Richard Gere spends "Time Out of Mind"

Richard Gere is 66 years old and still movie-star handsome (and still a movie star), but in “Time Out of Mind,” in which he plays a homeless man, he’s stripped of any sort of glamour.

Gere, who also served as a producer on the film, talked recently about the work that went into making it. The star of such hits as “Pretty Woman,” “An Officer and a Gentleman” and “Primal Fear” talked about playing the character, and about the work he’s done that inspired him to make the movie.

Question:Your character in the film is often lost inside himself. How do you not overplay that? Is it just confidence that you can get what you’re trying to communicate to the audience?

Answer: You certainly gain more confidence in that as you do it more. But those are two poles I played at from the very beginning (of his career). I don’t think I had a strong instinct to either play the big scene-chewing parts or the quiet internal ones. They’ve both been fun for me to play, both ends of those poles.

Q: How do you keep the performance contained?

A: I think most of moviemaking is the thought process, anyhow. The photographic process is one that you feel like you’re invited into an emotional process. It’s not about language. It’s not about what someone does. It’s what they’re thinking and feeling, and even primarily what they’re thinking. It’s a very mysterious place, someone’s mind. I think the surface of things, with too many words or too much cutting in terms of the direction, or too much operatic drama, is the illusion that something is going on. But the reality is the quietness of the mind itself is quite a spectacle.

Q: How did you come to get involved with the movie?

A: I’ve been working on this thing for 12 years or so. It’s territory I knew pretty well. There’s a group in New York called Coalition for the Homeless I was working pretty closely with. When we evolved the script and Oren Moverman came on to do the major rewrite and direct it, we were very much on the same wavelength of what to do here. But as a producer, I had to be very conscious of what we were doing, and planning it, and being responsible in that way. But the character to me, I was very intuitive about. I didn’t work at building the character the way I would normally do it. He certainly had to look a certain way. I made a lot of choices about the scars, simple things that maybe you’re not aware of. … As much as you are creating a character, there’s also a part of you that is corralling it, like you would corral a horse and keep it moving in a certain direction, because you are fulfilling a narrative.

Q: Does the horse ever get away?

A: Sometimes. Sometimes you want it to. But even that is part of the control process. You want it to be out of control. So you give it the space, so that there’s the illusion of being totally out of control.

Q:We often see him at a distance.

A: We had to do it on the fly. … A lot of these were one-take situations, totally spontaneous one-take situations on long zoom lenses. We had to be totally on the same wavelength to make this work. I had to get my acting side together, but I also had to be aware of what the camera was doing so it would be on-screen.

Q: You trust the audience to find the character.

A: Yeah, this isn’t the kind of movie where we’re telling you how to look or how to think or how to feel. The audience is highly respected to find their own way through this.

Q:That also gives the audience the freedom to draw its own conclusions.

A: Absolutely.

Time Out of Mind (2015) | Phoenix Arizona Movie Theater Showtimes Reviews

Q:But as an actor, all of those distant shots — is that different from having a camera right in your face?

A: Yeah, it’s much harder when the camera is right there. Because it’s not just the camera. It’s also the whole camera crew, and you also have the lighting guys. Everyone’s that close. It’s harder to get them out of your mind and imagine there is clear space all around you. When you’re actually very far away, this was, the whole footprint of the film was very far away. I think there’s much more freedom to be natural, to be real.

Q:Did you enjoy producing?

A: No (laughs). I have no interest. There was a pause there, because I was thinking, “Am I going to be honest?” I like getting the correct people together. It’s very important to me to develop the script in the best possible way, at least the way I see it as the best possible way. (But) the mechanics and the minutiae of producing a movie, I have no interest in.

Q: As you say, you worked for a long time to get the move made. What drove that?

A: There is a metaphysical side to this movie. I hate to use the word spiritual, but I think it’s actually what it is. The metaphor of this homeless man is not that different from the rest of us, because we’re all looking for a home. We’re all looking for where we belong. And we’re all looking for ourselves. Some of us may be surer that we found ourselves and found our home. Maybe that’s an illusion. I think there’s a deeper self that we’re looking for, that maybe in the end may be selfless, and a home that is not about a physical home, but a metaphysical home is what we’re looking for. I was interested in that side of the movie, as well.

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: twitter.com/goodyk.