A lot was riding on the $70 million mountaineering thriller Cliffhanger. Sylvester Stallone’s previous two films, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot and Oscar, were attempts at comedy — both flopped. “It really bothers me,” Stallone told me, ten thousand feet up in the Italian Dolomites. “Humour is my survival mechanism. It keeps me loose and it keeps the crew happy. But when I try to do these films, either it’s my shortcomings or the production itself, but it just never comes off. Arnold (Schwarzenegger) got away with it in Twins, but once you make your reputation as a so-called he-man, it’s really hard for people to accept you with your clothes on.”
At work, he was surprisingly humorous. His co-star, Janine Turner, was the main butt of his jokes. “I can’t work with this mendacious vixen,” Stallone would cry. “Gimme colour! Gimme a rainbow! I think your jacket should be on fire to give it intensity.” All this is funnier when you consider Turner’s background. “Well, for me, I need much more time to stay in my element,” she said. “I studied for four years in New York with a Method coach, basically using smells and emotional recall. Sylvester works in an entirely different way than I do.” In the breaks Turner stayed concentrated, while Stallone practised his golf. “When I get bored,” he explained, “I write these stupid monologues. I mix a little Shakespeare, such as ‘ingratitude, thou marble-headed fiend, more hideous when thou showst thee in a child than duh sea monster’, with my own pretend version of Ionesco, Beckett or Harold Pinter. It just passes the time.”
It was a major operation to get the wind machines, generators, snowmobiles, cameras and cranes up the mountain. Guns would fire only once at this altitude, and explosions had to be done in the studio because of the danger of avalanches.
The director, Renny Harlin, had a grip on his star. “It’s my movie and I want it to be what I want it to be. I think with Rambo he achieved a larger-than-life status that doesn’t work now. My aim is to play him the way he was in the first Rocky film,” Harlin said. Stallone concurred. “In action films I’ve found the less joking I do the better. This is like doing a film that is half dramatic and half Nat ional Geographic. What I love in most stories is redemption, like here.” Oh, and he doesn’t like heights or boxing.
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BRIAN CASE
Cliffhanger, Saturday, ITV1, 10.25pm