SYLVESTER STALLONE - LAST BLOOD
BY KYLE LEVY

 

Sylvester Stallone has come a long way from his film debut in 1969. It took nearly a decade after his first film, The Party at Kitty and Stud’s, for him to get success in the Rocky franchise, something for which he felt he was “lucky.”

Before the success of Rocky, he starred in the teen gang film The Lords of Flatbush, which gave he and Henry Winkler a breakthrough, but both went in different directions in terms of genre. Winkler making his name as “The Fonz” in the television series Happy Days and Stallone moving towards action flicks.

Finally, in 1976, Rocky—inspired by heavyweight boxing’s Chuck Wepner and his fight against Muhammad Ali—established Stallone in Hollywood, which very much paralleled Rocky Balboa’s rags-to-riches story in the movie. The film received the Oscar for Best Picture in 1976 as well as 10 other Academy Award nominations. 

After two decades of almost non-stop action, Stallone was cast alongside Ray Liotta and Robert De Niro in Copland and gave what many audiences and critics feel is his best performance – although it was incredibly understated, especially in comparison to his gung-ho movies filled with empty gun shell casings.

In 2005, he hung up his gloves and returned as Rocky Balboa the boxing trainer to Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Creed, which saw Stallone nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, the sixth actor to be nominated twice for portraying the same character.

Now, almost 40 years after author David Morrell’s book was adapted for the big screen, Stallone is back as one of the most well-known action heroes in movie history, John Rambo. In Last Blood, he must meet his past head-on and reignite his merciless battle skills to gain revenge in one final conquest.

When his surrogate daughter is attempting to track down her father, she is kidnapped. Rambo makes the journey from his home in the U.S. across the Mexican border to rescue her. But when he goes into war with one of Mexico’s most brutal cartels, it becomes a deadly game of vengeance on both sides, marking the final episode in the series.
 
STRIPLV: So, John Rambo, he is back for the final time. What can you tell us about this film?
STALLONE: Yeah, at the end of the fourth one he returned home and when we rejoin him, he is out in this terrible storm helping the others try to rescue people who need saving. The storm gets so bad that they start bringing people off the hill, and one of them is on horseback, and it’s Rambo. He is volunteering as if in recompense for being unable to save his friends in Vietnam. So, he has PTSD and that comes out as survivor guilt. He is going through a pretty rough time. After that, we see that he has this beautiful ranch as a home, but he chooses instead to live underground. There are miles and miles of tunnels which he has dug himself as he was a “tunnel rat” in Vietnam and there is something subterranean with the darkness, the stillness, the enclosure. It’s very cool, and I like it.
STRIPLV: There are other people close to him in this film, aren’t there?
STALLONE: Yeah, he has an adopted family, and his own father has died. He has a housekeeper who is probably 70 years old, whose granddaughter also stays with them as her mother has died and Rambo is like a surrogate father. However, he is extremely paranoid about anything ever happening to her. But she is a young girl, and when she finds out who her father is, she tells Rambo that she wants to go and see him. He’s in Mexico, but he is a bad man, and Rambo doesn’t want her to go.  She says that she won’t, but she does, and it’s then that bad things begin to happen. That’s when Rambo has been fighting his PTSD, and once he crosses that line outside of his property, he feels as though he cannot control what is out there and more so that it will control him. Sure enough, he goes out to Mexico, and bad things start to take place. A lot of people are getting hurt in this film. (Laughs)
STRIPLV: There is a similar theme of resilience with a lot of your characters over the years. Are you a resilient person yourself?
STALLONE: Yes, I think I would. There is something about the nature of man and woman, just the creatures themselves and we’ve been through so much upheaval over thousands of years. We’ve seen civilizations being destroyed, only to come back, and I am very much into that theme of fighting back and not accepting defeat easily. If we do get defeated, then we mostly rebuild ourselves and come back. I do think that it’s a very interesting cycle, which is also timeless.
STRIPLV: Is life something that is reflected in your writing?
STALLONE: I like to inject a lot of that into my characters, and I don’t separate myself from anyone else. I think all of us have a thread which goes through us, we are familiar with fear and what it is, the same with loneliness and isolation, what victory and failure are. I think that if you can tell that story, then the audience can relate to it. But if you are someone who feels that they are above pain or above fear, then who cares? You cannot be human if you don’t identify with those emotions. Being human means that you are able to balance all of your weaknesses and trying to make them a strength. Because that’s what life is, life is juggling things every day. It could be beautiful one day. Then, you can get one phone call, and your whole life is changed.
STRIPLV: Rambo and Rocky are your two most popular characters, and they are both very different.
STALLONE: It’s a constant battle, and that’s what I try when I am successful, and I am not successful all of the time, I do fail. But when it works, with Rambo and Rocky and I do really like those characters. I love Rambo because his character has a lot in common with those people who, unfortunately, deal with isolation every day. In contrast to Rambo, Rocky is different with his optimistic view of the world and of his own life. He quickly realizes that he is not special, and that life owes him nothing, but he tries as much as he can, to make his life better and to be special. Also, it’s a common misconception that Rocky is a boxing movie; it’s not. It’s more a movie that has boxing in it, and Rocky exists in isolation and is reborn once he meets a woman. Boxing is just his job; he could have been anything in life. But the boxing element is a metaphor because life is a fight against the odds and a race against time. It will always be that. One funny thing is that I still have the two turtles from the first Rocky film almost 45 years ago and they about as big as I am! They are the only friends that I have left. (Laughs) Maybe I should just make another Rocky movie and join them in the bowl. They are nearly as old as I am.
STRIPLV: Do you prefer writing?
STALLONE: Well, my daughter wanted to be a writer, and I told her: “No, you don’t!” Writing is a horror, it is so difficult, and whereas it is so rewarding, it is also so painful at times because you are constantly challenging yourself to put words onto a piece of paper. Writing is very mathematical, and we are not talking about typing, we are talking about writing. It’s an extremely difficult, precise endeavor, and it requires so many rewrites until you read something, and you shout: “I got it!” Then, the next time you read it, it makes you wonder who wrote it because it’s that bad. I always say to those people who want to write: “If it’s not your passion, don’t do it!” My daughter tells me she wants to be a writer, and so I went and got about 100 notebooks from my office, and it made me realize again that I wish I could type. I told her that for every one word that you are going to use, there are 500 more that you’re not. After that, she decided to go back to college!
STRIPLV: You were so convincing as Rocky at the height of your training. Do you think that you could have made it as a professional boxer?
STALLONE: (Laughs) Probably not, no. The reason being that I actually had a few reality checks when I was training for Rocky 3 and I was much better then. Because in the first Rocky movie, I was so awkward. So, for the third film, I thought to myself: “You know what… let me use a real fighter.” So, I brought in Joe Frazier in, and he was in the ring for maybe 11 seconds, and I had four stitches above my left eye. He just thought it was no challenge; it’s an actor. Then, I brought in Earnie Shavers, and he didn’t hit me in the jaw, he just started to bob and weave, and I thought: “Oh, I will be able to run him no problem.” Some people told me that Earnie was slow. Slow? First of all, he’s a former all-state halfback – total speed. The bell rings for the first round and the next thing, I am in the corner, and I can’t get out. He starts to unload, and he hits me just on the arms, and I said: “Someone has released a Buick into the ring!”
It literally felt like I was bouncing against chrome and I started to squeal, this new kind of sound, I got in touch with my feminine side very quickly, very, very quickly. Then, I did one with (Roberto) Duran, and I’m thinking: “I’ll beat him.” Yeah, right. I don’t know if you’ve ever saw a man go from young Italian to Roquefort cheese. Do you know the color of Roquefort? Blue cheese. Blue, yellow, tapioca-colored. He was extraordinary, and he literally could do it standing on a handkerchief. But there are certain earmarks they give away. When he was starting to work the speed bag with his head, you know that you shouldn’t be in a ring with him. With his head, as fast as I can move my hands!
STRIPLV: You were teased as a kid because you were a little bit different. Why was that?
STALLONE: Well, I had a speech impediment which I probably still carry to this day and it was one of those things which I just had. I was born in Hell’s Kitchen, so I had my accent to overcome, and I was very, very thin. So, it wasn’t until I saw a film called Hercules Unchained and I thought: “Hey, here’s a guy who can single-handedly defeat the Roman army with the jawbone of an ax.” I was obsessed with trying to emulate him and wondered what he was eating to get like that. Ever since then, I have followed Steve Reeves (the actor who played Hercules in the film), and I was very impressed with that.
STRIPLV: When did that begin then?
STALLONE: I actually had a very late start in athletics, and I didn’t have a lot of interaction with sports early on. In fact, I remember that when I was in third grade in school, we were playing baseball, and I was a catcher. Someone hit what we call a pop-up, which is basically an easy catch, and I put my hands up to cover my head instead of trying to catch the ball! This is a traumatic experience for me, and to this day, that haunts me.
STRIPLV: You had undiagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder didn’t you, and you played in an American Football team which was specialized with everyone else who had that?
STALLONE: Yeah, and because no of us listen to each other, the huddle before each play became a group therapy session [laughs]. It became like intervention, and you had to pull the quarterback away, everyone having a meltdown. People asking: ”Where’s my medication?” It was horrifying, and we lost all of the 10 games that we played, we went zero and ten. So, I know what the kids of today are going through when they feel frustrated, and everyone labels them as a bad kid. It’s just about being focused.