50 AWW.COM.AU AUGUST 2017
GETTY IMAGES.ABOVE, LEFT: The
actor in the role of
a homeless man
in the film Time
Out Of Mind.
RIGHT: Richard
with his first wife,
supermodel Cindy
Crawford, at the
Oscars in 1993.
BELOW: At a film
festival with son
Homer in Italy,
in 2014.“The reality is that, in New York, no one pays
attention. The first day of the shoot, I was very
apprehensive, the camera was hidden in a
Starbucks across the street, it was a 45-minute
shoot and nobody made eye contact, nobody. They
would avert their gaze thinking, ‘Homeless guy,
I don’t want to deal with that.’ People are aware of
you and they make a choice not to look at you.”
So the complete opposite of life as he knows
it. “Well, yes. It was quite an epiphany for me
[to discover] how shallow we all are,” he says.
Perhaps that is why Mr Trump is US President
(Richard was a Hillary Clinton supporter).
“Everyone was in shock,” he says of the election.
“I heard stories that kids came back from school
and everyone was crying. The teachers, everyone.”
He is also saddened, but doesn’t tend to show
extremes of emotion. Richard says he gets angry,
but never loses it. When we discuss his greatest
extravagances, he talks about his causes – the
International Campaign For Tibet and homeless
charities – and that is when I see him most excited.
Richard is 67 now and is still a beautiful man,
but doesn’t follow a regimen. “I have a big
property and there are a lot of physical things
in just living,” he says. “This environment is very
healthy and I have always been careful about
what I eat. I am vegetarian, I eat unfertilised
eggs – nothing that has been killed.”
I wonder if there will be a Pretty Woman
sequel, it is so beloved. Richard
was close to Garry Marshall,
its director. “He gave us that
movie, he was such a generous
and loving person. I never read
the original script for Pretty
Woman, but it was completely
different, dark, edgy.”
Unlike Richard’s story, it didn’t
have a happy ending – not that
it’s the end for him. AW WThe Dinner opens in Australia on
September 7.What kind of boy is Homer? Is he into acting
and the arts or sciences? “I don’t think he has
decided,” says Richard. “He has interests in
many different areas and I am not pushing him.
Whatever he wants, as long as he is happy. He is
smart and he is looking at schools that don’t have
a super strict curriculum because he wants to try
different things. We spend a lot of time together.
He is a busy kid. Sometimes, he has three or four
hours of homework so he likes resting up, trying
to forget about school before he starts up again.
He splits his time living with me and his mum.”
There is a palpable “don’t go there” about his
ex-wife – the only thing he says about Carey is
that she left her two cats there. “I am not a cat
person,” he says. “I inherited them from her.
They are a fixture now, my son loves them.”
We navigate a change of subject to his other
new movie, The Dinner, a four-hander with
two couples including Steve Coogan, whose
impersonation of Richard in The Trip allegedly
inspired the director to put them together. “I have
no idea [about that],” says Richard, “but he is
wonderful in it. It is a major acting performance.”
Richard, of course, is no stranger to the major
acting performance and he seems to enjoy being
able to spend time developing characters in a way
that he couldn’t before. In Time Out Of Mind
from 2014, he spent a while on street corners as
a homeless person and nobody recognised him.
How did that happen?
“Time Out Of Mind is one of
my favourite movies,” he says.
“It took me 12 years to figure
out how to make it. No one
wanted to make a movie about
homeless people and then we
had 21 days to shoot it. The
concept was that I would be on
the streets almost the whole
movie, the camera would have
long lenses and the film-makers
would be invisible on rooftops,
behind storefronts.