‘In Vail's mind he's a local deity, the creator of the truth or at least the illusion of the truth.He's a master magician. It's not his job to decide if someone is guilty or not guilty. His job is defend.In this case however he starts to care on an emotional level. It's not longer just a flashy case that will advance his own career. He wants to get this kid off so he himself is tested to his limits.' Filming went on during the O.J. Simpson trial but Gere says the real life media circus did not affect the slant of his movie. ‘It merely validated it. The actions of Johnnie Cochran and the other Simpson lawyers were what was in mind when this particular breed of lawyer I play was created. ‘I think there is a great self-interest, great-self promotion involved.At the same time Vail is attending to a certain ethic which is that you've got to make the prosecution do its job. Otherwise the prosecution will convict everybody. If you're going to use the most prominent case in fron of us, the Simpson situation, it could be argued that the prosecution didn't do its job. ‘But you get into the whole area of whether the defence was honest in what they were doing to make the prosecution do its job. That's a whole set of other jokes. ‘I don't think this movie is a slam against the judicial process. Vail really believes in the system -- he just doesn't believe in the people who run it. At the end what happens is personal. He has always needed to be far too much in control and at the end he finds out that he isn't, that we cannot be in control.' He believes the more complex, the more twisted characters are easier to play:'It's what actors are built to do. You get into it because you want to express that stuff. You get to chew the scenery. ‘Every ham instinct you have will come out in the process of doing that and depending on how good you are it will become hammy or not. It feeds every kind of childish impulse you have to act. It's much harder to act normal, to be a normal citizen, and make it interesting. That's the hardest thing in the world. But is it fun to do the other stuff? You just blow it off -- you blow off so much energy and crazy emotion. ‘Buddhism has helped me ease up in my attitude to acting and to the characters I play. Specifically, it has taken some of the pressure off the decision making process. I could see it as a piece of work. I do the best I can but I don't have to identify so clearly with it. This is not my life. I am not Martin Vail any more than I am this guy or that guy or any of the characters that I've done that I thought I ws so connected to. ‘I've changed but I change every day I get up. It's just experience -- keeping you ears and eyes open. It's the love that you generate that gives you happiness and the highest ideal in Tibetan Buddhism is a totally altruistic being. Offering your happiness as it works to everyone and everything is the only way you can have happiness -- that's the irony. And it's impossible. It takes billions of lifetimes.' So, like Shangri-la it is a myth? Richard Gere adds a pensive smile to the disguise that hides -- and protects? -- him from the land of the bottom dollar.
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