Laying down the law

By Michael HorowitzSummer Bruin Staff

Judge Dredd, and his companion Fergie, have been captured by a
cannibalistic family of desert nomads. Strung up to await their
fate, the pair dangle in mid-air, suspended by rope coiled around
their wrists.

Rob Schneider, the comedian starring as Fergie opposite
Sylvester Stallone’s Dredd, wears an expression of pain as he
recalls filming the scene. "We were hanging from ropes for a week
and a half," he says, shaking his head. "Very painful. There’s no
meat to hang on here." He holds up his skinny wrists to drive the
point home.

But then Schneider turns to his partner, the world’s foremost
action hero.

"Sly’s like ‘I do one of these every picture,’" Schneider
relates in perfect Slyspeak. "’Whatever. Piano wire,
whatever.’"

Stallone has been hanging in there for years, from his
Oscar-winning Rocky to his critically reviled Rocky V, from his
mega-successful turns as Rambo to his unsuccessful foray into
comedy with Oscar. The success of his last three actioners have
built back the invincible sheen that once coated the Italian
Stallion, and after a Savoy Pictures deal guaranteed him a whopping
$20 million for an as yet unwritten film, he stands as the world’s
highest paid film star.

Watching Schneider do Stallone is amusing, but hardly
knee-slapping. People have been doing it for years. Watching
Stallone do Stallone is far more hilarious.

"I am the law!" Stallone monotones, parodying Judge Dredd’s
single-minded devotion to the judicial system he represents. By
stepping into the persona and then back out to deliver an
intriguing and articulate interview, Stallone casts off his
reputation as an action meathead. He overlooks the Marina Del Rey
harbor from the Ritz Carlton as he talks to The Bruin about his new
film, his genre and his past.

Stallone says he’s never understood the animosity many critics
have toward the action genre. "Action films support this business,"
he says. "Without the action performers or directors, you wouldn’t
be here right now. I wouldn’t be here right now. This would be like
French cinema. We’d all be sitting here talking about eating toast.
That’s all we could afford. We’d have Dinner at Andre’s 14: Dessert
at Andre’s."

For Stallone, Dredd marks another move of confidence, for
despite anything critics say, he has a collection of die-hard
action fans that will turn up opening day. "I find that films that
deal with extreme hardship, they seem to be the best-(loved)," he
says. "I don’t know why people like to see me suffer. If an action
film is done locally, they don’t care. I have to go up a mountain
or desert or forest or jungle or freezing cold or underwater!"

He’s found that as long as he stays within the realm of the
genre, his films are a safe bet. "If you stay with that, it works,"
Stallone says. "The only scary thing is when you’re coming back,
and you do an action film and it dies. And that’s your ace card.
You just hit someone with your best punch and he just smiled at
you!"

It remains to be seen if Dredd is one of Stallone’s best
punches, but he doesn’t seem very concerned either way. "Everything
is going along fine," he says. "Every once in a while you have your
speedbumps, and any actor in the public eye is going to have
tremendous peaks and valleys."

While Stallone has made too many movies to comment on each, he
feels that his best work thus far has been in Nighthawks, First
Blood and Rocky. "They’re all good, solid films," he says, "that
I’ll be remembered for over Cobra and Over the Top."

He’s not one to defend his misses, slamming his failures with
words his worst critics might avoid. "The only movie I really,
truly despise is Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot!" he says, laughing. "I
cannot watch this movie. I absolutely get nauseous! It’s like that
scene in Clockwork Orange were he’s exposed to all those
films."

For Stallone, the experience on Stop! was one of restraint. Long
known within the industry as difficult to work with, he tried to do
his job without telling others how to do theirs. "I wanted to show
that I could work with other people and not comment," he says.
"It’s like being an airline pilot and you’re a passenger and the
plane is going down in flames."

He knocks on the table as if banging on the cockpit door.
"’Could I be of some help in there?’"

The answer he received from the filmmakers was "’No, sit back
and watch us crash.’"

Apparently some of the same tension occurred on the set of
Dredd, where first-time director Danny Cannon and others on the
production team wanted to focus more on the story of the 22nd
century hero and less on the mega-city he inhabits. Stallone says
he would have liked to show the filmgoer more of this world.

"There was nothing easy about making this movie," says Stallone.
"Everything was difficult. You have the responsibility of
maintaining the integrity of a character 25 years in the making,
then you’ve got the problem of trying to make it more cinematic
because the character was so one-sided that there’s no way you
could sustain that for a couple hours. And then, you’ve got to bite
the bullet sometimes when you see the film going in a certain
direction you don’t like, you can’t sit there and impose yourself
the whole time, so that’s a problem."

Stallone also wanted more of Judge Dredd’s peculiar brand of
justice, the very rigid one-sided character trait that others were
attempting to dispel. "He’s so hard-core, he’s so unforgiving and
he’s so inflexible, that’s what makes it sickening," smiles
Stallone. "For example, if a woman’s being attacked, he arrests the
attacker, gives her two years and then gives her a year in prison
for being in the wrong location five minutes past curfew!"

After the woman protests, Dredd ends up giving her more years
behind bars than her attacker. "He keeps going and going and
going!" Says Stallone. "It was that irony that I wanted to
keep."

Perhaps future projects will give Stallone more control.
Although he hasn’t written for films in years, he is finishing two
screenplays presently. The star Rob Schneider calls the "John Wayne
of the era," is also interested in directing again. Observing
Richard Donner’s craft on the set of his recent film Assassins has
Stallone excited anew about the job. "When you see Dick Donner
direct, you miss the process a little bit," he says.

Stallone says that despite the massive commitment, directing’s
power is worth the struggle. "The director’s there, he’s a hawk,
he’s God," he says. "He’s creating a two-hour reality in his own
universe."

He’s amazed when directors coordinate the "light god," the
"sound god" and others to create a masterwork. "When you see films
that all come together," he says, "it’s a miracle. Because you have
three hundred people working together on one canvas."

Laying down the law

Sylvester Stallone is back to the genre he knows best-action. In
‘Judge Dredd,’ he doesn’t just enforce the law, he is the law.