GERE BEARS THE TORCH FOR TIBET; CHINESE OPPRESSION BACKS ACTOR INTO `RED CORNER'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

It will likely be a very long time before Richard Gere's dream becomes a reality. But at least he's finally taken what, to him, is a key step toward it.

``For years, I've been trying to find a film to do on Tibet,'' says the actor, whose devotion to Buddhism and friendship with exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama have led him to become a leading critic of China's occupation of the remote Himalayan country. ``As I'm sure you would understand, when you care so much about something, you're much more critical of the piece of material that you'll do. You can't do it halfway; you can't do it like it's just a movie.

``Nothing that I saw would bear that kind of scrutiny. So when this came up, it was a different angle of dealing with Tibet, frankly.''

That movie is ``Red Corner,'' which opens Friday, and Tibet is never so much as mentioned in it. A courtroom drama/murder mystery set in the hall-of-mirrors Chinese legal system, the movie speaks volumes about how the communist government does things.

Lawyer in trouble

Gere plays American entertainment lawyer Jack Moore, who's in Beijing to cut a lucrative satellite television deal with Chinese bureaucrats. When a beautiful young woman - a general's daughter, no less - is found murdered in his hotel room, Moore is arrested, charged and not too subtly told to confess or die.

He insists he's innocent. Moore's court-appointed lawyer Shen Yuelin (Chinese actress Bai Lin) pleads him guilty anyway; her job is saving his life, not exonerating him. The American embassy is basically helpless and, worse, someone wants to kill both Moore and Shen. Eventually convinced of her client's innocence, Shen tries to get to the truth - the last thing, according to the film anyway, that Chinese justice is really interested in.

``When we were rewriting the script, there were many opportunities to bring in Tibet,'' Gere says of Robert King's screenplay, which was originally set in the Soviet Union but relocated after the fall of communism there. ``But every time, it felt like pushing a point that was not needed. If you talk about the judicial system in China, you're clearly talking about the same system in their colonies. And if it's that bad in China, imagine what it's like in Tibet.''

Gere is quick to point out that ``Red Corner'' is not strictly an exercise in China-bashing, unlike the recent ``Seven Years in Tibet'' (a project Gere was often approached for, but never found quite right). Indeed, Gere insisted upon extensive rewriting to give the film's Chinese characters more human dimension.

``They were kind of paper Chinese characters in the script,'' Gere, 48, says, ``so we needed to fill them out as human beings. Now, I think, we've given them all faces and personalities.''

Oddly enough, China's Film Institute invited Gere to visit the country shortly after his famous speech at the Academy Awards ceremonies in 1993, when he asked the world to ``send this thought out'' for the Chinese army to vacate Tibet. He's been banned by the Academy ever since, but the Beijing regime actually displayed enormous hospitality on Gere's tour of China and Tibet.

He's not been allowed to return to China. But that hasn't shaken Gere's fondness for the friends he made.

``We were treated very nicely; the Chinese were very sweet people,'' the lanky, gray-haired actor says. ``The only strange moments were when one of the party officials would show up and nobody would talk.''

``Richard loves China and the Chinese people, and he's knowledgeable,'' says ``Red Corner'' director Jon Avnet (``Fried Green Tomatoes''). ``Because of that - forget the fact that he's a great actor - he wanted to get it right. And because he knows so much, he was an enormously valuable collaborator.''

As well as a bit of a liability, since Gere's participation prevented Avnet from actually filming ``Red Corner'' in China. But both cutting-edge and old-fashioned movie magic got around that roadblock.

Avnet captured some not-entirely-approved footage of Beijing landmarks during research trips to the Chinese capital. Gere was later morphed into the shots via computer-graphics technology. For other exteriors, Oscar-winning production designer Richard Sylbert built a seven-acre hutong - a sprawling, residential neighborhood marked by maze-like alleys and numerous courtyards - in Playa del Rey, dressing it with hundreds of extras and nearly five shipping containers worth of items from China.

Obviously, ``Red Corner'' is a big deal for Gere. In fact, he lobbied MGM to release the film this week to coincide with the state visit of China's President Jiang Zemin, and the actor is currently hosting several protest events in Washington, D.C.

But politics and religion are not his only interests. Gere has another movie coming out Nov. 14, ``The Jackal,'' a loose remake of the '70s thriller ``Day of the Jackal'' co-starring Bruce Willis and Sidney Poitier. Gere plays an imprisoned IRA sniper, Declan Mulqueen, who is released to help track down an elusive international terrorist (Willis).

``My own personal beliefs are in total nonviolence - in every possible way,'' Gere explains. ``In all interactions, in all conflicts, nothing good comes from violence, nothing. So I thought it would be interesting to tell the story of someone who was a passionate soldier, an ideologue, as the best of the IRA are. But he was a sharpshooter, he did kill people, and he's now extremely reticent to pick up a gun ever again.

``Of course, in the movie, he's more or less forced to pick up a gun. I thought that would be an interesting dilemma for a moral person.''

``Pilgrim,'' a book of Gere's black-and-white photographs, has just been published, and he says he's working on another one.

And there's a new love in his life, ``Law and Order'' star Carey Lowell.

``She's a wonderful person,'' Gere enthuses. ``She is so funny, probably the funniest person I've ever known. And she's very committed to Buddhism, so there's no tension about that at all. You know, if you're on a path, it's almost impossible if your partner's not on the same path.''

Gere does not discuss what caused the end of his marriage to model Cindy Crawford several years ago. But the actor himself appears to have matured, contentedly, over the last two years. Pragmatism and consideration mark his political statements, a nice alternative to the hectoring manner of most Hollywood partisans. And he comes across with an easy humor these days, which is quite a change from the bristly Gere of the past.

Raised in upstate New York, Gere originally planned to become a musician. A gymnastic scholarship took him to the University of Massachusetts, where he first became interested in philosophy. But the acting bug bit, and he dropped out after two years to do theater work in New England and New York.

Gere broke into the movies in 1975 and made his first big splash two years later as one of Diane Keaton's ``Looking for Mr. Goodbar'' dates from hell. Since then, he's appeared in a wide variety of movies of greatly varying quality - some excellent (``Days of Heaven,'' ``Internal Affairs,'' HBO's ``And the Band Played On''), some commercially impressive (``An Officer and a Gentleman,'' ``Pretty Woman,'' ``Primal Fear'') and some just plain baffling (``American Gigolo,'' ``King David,'' ``Final Analysis,'' ``Intersection'').

Perhaps making a film as heartfelt as ``Red Corner'' has satisfied Gere in a way no other movie could.

``You know, the Chinese people's cause is the same cause as the Tibetans': They're not allowed to speak, either,'' Gere says. ``There's a wonderful line that Bai Ling says in this movie, `I no longer wish to remain silent.' She probably has finished her career, with that statement, in China. But she's speaking for herself, for her character, for a generation of Chinese people who were in Tiananmen Square.

``And the implication there, when she says this to the American, is that `You guys have got to stand by us the next time we speak out.' ''

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) THE CHINA QUESTION

For Richard Gere, working on `Red Corner' meshed with his human-rights concerns

(2) Richard Gere is an American entertainment lawyer accused of murder in China in ``Red Corner.''