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Cannes 2019 Sylvester Stallone, Cannes Darling
by Ben Kenigsberg, rogerebert.com May 25, 2019
"I'd rather be Rocky than
Rambo!"
“I'm not handsome in
the classical sense. The eyes droop, the mouth is crooked, the teeth aren't
straight, the voice sounds like a Mafioso pallbearer, but somehow it all
works.” --Silvester Syallone
Syallone remarked on his physical features and his
voice, which was affected by an accident when he was born. "I knew it was bad when Arnold Schwarzenegger said, 'You have an
accent.'"
Few screen legends would
look more out of place at Cannes than Sylvester
Stallone, and that would be true even if he didn't show up for
an onstage conversation at the Debussy theater on Friday afternoon wearing a
flannel overshirt and jeans—a far cry from the black tie he'd don hours later
for a red-carpet screening of "First
Blood."
Stallone was at the festival to promote
"Rambo V: Last Blood"—"Rambo
Cinq" in French—opening this fall. But the conversation, moderated by
the journalist Didier Allouch, was mainly a look back at his
career. Here are some highlights from what Stallone said.
He
remarked on his physical features and his voice, which was affected by an
accident when he was born. "I knew it was bad when Arnold Schwarzenegger
said, 'You have an accent.'"

He said he did not like to see his
characters die at the ends of movies. "The last three
'Rocky's I wrote, he dies. Every time. But I changed it. I start out with the
premise, logically, they should. Rambo should have died in the second one. But
there's just something. I go, you know, let's just push it. Logically, he should
die. Illogically, where should we take him? Is there still a story? I just don't
believe in reality all the time."
He discussed being conscious of
the limits of his acting range. "I knew that I was kind of
limited as an actor because of physical type. I think quite often, especially
acting students, they think or they're taught to be as versatile as possible—and
that's a nice theory, but that's not real. That's not going to happen. You have
a certain thing that you can do well.…Dustin Hoffman's not
playing Rambo and I'm not playing Tootsie.…I
just want to do what I do as best as I can. Every time I venture away from it, I
end up in 'Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.'"

Although he got criticized for using so many
montages in "Rocky IV," he likes the
montages. "I said, I'm going to make a montage movie. We
sort of know what the character's all about. I don't have to explain who
Rocky is by the fourth one, right? But I do have to show the
journey. I want to show the phenomenon of what's happening and the money and the
wealth and the fear and who Dolph Lundgren is. I said, that's
montage. Critically, I got murdered, but financially, it was the most successful
of the group."
It took time before he became aware of his
Rambo character's political
significance. "I'm almost a political atheist. I hadn't even
voted before. So it had nothing to do with politics. I just thought, this is a
great story, this is an interesting story about alienation. Then, I started to
do research, and I realized that so many veterans were coming back and were so
damaged, and there were so many suicides. I thought, maybe this can have some
benefit.… If I'm going to make this movie, I have to be responsible for
thousands and thousands of men that are ready to kill
themselves."
But Rambo
turned into a political talking point anyway. "It was not by
any means ever supposed to be a political statement. It became one. It took on a
life of its own." Discussing how President Reagan began
talking about the film, Stallone
dropped a microphone in his lap—expressing exasperation.
He believes that
changing his physique has affected his performances. "If you
start to change your body, and I found this out on 'Cop Land,' when you start to
alter what is your natural size, you react differently. It literally changes
your personality. You get to the point where you're in really great shape and
you become very narcissistic. You want to walk around naked. And then if you
don't, we're in 'Cop Land,' you go, maybe I'll wear a poncho. So that's the way
I approached it—not so much as vanity as this was one of the ways I would
prepare."
The sixth Rocky movie, "Rocky Balboa," was, to Stallone, not about boxing, but about grief. "I believe that our life is all about math, simple math. Up to
about 40 years old, 45 years old, everything is wonderful. Your career is going,
you're acquiring things, you're buying a house, you look good in clothes…and
then, the second half of your life, the kids are moving out, the house is
leaking, you're losing your job, your friends are dying. So it's about
subtraction. And how do you deal with subtraction? Because that's the hard part.
And I go that's a movie, man. That's a movie. And Rocky can only deal with loss
getting, as he says, the beast out of the basement—through literally pain. He
wants to replace old pain with new pain."
His collaboration with
Arnold Schwarzenegger on
"Escape Plan" happened years later
than it should have. "We should have done it earlier, but we
could never sit in a room together and agree, ever. My knife is gonna be that
long. Mine's this long. … It's the last of a breed."
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