Sylvester Stallone on selling out

NEWS RELEASE

NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE

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"I kept saying 'I'm more than Rocky' But the truth
is, I'm not. I wish I were half of who he is."

NEW YORK, Dec. 10 - When Sylvester Stallone announced that 16 years after Rocky V he was returning to the ring to film Rocky Balboa, the sixth and final installment of the franchise, the consensus in Hollywood was that Stallone was grasping at faded glory.

"A lot of people said, 'Just sit down, don't embarrass yourself.' There is this incredible resistance to anyone who seems to want a second shot: 'You had your moment, now f--- off'," he tells senior writer Sean Smith in Newsweek's December 18 issue (on newsstands Monday, December 11).

"I have things I truly regret," Stallone says. "I had, on occasion, sold out. But don't I get the chance to recover?"

Undeniably, Rocky has been a mixed blessing for Stallone - a creation so powerful that it overshadows its creator. "To fight it was almost an arrogance, and it was off-putting to the public," Stallone tells Newsweek.

"I kept saying, 'I'm more than Rocky,' but the truth is, I'm not. I wish I were half of who he is. I was foolish. Rocky is one of the most honest things I have ever done."

When Rocky was released 30 years ago, it was a scrappy, low-budget movie that became a sensation.

Rocky earned $117 million and was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won best picture. "It was so much, so soon, and it kind of distorted everything," he says now. "Where do you go from there? You become, in a sense, a brand. It's a good thing, but if you wanted to be a character actor, that's over."

Over the years, Stallone often complained that he wasn't being allowed to grow beyond the Rocky movies.

Still, he kept making them.

Then Rocky V, featuring a bankrupt Balboa, flopped.

"It was my fault," he says. "Everything in it was dark and dismal. People came to that movie for uplift and I took them into a mine shaft and turned out the lights."

"It nags me that I took the easy way instead of the high road," Stallone tells Newsweek. "But everyone makes mistakes. I look around at people my age, and I can see it in their eyes - a kind of bittersweet reflection: 'I didn't live the life that I wanted, and now I've got all this stuff I want to say, but nobody wants to hear it.' I was feeling that, and if you don't get it out, it can become a beast that tears you apart."

Read the entire article at Newsweek.com

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