Richard Gere will be the first to admit he's working a lot these days, but what we see isn't the half of it. This weekend he's starring in Brooklyn's Finest, about six months after we saw him romancing Hilary Swank in Amelia. But the two films were shooting back-to-back and on top of each other, requiring Gere to switch between playing a 1920s newspaper magnate and a worn-down modern Brooklyn cop, with both characters living simultaneously in his head.

But when you're Richard Gere, I guess, challenges like that come naturally. A few weeks ago we got the chance to speak to the stalwart actor, who stars in Brooklyn's Finest as a cop with just a few days left on the force but still looking for something worth fighting for. He talked about working for director Antoine Fuqua, barely getting the chance to meet Don Cheadle on the set, and why actors and cops are more alike than you think. Brooklyn's Finest opens Friday.

What pulled you into doing this movie?
I read the script and I thought, this is really unusual. These three interlinking short stories that don't really interact. But somehow, like music, contrapuntally inform each other, in kind of a mysterious way.

How do you develop characters to make it organic for your audience?
It's never the same. But in general, I have to sneak up on things. It's very difficult for me to just show up and work. In the process of testing a lot of young actresses to play [the hooker with whom Gere's character is involved], we were honing where this character would be coming from. And a lot of ideas were being generated. We cam up with radically different scenes than what Michael [C. Martin] had originally written.

There are real police officers who have been on the force for decades. Did you meet with some of these guys?
Yeah, of course. But I've been around the world a lot, so a lot of these people I knew before this. I've played cops before. Half of the cops on the force here are in SAG. Acting is about analogy and metaphor. You don't have to be a cop on the street for 25 years to understand what it's like to have done a job, committed for 25 years. You don't have to be a cop to know what it's like to have a bad marriage, emotional problems and can't connect, self-loathing. They're common to all of us,

Tell us about working with Antoine Fuqua, and what perspective did he bring as a black director?
Well Antoine was a trip, man. He's his own thing. Antoine's very smart, very sensitive. He's got a quality that you have to have as a filmmaker especially, you feel things. It's not in the words. It's just feeling the movement of people, their drives, their dreams, their roadblocks.

I enjoyed the pre-production process, when we were exploring this character and his relationship with the hooker. We tried a lot of different things. He's very open to trying things. I think elements of this could have been a very B-movie throwaway. But I think he is always looking for something that takes it off center, that has its own rhythm, own emotions. That's a unique quality.

I know you didn't have dialogue with Don and Ethan, but did you guys all get together at some point?
No, because we were all like, you work for two weeks, then someone else comes in for two weeks, then someone else comes in for two weeks.

But there are scenes were you interconnect.
Yeah, but they were just it-- in passing. Just those moments. But I remember, I came to the set just to hang out, and Ethan was shooting the card game scene in the basement of his house. And that was the first day he and I talked. We had known each other before, and I always admired his work, I thought he was terrific. We got to know each other a little bit on this film. We've got similar histories, he and I. Don, we barely said hello. The most we said was when we bumped into each other on the street.

What drives you to work so much? You have three or four movies in a year sometimes.
I don't think there's ever been four. I think maybe three, once. I'll never do it again. This was the year of three. I was finishing up Hachiko, the dog movie, this movie and Amelia. They were back to back, over each other.

But it is a lot of work. Do you just like working?
Things came up that interested me, and they fit my life. I'm always busy, believe me, with movies or something else.

What is it about this genre? People love cops and robbers.
I think it's just the extremes of it. Actors have a life very similar to cops, especially undercover cops. Very similar. The movies I've done had to do with that sense of play and danger. For an actor, it's very rare you're in physical danger. I do my own stuntwork, but I'm not jumping off a 30-foot platform. There's a sense as an actor of an emotional danger. It's not easy, the camera's in your face all the time. When you fail it's right there for everybody to see, you messed up. The physical danger of a cop is something else.