Evening with Actor Richard Gere who has a fascinating new movie out called time out of mind about a man homeless. It really is a movie i wanted to make but by the end of it i forgot the man was homeless. That wasnt the issue. I was a deeper kind of yearning for a place that i was interested in, a more spiritual, cosmic voyage towards a yearning for place, for connection, for family, for tribe. Where is my place where i am valued, where i am precious . Rose lasker laureates and richard gere, when we continue. Rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by american express. Additional funding provided by and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose the lasker awards are among the highest honorsiin science. They recognize individuals from major advances in understanding, treating and preventing disease. Lasker laureates have won nobel prizes in the last seven years. Evelyn witkin is joining us, Ground Breaking search on dna that helped shape modern genetics. Also Stephen Elledge of harvard university, he built on witkins work uncovering dna repair, a mechanism that protects the human genome. Pleased to have both at the table. Welcome. Thank you. Rose great to have you here. Pleasure to be here. Rose you will receive the awards tomorrow. Yes. Rose tell me about you and how your career, why this direction . I was a graduate student at columbia. In 1943, i read a paper that came out by two scientists and they established in that paper that bacteria have genes like other organisms, and that hadnt been known before. Rose in 43, they did not know . They did not know bacteria had genes. And i got very excited when i read that paper because it seemed to me that bacteria would be a wonderful material for genetics. Rose to study genes. To study genes, because they divide every 20 minutes, and you can hold a billion of them in one little test tube in your hand, and that my advisor, my professor at columbia, saw i was so excited about the bacterial developments, he suggested that i do my ph. D. Dissertation research with e coli instead of fruit flies, and ealso suggested i should go to Cold Spring Harbor for the summer because thats where bacterial genetics was being born, and i could learn to handle e coli and come back to columbia and do my research with e coli. So i went to Cold Spring Harbor, and it was a wonderful place to be at that time. And you could feel the stirrings of the revolution in molecular biology beginning, and there was much excitement about the new developments both in bacteria and in badg in bacteriaphageh exciting genetics coming out of those studies. So i started out by discovering a radiationresistant mute pt, and it was unexpected and diverted me from my original plan looking to induce mutations with chemicals, and that became the subject of my ph. D. Thesis. Rose you would induce the mutation by radiation . No, i had planned to study radiationinduced mutation, but my first day in Cold Spring Harbor, the very first experiment i did, i discovered a radiationresistant mutant. Rose i see. Why was that important . Well, this was in 1944 and some of the physicists involved in the Manhattan Project were quite interested. Some were in Cold Spring Harbor. A few of the physicists who had worked on the atomic bomb decided that they were disenchanted with what they had brought and switched to working in biology. Rose and their interest and curiosity was in the effect of radiation . Well, the fact that a single mutation can increase resistance of an organism 100 fold, they knew i didnt know i didnt know, but they knew the bomb was coming and the use of the bomb would expose populations to a huge amount of radiation. Rose as it did. So the idea that you can have a single gene mutation that greatly increases resistance to radiation was interesting to them. At any rate, i studied that phenomenon. I got my thesis, i got my ph. D. Then i started to think about how mutations happen. The first thing well, one of the ways that i worked was to start out with strains that require something to grow, like an amino acid or some other component of their nutrition, and look for mutations that no longer required that growth factor, that was easy to select, because if you just leave out the growth factor, the ones that have lost that requirement will be the only ones who could grow. And, so, that was a system that i used. And the first thing i did i was using ultraviolet light as the source of my radiation, and we didnt know yet, but we found out in the 50s well, a little bit later than that, in the late 50s that what ultraviolet light does to dna is to fuse or connect two of the dna Building Blocks that we call bases, and theyre normally not connected to each other in the fact that they get connected stops the recommendation of the dna. The copying enzymes that usually go quickly through dna making a copy, theyre stopped by that kind of damage. Thats the kind of dna damage that is lethal unless something either repairs it or tolerates it somehow. And what i was trying to well, what i did begin to find out was that there was a repair mechanism that i couldnt identify biochemically at this point, but i could see the effect of it. I could see that it was eliminating the mutations very rapidly under certain conditions. And a few years after that, a repair mechanism was identified biochemically. It turned out to be the same ine i had more or less observed in action, and thats called excision repair. Rose so from that discovery about dna repair, what happened between that time and today . What do we know now thats on the course of learning . We know there are very many different kinds of repair. I wont describe them all. But i guess what im known for, what the prize relates to is work i did thats called the s. O. S. Response for my part in discovering the s. O. S. Response. The s. O. S. Response and the term s. O. S. As used in its usual meaning to have the International Distress signal, a bacterial cell that has this kind of ultraviolet damage that stops the copier is in distress. What i learned was something happens in that cell that the damage itself and the stalled replication generates a signal that turns on a bunch of genes. We didnt know how many, yet we now know its at least 43 different genes that are in the healthy cells but they dont make the product, they just sit there. Rose in the healthy cell. In the healthy cell. But in a damage cell, they get turned on and they make all their Protein Products and they go into action, and what they do is, in a number of very diverse ways, they help the cell survive. They repair damage. They get the replication going again, and the way they do that, one of the gene products thats induced at that point in the s. O. S. Response is another dna copier that isnt stopped by this damage. Its one of the scientists who worked on it calls it a sloppier copier, and its not so fes festidious. It gets by the damage by inserting any base in that position, and chances are that it will be a mistake and a mutation if the wrong base is inserted in the dna, that is a mutation. Rose and the consequence of all that is for us . The consequence is, first of all, we learned that there is the phenomenon of induction of many genes when you have genetic damage and, of course, what happened after we developed this system and described it in detail that Steve Elledge who is going to speak after me picked up where we left off rose saw what you had done. He didnt just see what we had done, he took part in what we were doing. Hes about 35 years younger than i am, were of different generations but have the same interests. He was a graduate student at the same time i was working on the s. O. S. Response and he was working on the s. O. S. Response in his graduate work. He did valuable work that rose let him pick up the story from there. Okay. Rose go ahead. Because the way he picked it up will answer your question about what the significance is now he brought ut to the human level. Rose congratulations. Thank you. Rose so youre there as a graduate student. Right. So i did my ph. D. In graham walkers lab and graham worked on the s. O. S. Response and, in fact, i was the person who identified the gene for the sloppier copier. That was my thesis, so i was very familiar with evelyns work and the whole concept of the s. O. S. Response as a graduate student. And then i got my ph. D. , and i went to stanford, and i was going to work on something completely different. I was interested in plants, i was interested in trying to figure out how to m manipulate human genes, also, so i had multiple interests. I was going to follow up on graduate work, i never intended to, always seems like you should do something different. So i started looking for genes that might be involved in letting us manipulate human genes. Rose right. Something thats very exciting now. And i failed to find that gene that i was looking for but i accidentally cloned another gene, and this other gene that i found turned out to respond to dna damage and recommendation problems. It was a gene involved in making nucleotides to make dna, those are the Building Blocks. And i realized that, well, you know, at the beginning, you know, there was all this great work in bacteria, but people in bacteria, you know, sort of didnt work on eukaryotes, the cells that we worked on. It wasnt at all clear that the same pathways would actually be functioning there. Rose were they . Similar, but different. So it wasnt this take it here and put it over here. What we found was that they had developed a competely orthoginal, sort of different system to sense problems at dna recommendation forks and transmit that into information. So what i discovered were the genes and the pathway in human cells, eventually, starting in yeast, but that actually are scouring your genome looking for problems and when they find the problem they set up a signaling apparatus thats sort of like sending out radio signals to the ambulances that come in to try to deal with these problems. As evelyn had discussed earlier, u. V. Light makes a specific type of damage and there is a specific type of pathway that can snip it out and fill it in like a pothole and move on, excision repair. But if you have a problem thats in the process of duplicating the dna, and that means youre taking the dna apart and copying it, thats a much more severe problem, and when that kind of a problem happens, you need a very sophisticated response. So the response that i found was sort of the equivalent of the response in bacteria which we know existed at the time, and that turns out to alert and activate a lot of different sorts of pathways that result in the survival of the cell. They do a lot of other things, too. For example, you know, since were working on humans now, we know what the effects of losing these genes are. So if you dont take care of your genome, you get mutations you get rearrangements and you can get cancer, you can get developmental defects. Rose how do you take care of your genome . You have a monitoring system. The dna has the ability to sense its own integrity. It has evolved the ability to know when it has a problem. Rose a malfunction. A malfunction. And it calls in the troops. Some of these troops are very dangerous. Some of the enzymes that you dont really want around all the time. So you have to turn them on at the right time in the right place. Cells cant see. They have to feel their way around things. So there has to be something that says, okay, theres a problem here i need you guys over here now to fix this, not yesterday or tomorrow, now. And they get through. Because the human genome is very, very complex. Rose this is all an Automatic Process in the human body or is it from outside . Its an Automatic Process in the sense that we carry all these genes that have evolved to sense the presence of dna damage, called the dna damage response and to alert the rest of your body. Now, i said earlier that, you know, in terms of human health, some very subtle changes in the pathway can lead to serious developmental disorders. But the you take the pathway altogether, you cant even duplicate a cell. Its that important. Every time you duplicate a cell, there are problems. This pathway is always monitoring things, saying, okay, we have to fix this and that, so life itself doesnt exist without this pathway in mammals. The other thing about it in terms of human health, this pathway, if there is too much damage, you make a decision to kill the cell, and that prevents cancer, and it can also cause another process called senescence and thats when the cells dont die but permanently quit dividing. These cells are controlled by our pathways that we discovered and accumulate as we get older and actually contribute to aging. Someone did an experiment where they eliminated the cells from the mouse that was rapidly aging and the mouse did not age. So its sort of the ying and i cant think sort of thing which is it takes a cell thats been damaged out of the chance of it becoming a cancer cell, but it leaves it there, and that leads to a problem thats involved in inflammation. These cells promote inflammation which is a problem for a lot of agingrelated diseases. So thats a pretty great experiment. Our pathway helps control that process. Rose whats the future of that . Well, its interesting. There have been companies that have sprung up around, trying to understand aging, calico out of google, and i have a paper coming out in science in two weeks that describes a new protein, its the switch that turns on the inflammation itself. Rose if you can cut that switch off thats why we have to ask the question does that stop things. Rose if there is something a cell that turns off or turns on inflammation, if we can figure that what happens there and can then turn off inflammation that presumably would help us a lot and we can prevent aging. This is still a theory but thats the theory people are working on now to try to test. If you get rid of the senescence cells, youre better off in a mouse. Isnt done it in a person yet. But if you just turn off the inflammation part, do you get better and thats what were trying to figure out. Are you still going to prevent the aging. Thats the theory. We found the switch that does that and we can genetically manipulate that in mice and sphee this is a part of the aging process or not and its a target we can potentially effect. Rose where might all this go . In other words, if we can repair genes, we can edit genes, some people look at that and they say, you know, lets look at this very carefully because what we could do you know, what do they mean when they say look at this very carefully . Well, tinkering with genes is not something we want to do per promiscuously. Rose because . Because we havent got the knowledge to be sure of the consequences. We have to take this very slowly and very carefully and be aware of the risks. Rose and who makes sure we do that . I think the field itself. Rose selfimposed. Yes. I think we have a pretty good record for regulating our own activities. In many tech notle that have been technologies that have been developed, theyre great in the lab. The question is what happens when we start doing it in people and thats where we have to be extremely careful. These tools are not perfect, and, so, they need to be very carefully managed and their consequences have to be looked at. Rose thank you and congratulations. Thank you very much. Rose thank you. Thank you, charlie. Great to be here. Rose back in a moment. Stay with us. Rose joining me now is James Allison of the university of texas. He found a lifesaving Cancer Treatment that harnesses the immune system. Glad to have him joining us as one of our lasker award recipients. Congratulations and glad to have you here. Thank you. Rose what is immune therapy. Using t cells to go after cancer and eliminate it. Rose what are t cells. The warrior of the immune system. They can attack cells affected by viruses and kill them and detect tumor cells as well that express things on their surface that are not supposed to be there. Rose and what drew you to them . Well, when i was in college, the t cells had just been discovered and nobody really knew how they worked and that to me was a fascinating thing that you could have these cells that travel all throughout your body and look for things that might hurt you. Rose and attack them . And attack them. Even though theyre things that theyd never seen before. Rose yeah. And, so, my first question which i meant to start with really is what drew you to medical research . As a boy growing up in south texas i was always interested in biology. My father was a country doctor. He did house calls. He encouraged me to be inquisitive and supportive. I thought about being a doctor for a while, but i realized from watching my dad and other doctors, that they have to be right all the time. They have to be able to diagnose and treat properly. I figured out early on, if youre a scientist you only have to be right some of the time. If youre wrong, you move on. Rose thats right. Immunotherapy, i hear this term in terms of lots of cancers. Its real serious. It comes with respect to some of the attacks on brain cancer now in terms of using polio virus. Yep. Rose is this the coming field in cancer . Well, i would say it is because the immune system can attack all cancers. The drugs i have developed, they unleash the immune system. They dont treat the cancer, they treat the immune system and unleash it to go and attack and conceivably can work against all kinds of cancer. Rose and remind me specifically why the lasker people and youre appearing at a Conference Im having later with a group of scientists, when you mention immunotherapy and Cancer Research your name is at the top of the list for a good reason. But explain to us exactly how you came to discover what you did. Well, i was interested in understanding how t cells, what turns them on, how its regulated. Rose let me interrupt you. Its a very interesting idea to me, and this is a nonscientific question, is the idea of cells being turned on and turned off. Mmhmm. Rose thats a remarkable idea that somehow cells which are allpowerful can be turned on or turned off. The immune system, you have to turn them on and you go from youve probably got 100 million t cells with different receptors kind of like the ignition switch, they can recognize different things. But when there is an infection or cancer, theyve got to multiply very, very fast, so you go from a few dozen to tens of millions in three or four days, but youve got to stop that. Rose at some point, youve got to turn it off. Youve got to turn it off, so thats what my lab and a few others found in the mid 1990s is there is basically the ignition switch which is the angioreceptor and then another molecule, c28 is the technical name, but like the gas pedal. Then another model called c24 actually stops the immune response. And, so, the way we put this together in cancer is rose you have a starter and an ender . Exactly. And the idea we have is the tumors get big before the immune system kicks in. This program thats going to turn them off starts but the t cells dont have long enough to kill the tumor cells. If we extend the brakes they can keep running till they eliminate the tumor. Rose assuming immunotherapy has the potential you think it does, with are we looking attend of cancer . I would like to think of that. Some canalsers, melanoma, for example, about 22 of patients that get a single round of treatment with the drugs that we developed that unleash the immune system are alive for ten years, theyre basically cured, if you want to look at it that way. 22 . Weve got to get that higher. So there is a combination with another drug in the same class where about half the patients respond. Its so new, we dont know how long its going to last. But our challenge now is to make this work in other types of cancer. Rose and where which cancer might that be . The ones where these drugs are approved and prescribed are lung cancer and melanoma. But when you get to prostate and Kidney Cancer and brain cancer, theyre a little bit harder because they dont have as many antantigens as lung cancer and melanoma. Rose taking brain cancer, im told some people it works perfectly and theyre essentially in remission or the cancer is removed. Yeah. Rose others, it has no effect. Yep. Rose why is that . We dont really understand that. I wish i had an answer to that, but we dont really understand. In some cases, its because maybe there arent t cells in the tumor when we start, or there are multiple checkpoints. You know, antibodies against two, two are in practice now but there are about eight that we know of. Rose what else is going on in the world of cancer . Well, there is what used to be called personalized medicine, now its called Precision Medicine where you do genomic sequencing and identify the mutation that causes the cancer. Usually its something that normally would tell a cell to divide only under certain circumstances but it gets locked on, you know. Rose explain that. In other words, this is kind of a laymans conversation for me, but what is it that we now believe causes cancer . I realize there are all kinds of outside factors, whether its smoking or a lot of other things, but what is it hat happens within the biology of the body . Well, to maintain the integrity of the body, cells have to know when they should divide or shouldnt divide and basically if they start dividing, you know, proliferating, making more cells, then you get a cancer. So rose if they decide do they go wayward . Sometimes they just grow more than they should. Rose an accelerated growth. And then they ecape where they normally should be and go to other parts of the body and metastasize and thats the really dangerous ones. Rose when they metastasize, do they simply go somewhere and multiply, or go somewhere and infect other cells, or whats the process . No, they go there and multiply. Rose the same bad cells. Yeah. Rose just go all over the body and start multiplying and interrupting body functions. Yeah, right. So there are ways of, in personalized medicine, you find the mutation thats been caused by smoking or too much sunlight or whatever and stop that molecule from telling the cell to grow. The problem is rose stop that molecule from telling the cells to grow. Yeah, you have a drug that inhibits it and wont let it give the signal it gives. But the problem is there is a lot of ways that cancer cells are so unstable genetically that theyre accumulate ago lot of mutations and theyre multiple ways they can get around any single thing you can throw at them. So the next coming thing is to i mean, so that type of Therapy Works in 90 of the patients that have the leanings that the drugs decide to treat. But the responses are of short duration. They can be in remission for months. Rose but then the multiplier comes back in. Yes, stop other mutation, whatever. Immunotherapy is different, a fraction of the people respond, but once your immune system starts, they can take it out basically. Rose in months. For years. Rose no, how long does it take the t cells once they get started to take them out . Weeks to months. Rose thats what i thought, weeks to months. You can go in and be on deaths door. Yeah. Rose with a certain cancer. Yep. Rose melanoma, for example. Melanoma. Rose and in two months, youre cured of that cancer. Yes, and you dont ever have to treat it again. Rose and never have to be treated again. Yep. Rose can you imagine what that means to somebody . Well, youve seen it. Ive seen it. Ive met many people. Rose this must be the great joy of what youre doing. Absolutely. Rose people are alive today because of you and your team. Thats well, thats ultimately the reason we do this work. I mean, the initial reason is to figure things out and be a scientist and figure out how things work, but its also at least i feel its important why were doing this to figure out how to use what we learn to help people, you know, to save lives stew do you have what are the tools of your work . Oh, many. We have instruments that shoot cells through light beams that can measure different cells on the surface. Microscopes that can see different cells. Use experimental treatments on mice. Rose if something works in mice, why may it not work in humans . Mice are genetically identical there are different strains and the tumors we use are different so we can figure out how to do it, but people arent like that. People are genetically very different, more complex and the disease is more complex and its hard sometimes to extrapolate. But having said that, the therapies, the basic principles of the immune system are the same. Rose if you had three times as much money for research as you do, what difference would it make . It would make a lot of difference in eni believ en ig us to study the patients. There are mouse studies but also we need to have clinical studies about what happens in the tumor when we treat people with these agents, and were beginning to do a lot of that. Rose to find out, if the t cell attacks at the moment of trying to destroy the tumor or change the mutation or whatever, slow it down from growing, shut off the growth mechanism. Well, it kills it. Rose it kells it. There is two or three ways they can kill. Rose what are the two or three . One is by making molecules like interferon by killing them. Other t cells could punch holes in the tumor cell and inject things in them that destroy their dna. Third way are cells are coated with antibodies, certain cells would bind to the antibodies and kill them indirectly. Rose where will we be in ten years . I think well be in a situation where if there is a precision drug that you can genetically type a patients tumors and saying this drugs got a good chance of killing a lot of tumor cells, even though its not curative, we can combine that with the immunotherapies to make it cureddive. The wonderful thing about the immune system is once you get t cells, theyre with you the rest of your life and if the tumor comes back, they can attack it again and we can give memory to the drugs that are around for just hours. Rose can you introduce t cells into the body . You can. Thats an alternative immunotherapy thats getting popular these days where you isolate t cells from patients and expand the ones you know react with the patients own tumor cells and put them back. Theres a new field where people actually code the genes that encode the receptors that recognize the tumors and you retarget the cells from a patient and make them go kill and its a very elegant way, its a little tedious but it could also work. Rose whats your goal next . To really understand how these therapies are working and try to make them work in many more kinds of cancer. I think that we know that we could cure a fraction of patients. We just need to raise the percentage of those patients so we could cure and get it outside of just melanoma and lung cancer and other kinds of cancers as well. Rose youre a hero. You really are. So are t cells. Yes. Rose thank you, jim. Thank you. Rose back in a moment. Stay with us. Rose richard gere is here. Hes one of hollywoods most successful and enduring actors. His latest film is called time out of mind. He plays george hammen, a homeless man living on the streets of new york city. The New York Times describes the film as an intimate portrait of a man caught between the desire to be left alone and a need for human connection. Here is the trailer. bell ringing jesus christ who the hell are you . Are you or have you been addicted to any legal or illegal substances . How about family . You got family . Normally, a parent takes care of his kids. You believe in yourself. Why do they care . I have had the feeling for the last ten years maybe that i am just one screw louis of an idiot and im just not so sure anymore. Am i homeless . No, no, youre just am i homeless . Im homeless. I dont exist i dont exist rose people say that this is almost for you, in your own mind, a film you have made to act in, that this was what calls on within you things that you want to put on the screen. It ended actually one of the reviews, i think it was Peter Travers in Rolling Stone said it was a miracle. It was a miracle that got made because this is not an easy subject. Rose and you had it for what . I bought this script i lose track 12 years ago or Something Like that and knew there was a movie in here that i wanted to make, and it wasnt obvious in the script what to do with this, but there was just something that i could feel. I was flailing around, trying to describe what i saw in this thing, and i saw a review in the New York Times of a book by a homeless guy, cadillac man, and it was called in the land of lost souls, and i bought the book and read it. I said, well, this is the way to make a movie. This is it. Its not sentimental, its not dramatulgical in a sense. Hes just telling his life as it is. No hard boiled. No editorializing about it. And i found cadillac man who was living on the streets in queens. His approach in his life, i just saw there was a neorealist movie in here where the neorealists were the italians just after world war ii and told real stories that were almost documentary in form. The acting was transparent. The bicycle thief, thats a movie i always admired. Ran into an old friend of mine, oren moverman, who had been the cowriter of todd haynes movie about bo bob bob dylan. I ran into him and said i need someone whos comfortable doing this kind of naturallism. He jumped in and ended up directing it. Rose tell me more about george hammond. This is the irony. I have no interest in his back story. Rose none . None. Rose only interested in where he is today in his life . Right now, in the present. Rose dont care about why he is there now . I think it explains some things, but thats explaining at a certain level im not that interested in, in this movie. Its not what this ones about. I think we all there is the illusion we can be explained by our back story, our history. Rose what is it you want us to walk away with, then, about hammond today . Nothing . No, i want to see ourselves. I dont one thing i was very happy about when i saw the first rough cut, and one wanted space to do this. I produced the movie and he and i worked together incredibly close on this, finally showed me a rough cut he was happy with, and i was delighted for many reasons. One, it really was a movie that i had wanted to make, but also, by the end of it, i forgot the guy was homeless. That wasnt the issue. It was a deeper kind of yearning for a place that i was interested in, a more spiritual, cosmic voyage towards, a yearning for place, for connection, for family, for tribe. Where is my place where i am valued, where i am precious . Rose okay. You perfectly set up this segue into this clip where you talk to another homeless man, george does, talks to another homeless man ben vereen. Rose yes. I think this is the clip. Hes asto astonishing in this. Rose he plays a character called dixon. He may or may not be an actual person. He may be a friend in my mind, but well see. Rose here it is. 60,000 in his suit in his socks you dont get it the man didnt have to be who he was. He had all the help he needed he didnt have to be homeless they told him he wasnt worth anything. Would you Say Something . Anything . Do you understand . Are you the idiot or am i. What . Because that is what i have been thinking about. I have been feeling for the last ten years maybe that i am just one stupid loser of an idiot, and im just not so sure anymore. Am i hom homeless . No. Am i homeless . I dont know. ve got no home. Im home less. Thats not what its about. Im homeless. I dont exist. What do you mean you dont exist . We dont exist you dont exist. I exist im going to prove to you. They think youre a clown they think were clowns were cartoons okay, im a cartoon. Im a cartoon. At least im animated i am a cartoon look at me i am a cartoon oh, oh, oh, oh charlie asked me who wrote this, it was oren moverman. He was a great writer. Rose what an exchange. We played app lot. You have to be opening to whats happening and in flow with it and be in character so that youre alive no matter whats happening. We were shooting with no extras. Rose if you had a magic wand, what would you do to change societys attitude about the homeless . Oh, we have to start from ground zero, and the transition is are we in this alone from our side or are we in it together . Thats the basic decision we have to make. Do we work with those of us who are having problems . Are they really our responsibility . Or are they an annoyance to be avoided . And thats the decision we have to make as a people, as a culture, as a society, as a planet, are we in this together or not . With all the issues going on, and homelessness charlie, from my side, i dont see homelessness as a new york story. But you pick up the newspaper today north africans syrians, iraqis, migrants, displaced people, people looking for their place in the universe, where can they and their families be safe. Rose how can they help their families. What can we do about that . How many billionaires are there in the world now . More and more every day. And then we have that kind of madness . No, we have to make a radical rose then you must be enormously grateful for the pope we have. Yeah, of course i am. I mean, hes challenging a lot of the givens. Rose and human and in a real way. I think the dalai lama, with this pope together, can do extraordinary things. Theyre each doing Amazing Things on their own but are coming from the same place. Were all in this together. Rose and we all have our part to play. Were responsible. Nobody else will fix this. We are going to fix this. Rose the reason im talk about the pope is hes taking in refugees at the vatican. I didnt know that. Oh, man. Rose and hes asked everybody in every country, you know, you owe it to do more than youre doing. We owe it to ourselves. Rose yeah. This isnt a giveaway. Were really in this all together. When you have that kind of suffering, that suffering is shared on this planet. Its an illusion to think were in our own bubble. Rose tell me about more about what you came to understand about george other than what we just saw in that dialogue . I found first of all, the basic story of how we shot this was with very, very long lenses. They were basically two very long lenses. One a 600millimeter zoom lens and a 900millimeter. The footprint of the moviemaking, the first shot we did was a master place. The cameras were in starbucks across the street. I was at the cube. You know, the cube, everyone has turned right there. Thousands and thousands of people walk by there. Well, i was in character, bad haircut and clothes and i came out and stood there on the corner, and i was in character mentally, physically, i was in character. Rose and what happened . Nobody paid any attention to me. Do you think i could do that as me . Rose as richard gere . Of course not, no. But i behaved to peoples expectation of a homeless guy, a bum on the street, and they could see that for two blocks away and immediately turned off. I could see eventually we did a 45minute take the very first shot of the movie in which no one made eye contact with me because they had already projected all of these negative things on this person standing still on the corner in a place where everyone else is walking, going somewhere. Very few cues led to that judgment. Rose because nobody can imagine being homeless, first. No, you cant, and i think thats really it. I think rose you can . Yeah, i think people do. I think people subconsciously know how close they are to losing it, how close we all are to having it all taken away. I dont think anyone is that secure in their lives, especially in these times. You lose a job, the violence rose do you feel that . That youre that close . Actually, i feel mentally i could go. I was feeling that playing this guy on the street. I could feel, i could feel how easy it would be to lose integration, that mentally i could come apart. Rose within the fabric of other things. The fabric of our reality is very fragile, extremely fragile in all ways. Rose describe georges relationship with his daughter. They havent seen each other in some time, okay. And i think there have been attempts for them to a at let attempts from his side. The timing has been wrong. He hasnt bn in very good shape and theres a lot of history that hasnt been fixed. Rose roll give me those photos like that . I didnt have a place to put them. Im changing places right now. What is it you want . You want money . All right. Well. Here. Thats all i have. What else . You seem good. What else do you need . I dont want to get involved in this ever again. I dont. All right. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Rose we didnt go that far. That was an amazing shot. We were just talking as it was playing. Almost a whole movie through glass, through windows, through things going by. Reflections on the windows that are always moving and dancing. Metaphorically like our brains. Our minds are always dancing, even if were still, this is going on all the time. Thats jena malone, one of the best actresses ive ever worked with. This was the first day we shot together. We didnt rehearse a lot. I didnt want to do that and oren didnt want to do that and jong jena dii dont think jena. We were in our characters. I was to happy she was so good and so much fun and so rich. Rose are you working all the a time . Are you spending a portion of time as you always have in your faith and in your commitment to the dalai lama . Well, thats a lot of what i do for sure. I mean, hes my teacher, so im still learning. You know, i think thats one of your life is still about learning. Every time you do this, you dont come into it doing speeches, its a dialogue of what can i learn here. Rose exactly. Thats why it stays so fresh. Its alive. Thats why people want to do this. Thats a deeply important part of what i do, and i have been chairman of the board of the International Campaign fort fort for 25 years now. Movies are actually what i do as a man. My profession, i actually am an actor. Uim admitting it here for the first time laughter its opening in new york now, opening in l. A. I think just last friday. But were rolling this out in terms of social action, social change, too. I mean, its a really important part of what i want to do with this movie. Rose to make for a different attitude in funding programs that connect to the homeless. Connecting with programs we know that work. Housing is number one but its not the only thing. You have to create community. Rose thanks for coming. Thank you. Rose richard gere, thank you for joining us. See you next time. Rose for more about this program and earlier episodes, visit us online at pbs. Org and charlierose. Com. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org announcer this is nightly Business Report with Tyler Mathisen and sue herera. What you see is what you get. The Federal Reserve says the economy wont grow much over the next few years. So what should you do with your money . Dodging the rules . The epa accuses volkswagen of evading some regulations, and it could cost the automaker billions. Corporate checkup. The next big challenge for stocks is fast approaching. All that and more tonight on nightly Business Report for friday september 18th. And good evening, everyone. A fedfueled fall. Stocks started the day low and ended even lower as investors from asia to europe and here in the u. S. Focused on the health of the global economy. The concern was sparked by comments from the Federal Reserve