In 1993, Richard Gere was on the podium of the Oscar Award ceremony, where he was to present the award for Best Art Direction. However, during his speech, he allegedly leaped and spoke about China’s take on Tibet. He called attention to the human rights issue and criticised China for abusing Tibet. This was reportedly not included in his speech, and he was subsequently banned from the award ceremony. On December 3, Variety published an interview with Richard Gere, where he reflected on the ban. He said that he wasn’t too troubled by the ban. According to him:“I didn’t take it particularly personally. I didn’t think there were any bad guys in the situation. I do what I do and I certainly don’t mean anyone any harm. I mean to harm anger. I mean to harm exclusion.”Richard Gere added:“I mean to harm human rights abuses, but I try to stay as close to where His Holiness comes from… that everyone is redeemable, and in the end, everyone has to be redeemed or none of us [are]. So in that sense, I don’t take it personally.”According to New York Post, during his Oscars speech, the actor from Pretty Woman said that if something amazing and almost like a movie had happened, he wished everyone could send kindness, truth, and calm thoughts to Deng Xiaoping in Beijing. He hoped this would make him pull the troops out of Tibet so the people there could live freely again.Richard Gere talks about the Dalai Lama and the documentary he produced View this post on Instagram Instagram PostRichard Gere produced a documentary on the Dalai Lama. During the conversation with Variety, he said he had never spoken about the Oscars incident with the spiritual leader. According to Gere, the topic never came up when he spoke to him. He also said:“They’ll tell him once in a while if I get an award or something and he sends a note, congratulating me, that he’s happy for me, But that’s about as close as it gets to actually talking about movies.”Elsewhere during the interview, he said that he had been quite enthusiastic about the documentary. He put in a lot of effort so that everybody could see the film. According to him:“I think this is important enough that I have to give my last bit of energy to put this out there for people to see. At the very least, it will put a seed in the minds of people who see it.”When asked if the Dalai Lama could influence Donald Trump, Richard Gere said he was unsure about it. Nevertheless, he strongly believed that this would be the case, saying:“But boy, I don’t know how you explain what he has done to this country, what it feels like to be an American now, 10 or 11 months in. It’s just astonishing. It’s beyond what anyone could ever imagine.”In an interview with Today in October 2025, Richard Gere said that the movie on the Dalai Lama was not “really a documentary.” He said it was a hybrid, and that’s what he liked so much. Gere said part of the work is a documentary about the Dalai Lama. However, he said the core of the work is the Dalai Lama’s teachings.