35 years later, Richard Gere tackles his character in Pretty Woman

“A nice suit with a nice haircut…” The 75-year-old actor looks back on the filming of the cult film with Julia Roberts.

Passing through Venice this weekend, Richard Gere celebrated his 75th birthday by delivering a masterclass organized by the Italian festival. In front of a packed house, the actor looked back at the behind-the-scenes filming of the famous Pretty Woman from 1990. Not without putting a little tackle to Garry Marshall And JF Lawton (the director and screenwriter), whom he accuses of having limited his character to a graying sex symbol:

“I played a character that was almost criminally underwritten! It was basically a guy in a nice suit with a nice haircut.”

Still, Edward still made Vivian crack (Julia Roberts) during a remarkable love story of the 7th art. A typical scene of Pretty Woman The famous piano sequence was shown to the festival-goers present, in the middle of the night, in the hotel ballroom.No chemistry between them… This actor and this actress, obviously, had no chemistry between them...” laughs the American actor, with irony, visibly still under the spell of his relationship with Julia Roberts: “I haven't seen that in a long time. It was a really sexy scene, very sexy..”

A completely improvised sequence, however. Because Garry Marshal asked him to imagine what his character would do during his stay at the hotel.It was never in the script (…) We didn't know how we would use it later but the sequence ended up being an integral part of the film (…) We just improvised that scene. I just started playing something quite dark, behind this piano, that showed the inner conflict of this character and it's this moment where she can see him in a completely different way. There's a mysterious desire in this man and maybe a damaged quality that she didn't know she had..”