Richard Gere Talks Improvising ‘Pretty Woman’s’ ‘Sexy’ Piano Scene and Why His Character Was ‘Criminally Underwritten’: ‘It Was Basically a Suit and a Good Haircut’

Richard Gere celebrated his 75th birthday with hyped-up fans at a masterclass hosted by Cartier at the Venice Film Festival and revealed some behind-the-scenes on the filming of his 1990 hit movie “Pretty Woman” which catapulted Julia Roberts into star status.

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Reacting to a clip of his steamy piano scene with Roberts, Gere laughed and blushed about his palpable chemistry with the actor.

“No chemistry,” he laughed. “I mean, this actor and this actress, obviously, had no chemistry between them… I haven’t seen that in a long time, too. It was a sexy, sexy scene.”

Gere then went on to share that the scene had been improvised. “This was never in the script. … We didn’t know how we would use it later. It ended up being integral to the film,” said Gere, who also joked that he “was playing a character that was almost criminally underwritten. It was basically a suit and a good haircut.” He said the idea for the scene came up after the director asked him to imagine what his character would do during his time at the hotel.

“We just basically improvised this scene. I just started playing something moody that was about this character’s interior life,” said Gere, who stars as Edward, a wealthy but lonely entrepreneur who hires an escort, Vivian (payed by Roberts), to accompany him at social events. He eventually falls in love with her.

But ultimately, the piano scene brought depth to the plot because Roberts’ character “was able to see him in a complete different way. There was a mysterious yearning and maybe a damaged quality to this guy that she didn’t know.” In the scene, Edward plays piano in the ballroom of the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel  in the middle of the night when Vivian, who fell asleep watching “I Love Lucy” on TV, enters, wearing a bathrobe. He asks the staff to leave them alone and sits her atop the piano before they start making out.

The movie was produced on a reported $14 million budget and grossed $463.4 million worldwide. Yet, Gere said he, Roberts and Marshall didn’t anticipate that smashing success. “We were having fun making this. The whole time we made the movie, we didn’t know if anyone would ever see this.”

The actor, who is being honored at the AmfAR gala with the Award of Inspiration, discussed the art and craft of filmmaking, from acting, screenwriting, lighting, dubbing to musical composition, at the masterclass.

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He talked about one of the greatest challenges of his career while playing a Japanese-American character in Akira Kurosawa’s “Rhapsody in August.” Although he learned to speak Japanese in the film, his casting as a half-Asian character stirred some backlash at the time. He said the experience of starring in the movie proved tricky because although he was “very proud” to have been cast by Kurosawa (whom he called a ‘true genius’) for the part, he kept thinking that he “[had] to do something to make myself Japanese.”

“So I’d spend the day doing things, putting prosthetic things, and moving my eyes and doing various things like this and I could see [Kurosawa] shaking his head and looking over. And finally, I called over his first director. I said, ‘So what is Kurosawa saying?’ He said, I don’t know what Richard’s trying to do, because he looks completely Japanese to me.”

Gere was at Cannes this year Paul Schrader‘s “Oh Canada.” In the movie, which reunites Gere with Schrader for the first time since 1980’s “American Gigolo,” the actor plays a terminally ill writer and filmmaker who sits down for a final interview to reveal the unvarnished facts of his life.

Gere, who will next star opposite Michael Fassbender in “The Agency,” the U.S. remake of the French spy thriller “Le Bureau des Legendes,” said that he’s working on a project with his son, Homer, who attended the masterclass with him.

“It’s a father and son story getting to know each other and to know each other,” he said.

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