Sylvester Stallone names the best director he ever worked with: “I was a much tougher, stronger person at the end”
Throughout his five-plus decade career, Sylvester Stallone has worked with many directors, including John G Avildsen, who, in addition to winning an Oscar for directing Rocky, also helmed The Karate Kid and Rocky V, and Ryan Coogler, whose credits include both Black Panther movies.
Stallone has also worked as a director. His credits in this role include no fewer than four Rocky movies, 2008’s Rambo, and, less successfully, 2010’s The Expendables. With this track record, he’s well-versed in what it takes to be a successful director, both from the perspective of an actor and from the perspective of the person behind the camera, so when he says someone is the best director he’s ever worked with, it carries weight.
Speaking to Variety in 2019, Stallone reflected on a lull in his career in the late ‘90s when his management company parted ways with him after struggling to find roles. His claw back to the upper echelons of the box office was slow, but during that low point, there was one bright spot—working with a director whom he came to revere.
“I had done Cop Land a little bit before that, which I thought would be a good acting exercise, and I worked with the best director I ever worked with — James Mangold,” he said. “I loved the film, but it actually worked in reverse. It was pretty good critically, but the fact that it didn’t do a lot of box office, again it fomented the opinion that I had my moment and was going the way of the dodo bird and the Tasmanian tiger.”
Released in 1997, Cop Land features an impressive cast and a winning formula. It stars Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, and Stallone (among others) and follows the exploits of a group of Mob-connected NYPD officers who operate in a New Jersey town in order to avoid internal investigators. Stallone plays the half-deaf local sheriff who helps protect the crooked cops even as they pick on him. Slowly but surely, he has a change of heart.
Critics were largely positive about the film, though it isn’t a highlight of either Stallone’s career or Mangold’s solely because both of them have such impressive filmographies. While Stallone’s is pretty consistently stuck in the realm of the action genre, Mangold’s runs the gamut. His credits include 1999’s female-led drama Girl, Interrupted, the beloved 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, the critically acclaimed 2017 western-inspired comic book movie Logan, and the 2019 historical car racing drama Ford v Ferrari (also called Le Mans ‘66).
Despite this varied filmography, he’s only made 11 films. His next project is the hotly anticipated Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, which is notable for its similarity in genre to Walk the Line. In a career marked by variation, it’s an outlier. The main throughline to his work is that he finds humanity in every genre. Logan, for example, is one of the most emotionally complex and mature comic book movies out there.
Cop Land may not be Mangold’s most well-known film, but it had a similarly outsized role in his career as it did in Stallone’s. The production was marred by a contentious relationship with Miramax head Harvey Weinstein, and it helped shape him as a director. Speaking to Cinephilia & Beyond in 2017, he said, “The whole experience of leading that kind of an ensemble was a magnificent experience and really a kind of a trial by fire that when I got to the other side, I felt that I had gone to war or something”.
He added: “There was no way I would ever be the same. I wrote a script starring actors of this calibre and star power, and I survived the Weinsteins, that system, all of it. I was a much tougher, stronger person at the end. All those memories come back to me when I see the movie.”
