It’s fascinating to hear Richard Gere talk about spirituality. One of Hollywood’s most famous Buddhists, Gere has plenty of ideas about the state of being, spirituality, and how one’s place should fit into the broader picture.

In “Bee Season,” currently playing in limited release, Gere plays Saul Naumann, a college professor who specializes in teaching religion. In his own home, Saul is heavy on teaching his children all there is to know about the Jewish religion. When his young daughter Eliza (Flora Cross) begins winning spelling bees at the various levels, his begins to stress an intense relationship between words, spelling, and their connection to God.

Gere recently spoke to us about “Bee Season” while promoting the film in New York.

Q: Can you describe how it was to immerse yourself in the Jewish religion?

RICHARD: I talked to a lot of writers, rabbis, thinkers, and spokespersons – some that I knew before, some that I met during the process. In the book, he really is so hardcore Jewish. The decision was made to make this a little bit more universal. So he’s a religion professor at Berekely who specializes in Kabbalah. In three months, you can’t really become an expert in anything. What you can do is learn about how it stimulates what you have learned in your life. In my training, of thirty years of practice, I found some certain aspects of this guy that I feel. It was similar enough that it hotwired into my own truths and explorations.

Q: Do you think you will continue to look into Kabbalah because there are some similarities between that and Buddhism?

RICHARD: I’m perfectly fine with Buddhism. [laughs]

Q: Not in changing your religion but just as an exploration…

RICHARD: I’m particularly fascinated by Tikkun Olam, the idea of fixing and healing. It’s important and part of any general spiritual approach. There is wholeness. It’s this idea about fixing things that have been damaged. They’ve been damaged because ignorance has intoxicated the mind so that there is a hardcore belief in one self. When you have a hardcore belief about a self, you have a difficult time believing in another self out there, and that creates separation and dualism. That is the source of all our pain and suffering.

Q: What was it about the script or story that drew you to it? Was it the religion?

RICHARD: Every piece of serious work as a letter to the universe somehow, and the letter to the universe from this was mysterious, all encompassing, very generous, and this yearning that we all have, to reconnect to this fix that there is a large universe. You see this in children; they tend to be jumpy from feeling like they’re being minimized constantly. Growing up, it’s making them smaller when they’re instincts are getting larger. It’s possible to expand your mind and your heart to the size of the universe. You can expand your mind and heart at the speed of light in all directions. Everything in our culture, basic ignorance that is, has conspired to minimize our abilities. The yearning is for the larger self, not the smaller one. That was the essentially quality that I found.

Q: What were the challenges of the character?

RICHARD: It’s very easy to play certain characters in a caricature way. I didn’t want this guy to be so obviously overbearing that you just go, “Oh, this guy is a control freak” and write him off. I wanted to find a way to be subtle enough so you can take a ride with him and give him the benefit of a doubt for as long as possible and realize that he was caught up his own ignorance, like everyone else.

Q: How was working with Juliette Binoche?

RICHARD: The way she works…she apologized to me at the beginning saying, “It’s not going to be easy for you” because she’s pretty much the character all the time. She immersed herself in this character. The relationship we had on the screen was more or less the relationship we had off screen. It was a bit disconnected. That’s just the way it was.

Q: There’s a lot of different ideas and interpretations you can associate with this film…

RICHARD: Our storytelling has to be telling that, our acting has to be telling that, the direction has be telling that. I was moved by the movie when I saw the daily cuts. It was working. I couldn’t tell you why but when it got to the end of the movie, I found it incredibly moving but not consciously. It was a mysterious spontaneous reaction to it. I’m sure there will be some people who [the movie] doesn’t work for at all. It leaves them cold. If it works, it’s because it taps into a nonconceptual emotional space that is generally, again, beating us into that space of yearning that is telling us exactly what we’re supposed to feel.

"Bee Season" is now playing in limited release in theaters everywhere.