairs (1990), for instance, was a very difficult decision for me to make because, potentially, that could have been such a piece of shit. It turns out to be one of my favorite movies and best experiences, too.

I'm still like this guy who, like, washed his dad's car. I don't feel like I'm some sort of rarefied species of creature.

[on Brooklyn's Finest (2009)] I read the script and I thought, "This is really unusual. These three interlinking short stories that don't really interact. But [they] somehow, like music, contrapuntally inform each other, in kind of a mysterious way."

[on his character Jesse Lujack from Breathless (1983)] Basically the root of him is music--music manifested by his moods. He uses the energy and emotions of the things around him to his own purposes. There's not guilt in him. He refuses guilt, he refuses despair. He turns despair around. He's a funny kind of character; he's not the kind of person you'd bring home to your mother and father. He'd be pocketing things; he doesn't see possessions as being personal. He has an outlaw mentality we haven't seen for a while.

[on why he starred in The Mothman Prophecies (2002)] The emotional stuff was rich. In the beginning, my character's in the perfect job, he has a beautiful wife, they're talking about babies, they're buying a house, everything's great and then literally in the middle of laughing, there's a car accident and she's gone. Now if you put that on top of the metaphysical story of "Is there anything out there?", then you have something that has a lot of power.

[on Hachi: A Dog's Tale (2009)] Reading it captivated me immediately. It was very emotional and tense, even though I'd never heard of the story before that. My first thought was, "I don't know if I want to act in this, but I certainly want to make it and help it along".

[in 2015] I love almost everything Ingmar Bergman did. I came out of that era, the '60s and '70s . . . so all that and Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini are just great. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a friend of mine, and I loved all his films, too, and Werner Herzog. That whole time was when I was trying to figure out who I was, and stretching myself, and those are all the films and filmmakers that meant a lot to me.

[in 1993] I've always maintained that actors are best when they find characters that are congruent with the emotions they're going through at the moment.

[in 1993] My wife doesn't understand why I'm a sex symbol. She says I don't look different from a guy on the street.

[In 2012, reflecting on working with Debra Winger in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)] I was delighted, she was perfect for the part . . . She has a really interesting quality. Again, I haven't seen this film in 30 years. But she is, she's really a kind of true heart in the camera. It's very hard to be as kind of open and unguarded and nice. You know, a nice person and kind of a genuine person and true heart on camera. That's not an easy thing to do. She's able to pull that off. I could never be that way. I was too complicated. There were too many things going on. Just the straightforward presence is an extremely difficult thing to do.

There doesn't appear to be any sort of basis for any of this. I have a feeling something hidden is at work here that will someday see the light of day. I keep asking myself where all this personal enmity between George Bush and Saddam Hussein comes from. It's like the story of Captain Ahab and the great white whale from "Moby Dick". We have to say, "Stop". There's no reason for a war. At the moment Hussein is not threatening anybody. It'd be different if he was staring somebody down with a loaded gun in his hand. But there doesn't seem to be any indications whatsoever that this man poses an immediate threat to anybody. America has never paid any attention to other people, so it's absurd for Bush to say that it's all in the best interests of the Iraqi people. If the United States marches into Iraq without the backing of the United Nations, that will be done entirely without the backing of the American people.

[on US President Donald Trump] Here's a guy who's obviously [Benito] Mussolini. How is it possible that people would be supporting this guy? You can try to find reasons. It's about how disillusioned they are, how afraid, how confused. Trump is a demagogue, a clown--but people like clarity. Here's this guy who says, "I'm going to fix this problem for you. It doesn't matter how, I'll just take care of it". He's finding villains everywhere and then telling people he'll get rid of them: "We'll get rid of the Jews, the blacks. Anyone that we perceive as a problem, we'll get rid of". This is how it starts. Intelligent people aren't seeing this--don't make the mistake of thinking it's just idiots who are backing Trump--this kind of thinking is a slippery slope.

[on Susan Sarandon] She's one of the few actresses you can think of who, besides being a terrific technician, is also funny, sexy, and womanly. Susan's a very modern lady, and she never stops taking chances.