The Hollywood Reporter has posted a lengthy article/interview with Sage Stallone, Sylvester’s son. I was only going to skim over it to see if there was anything half-interesting but found myself reading the entire article from start to finish. It’s filled with great anecdotes and reminicises about Stallone’s childhood forays into exploitation cinema and how those films informed his first attempt at directing.

After seeing and enjoying “Vic” recently I was happy to be able to catch up with Stallone to explore how he managed to get it made. ” ‘Vic’ came about when I was 16 years old, believe it or not,” he explained. “Around that time I was watching a lot of movies. I was a video junkie, a video-holic. I would go to the video stores and rent everything I could find that was pre-1980. So I started learning about older films and actors and so on. I’d watch these great movies and then somehow I worked my way into exploitation films. The same actors that I saw that were my heroes in these ’50s war movies and cowboy movies were in these (exploitation) movies for five minutes — getting beat up and killed.”

He also discusses the origins of his company, Grindhouse Releasing, and how his father disapproved of the subject matter for his first film. And hey, anyone that can namedrop Fellini and Fulci in the same breath has my complete attention.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Movies, Shorts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.