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.
![Richard Gere tried to change one of the best movie endings ever Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman](https://www.thedigitalfix.com/wp-content/sites/thedigitalfix/2023/08/richard-gere-officer-gentleman-550x309.jpg)
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.’”
![YouTube Thumbnail](https://img.youtube.com/vi/5EeIvsvBXHI/hqdefault.jpg)
“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.