The team behind I Play Rocky found themselves time-traveling 50 years into the past to capture the essence of the story of how an unknown Sylvester Stallone wrote and starred in Rocky, the blockbuster hit of 1976.
Along with fight training and physical conditioning, star Anthony Ippolito immersed himself in studying Stallone’s experience for months until he finally got to hear from the source himself.
“I got to speak to Stallone about a month before we started, which was really cool,” Ippolito explained during Deadline’s Contenders Film Los Angeles panel Saturday. “But I was, as you can imagine, a little nervous going into that conversation as I had already done a great deal of my own research, but there’s nothing that compares to being able to speak with him directly.”
“I felt privileged to be able to hear 50 years later, this crystallized version of him describing his circumstances at the time and him falling in love with writing and just all of these negotiations and how everything panned out for him and how it feels to him, him reflecting on it,” the actor added. “It was really, really awesome.”
Director Peter Farrelly found that making the crowd-pleasing underdog tale was just as much of an uphill battle as Stallone’s bid to see Rocky make it to the screen.
“Every movie’s tough. I’ve never had an easy one, that’s for sure,” Farrelly said. “And this one fell apart a bunch getting this made. And this took us a year and a half and it fell apart three times in the middle of it. And there was one time, the budget was low too. We shot this in 34 days. They shot Rocky in 28, but they had the advantage of shooting during the 1970s. We had to make it look like the 1970s.”
“And they kept cutting the budget, cutting the budget,” Farrelly added. “And one day I just said, ‘Fuck it. I don’t need this shit. This is brutal. I’m not getting paid. I’m not getting anything.’ And then I thought of this guy and that guy. And I thought this is Peter’s masterpiece, Peter Gamble, and I can’t quit on that. And [Anthony] has been getting his face punched in for a year learning how to box. And it just kept me going. But yeah, it’s hard to get a movie made.”
Writer Gamble revealed he found inspiration in the whirlwind three-day marathon in which Stallone wrote Rocky’s original screenplay. “I said, “Okay, let me just embrace what Stallone did. Let me see how fast I can write this,” said Gamble. “And my first draft took about two weeks to write and only working in the mornings got something in the afternoon. And it changed how I wrote.”
“What I found was that so often we’re sitting here trying to make every word on the page great,” Gamble explained. “I’d get five great pages just messing with everything. And when you get yourself out of the way and you just take these leaps and just dive into something, sometimes you write 15 pages in a day and then you get nine great pages and then you got modeling clay for those bad pages you can work with to make better the next day.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.
