Sylvester Stallone has reacted to I Play Rocky, the upcoming biopic about the making of the 1976 classic Rocky, saying he initially questioned whether his life story was being revisited too soon.
Aren’t we jumping the gun a little bit? If he gets the opportunity to recut the film, Stallone joked, “It’s not going to be great. It’ll be acceptable.”
Speaking at 92NY on Monday while promoting his new memoir The Steps, Stallone said he was “kind of mixed” about the project because, as he put it, “I’m not dead yet, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “It bothers me to death because I know I took my foot off the gas,” he said, adding that he should have directed the film himself and “I should have been more aware of not trying to be cool to the audience.
The film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, follows the making of Rocky and features Anthony Ippolito as a young Stallone, depicting the actor as he develops and pushes the film through a tumultuous production.
“I actually thought it was me the first moment; there were a couple of angles. I go to my daughter and say, ‘That’s unbelievable,’” he recalled. The actor also stressed that he was not involved in the production, directed by Peter Farrelly. I talked to the kid. He also joked about seeing his mannerisms recreated on screen, saying, “I go, ‘Do I talk like that? Now I get it.
Stallone said his reaction changed after seeing Ippolito’s performance. “I said, ‘I’ll just sit back and watch. I said, ‘If you want any questions, here I am,’ and that was it. But they did it all on their own,” Stallone said. “It’s like you look at a photo of yourself, everyone else likes it, but you go [growl],” he said. Stallone revealed that he is trying to get Amazon to allow him to recut 1990’s Rocky V, which he described as “a thorn in my side.”
During the conversation, Stallone also discussed his complicated feelings about watching the Rocky films today.
