The remarkable $1million stunt performed in ‘Cliffhanger’
The easiest way to describe Sylvester Stallone‘s Cliffhanger is ‘Die Hard on a Mountain’. As straightforward an explanation as that may be for pretty much everything that happens on-screen, realising that concept was anything but.
The Rocky and Rambo figurehead was initially eying a collaboration with director Renny Harlin on another action-packed disaster thriller called Gale Force, which was ironically surmised as ‘Die Hard in a Hurricane’. That idea originated in 1984 and went through several revisions, with production company Carolco spending millions of dollars along the way, including one draft by Joe Eszterhas that decided to turn the entire thing on its head and reinvent the premise as the basis of an erotic thriller.
Once titillation and inclement weather were thrown out of the window, Stallone himself got heavily involved in refitting Gale Force into Cliffhanger. He successfully lobbied the Writers Guild of America to receive a writing credit, with Michael France retaining story and co-authorship.
Somewhere along the line, it was decided that the planned $40million budget of Gale Force would be raised substantially to $70m, making it one of Stallone’s costliest star vehicles at the time. The expense is right there up on the screen for all to see as his intrepid mountaineer battles against the threat of John Lithgow’s wonderfully hammy criminal mastermind, Eric Qualen. Still, a million dollars of those aforementioned costs ended up being funnelled into a single set piece.
It wasn’t the iconic opening scene, either, which sees the leading man’s Gabe Walker watch helplessly as Michelle Joyner’s Sarah plummets to her death during an unsuccessful rescue. It establishes the all-important motivation for the hero to turn his back on high-altitude feats of derring-do while also opening the doors for Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls to mount an ingenious parody of its own where a helpless raccoon plunges from a great height.
Instead, it was a first-act action beat that required a seven-figure sum to pull off, with Lithgow’s daring band of thieves heisting $100m by stealing three suitcases jam-packed with uncirculated currency. Putting their plan into motion, the robbers and their cargo are ziplined between two moving planes, something that would no doubt be executed using CGI if Cliffhanger were made today.
Despite releasing in the same year as Jurassic Park, though, visual effects weren’t quite at the same standard where such a thing could be pulled off to a convincing degree. That’s not to say the production tried and failed, but the fact Escape from L.A.‘s infamously rendered surfing scene arrived three years later offers a fairly illuminating illustration, never mind Air Force One doing a very similar thing in 1997 with some unconvincing digital trickery added in for good measure.
In the single most expensive aerial stunt that had ever been performed, performer Simon Crane couldn’t even be insured for putting his life on the line because the company covering the film refused to sanction it. This led to Stallone reportedly reducing his own salary by a million dollars and placing it right in the stuntman’s pocket as a thank-you for his efforts.
Ziplining between two moving planes at 15,000 feet in the air is every bit as dangerous as it sounds and was even declared as being against the law in Europe. This necessitated the crew’s return to the United States in order to accomplish Cliffhanger‘s signature moment without running afoul of the local authorities.
Crane almost botched it due to external circumstances, too, with turbulence almost wiping him off the face of the planet when he attempted to board the secondary aircraft. The stuntman “bounced into the door and bounced out again” and found himself “within about six feet of the engines,” which would have turned him into little more than a trail of red mist. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, and he lived to fight another day with Cliffhanger, reaping the rewards of his death-defying antics.
