Over the years, Sylvester Stallone has consistently demonstrated his prowess in action movies, with First Blood emerging as the pinnacle of his action-oriented performances. Stallone believes that actors should embody their characters so well that they can use their body language to tell stories.
“That’s why I think First Blood is one of the first action films. I relied on body acting to tell the story,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “The character never talks, but you know exactly what’s going on through the other characters. They’re almost like narrators in his Greek tragedy.”
Sylvester Stallone says ‘Star Wars’ led to the end of body acting in action movies
Recently, the 77-year-old revealed in a discussion with Film Threat that the advent of technology, introduced in the George Lucas Star Wars franchise, affected the way in which action movies are produced. Stallone explained that action-film actors no longer felt the need to put in their best as technology could cover for them.
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“What I meant is that beginning with Star Wars, the industry began to revolutionize itself. Special effects and technology became extremely important and action films went from being Lawrence of Arabia to these extraordinary special effects events,” he shared. “It wasn’t really a prerequisite that he be a great actor anymore. The human emotion was being transformed into the technological explosion.”
Sylvester Stallone says ‘First Blood’ was his last movie that did not use special effects
Despite criticizing the new trend, the actor disclosed that aside from his first action movie, his subsequent productions have had a touch of special effects. “The last time I had done a film without this kind of gimmickry was First Blood in 1982,” he detailed. “After that, my career began to move away from what I think I do best, into something. . . it was completely out of my hands, and science took over. Now, I’m just trying to say, ‘Enough of science.”
The actor lamented that the special effects that were utilized in his 1995 film Judge Dredd cast a shadow over his portrayal. “Toward the end of making Judge Dredd, it really had nothing to do with me. It had to do with gimmickry. And that’s fine. There’s certainly a place for that kind of picture. But in those kinds of films, when you see the star in the first few minutes do something that is so extraordinarily inhuman — not possible — you sit back and you look at it the way you’d look at a David Copperfield illusion,” Stallone confessed. “At the end of the movie, you don’t walk out saying, ‘I was moved’ or ‘I was sad,’ or ‘I cried,’ but ‘How’d they do that?’ You intellectualize but you don’t emotionalize.”