Sylvester Stallone’s motivation for writing ‘Rocky’: “anti-society, anti-Christ, anti-government, anti-everything”
Back in the mid-1970s, Sylvester Stallone delivered what would become a true artefact of pop culture in the shape of his sports drama Rocky. It sees Stallone play Rocky Balboa, a lowly boxer and loan shark’s debt collector, who finds himself with a shot at taking the heavyweight championship belt in a fight with the champion Apollo Creed.
With it, Stallone practically invented the modern boxing film, as well as popularising the sort of rags-to-riches narrative that would dominate cinema over the proceeding years. The beauty of the film comes from the fact that Stallone had also been down and out of his luck as an actor and writer at the time, enduring in a narrative that matches his work.
When it came to the reasons for Stallone writing his debut, he once admitted that he had become frustrated with the cinema of the early 1970s. “I felt at the time that cinema, at least the movies I had been seeing, was at an all-time low,” Stallone noted. “Everything was anti-society, anti-Christ, anti-government, anti-everything, and there was no one to root for.”
He’d also felt that the time had come for movies with a strong sense of morality, like those from the 1940s and 1950s, to make a comeback. “I also feel that films are very cyclic, so I wanted to get back into the cycle of the films of 1940s and the 1950s where people say, ‘Hey, gee, I miss the good old films, yet Hollywood [hadn’t] made any good old fashioned type films where morality was at the forefront.’”
Stallone was then asked whether he thought he was a bit presumptuous in thinking that he would be able to take on the role of Rocky Balboa because his acting career had not exactly taken off as he had originally hoped. “That’s kind of you to say ‘small roles’,” the actor joked.
“I was known as atmosphere,” he continued, “I was in the background, the drunk that was being stepped over in the gutter and other lame roles. But I felt that if I was gonna go down into professional obscurity, I wanted to at least have the opportunity to say to myself, ‘Well, you tried. You put your best foot forward, and you didn’t make it’.”
That very notion of giving the film industry one last shot was another motivator for Stallone, and it’s quite similar to the very story of Rocky in a way. “I just knew that I had to do it one time, and I knew it was in me,” he said. As for what kind of man he wanted to be in the film? “An underdog.” How true.
