Richard Gere tried to change one of the best movie endings ever
Richard Gere was the romantic leading man of the 80s and early 90s, but his movies were often darker and grittier than they seem from their ‘chick-flick’ image.
Gere felt like the ‘fairytale’ ending of An Officer and a Gentleman didn’t fit with the rest of the movie, but it became instantly iconic and is what the movie is famous for. Gere told Entertainment Weekly in 2012; “I argued against it from the beginning. I said, ‘This is bullshit.’ I was trying to make a very real, gritty movie and all the rewrites we did were to keep it grounded in that territory of realism. And that didn’t fit at all — it was such a rave-up ‘movie moment.’”
“We were in the factory ready to shoot it and I said, ‘We’re going to waste half a day shooting this thing. We’re behind schedule, we’ve got other stuff to do. This is never going to be in the movie.’ I remember Taylor [Hackford, director] said, ‘We’re here, it’s in the script, they expect us to shoot it, let’s just shoot it.’ I was definitely wrong.”
The song Up Where We Belong by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes became a huge hit, thanks to this scene and it’s been much imitated in pop culture since. But both An Officer and a Gentleman and Pretty Women are darker movies with grittier themes than their frothy romantic image would imply.
Check out our guide to the best rom-coms and the best 80s movies. See if you agree with our lists of the best movies of all time and the best actors of all time.
