FIRST BLOOD
It cemented Stallone as a superstar and invented the one-man-army action movies that would come to dominate ’80s Hollywood. It paved the way for Schwarzenegger, Van Damme and Willis, as well as Neeson, The Rock and Diesel. Total Film discovers the brains
November 1981, deep in the woodland that surrounds the town of Hope, British Columbia. It is three weeks into a six-week shoot, and the 100-strong crew are holding their breath as two stuntmen and the movie’s star, Sylvester Stallone, prepare to enact First Blood’s most memorable set-piece. In the movie, itinerant Vietnam vet John Rambo (Stallone) has escaped arrest and fled into the kind of untamed country he so excelled in during the war. Chased by Sheriff Teasle’s (Brian Dennehy) men and a pack of baying dogs, Rambo stands at the edge of a stony cliff, overlooking the teeming Coquihalla River.
Canadian director Ted Kotcheff and his crew hide in the treeline 50 yards back, the fierce wind necessitating they tie themselves to tree trunks. Stallone, meanwhile, slips and slides on the wet moss at the very brink of the gorge, his only protection a length of rope bound to an ankle. He lowers himself over the edge, clinging to the sheer face by his fingertips as showers of scree tumble 150ft and squibs detonate all about, ricocheting into Stallone’s eyes. A deputy is hanging out of a chopper, taking pot shots. And then… Rambo pushes off and plummets 30 or 40 feet into a row of towering evergreens, with stuntman Buddy Joe Hooker performing the crazed leap before Kotcheff cuts to a second stuntman tumbling branch to branch through the trees, and Stallone taking over for the final drop onto a wide bough just above ground level.
“He wanted to do that final fall,” Kotcheff tells Total Film 33 years on from the shoot. “I said, ‘Please don’t, Sylvester,’ but he said, ‘Ted, let me do it,’ and he jumped off a branch and fell six feet to land on a very thick pine branch that did not give at all. He let out this incredible scream of pain. His face was right in camera – it’s a great shot! – and then he slipped off the branch and fell to the ground. He’d cracked four ribs. But he kept on filming, never complained – he was a real trouper.”
Stallone was making 1981 movie Nighthawks when he was approached about playing Rambo in First Blood. Based on David Morrell’s 1972 novel of the same name, the project had been knocking around Hollywood for eight years, the rights passing from Columbia Pictures to Warner Bros to Orion and finally picked up by Andrew G. Vajna and Mario Kassar, a pair of film distributors who sought to become producers. “At first, I thought it was a disastrous idea,” remembers Stallone
on the commentary track of the 2004 Ultimate Edition DVD. “Just about every viable leading man in Hollywood had passed on it, and about a half dozen directors.”
He’s not exaggerating. First Blood had worked through 18 screenplays and the character of Rambo had been linked to Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, John Travolta, Dustin Hoffman, Ryan O’Neal, Nick Nolte, Kris Kristofferson and James Garner; some passed because they considered the film too violent, others because the Vietnam War was too fresh. Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall had rejected the role of Sheriff Teasle, a Korean vet who makes things painfully personal with Rambo, and Lee Marvin had turned down the part of Trautman, the no-nonsense army colonel who once trained Rambo and now turns up to stop him. With the benefit of hindsight, Stallone seems like an obvious choice, but in 1981 he was considered a huge risk.
“I worked on that script for a long time,” Kotcheff says, “and finally the producer said, ‘Who do you want to play it?’ And I said, ‘One guy I’d really love to play it is Sylvester Stallone.’ And the producer went, ‘Er… He only works in Rocky.’ He’d done four other films at that time and they’d all flopped. The perceived wisdom in Hollywood was Stallone only works in Rocky. I said, ‘I don’t give a damn.’ So I sent it to him. The next morning he phoned me up and said, ‘I love the script. I want to do it’.”
Not that Stallone didn’t have his reservations. He now jokes that his prime incentive for taking First Blood was the “very, very lucrative fee”, but right up to the start of the shoot he worried that it might put a bullet between the eyes of his career. “I was having dinner at Burt Reynolds’ house and he said, ‘Even if the movie dies and you’re good in it, it doesn’t matter.’ I said, ‘Burt, that’s about the worst advice I’ve ever had, but thanks anyway’.”
Before shooting began in and around the town of Hope (a mill town where everyone had been laid off, it didn’t live up to its name – the locals often fought with the crew), Stallone revised the script. For starters he toned down the violence,
‘Sly cracked four ribs, but he kept on filming’
TED Kotcheff
reducing Rambo’s tally of kills from 16 to zero (the one death in the film is not his doing, as the deputy who fires from the helicopter falls onto the rocks below). He also changed the ending, choosing that Rambo should survive and penning a climactic mumble-monologue as all of his locked up rage and persecution finally spills out.
But a malleable script was the least of the film’s problems. The day before shooting began, Kirk Douglas, cast as Trautman, turned up with his own copious edits, a set of notes that reportedly re-envisioned the colonel as someone who morphs into Rambo 2.0 and finishes the movie with his own headband in place. Advised that this overhaul was not about to happen, he exited the project to be replaced by Richard Crenna at a day’s notice. (Stallone remembers how Crenna had been playing a gay doctor in a TV show. Making his big entrance in the film, he delivered his “I made him” line in, as the star puts it, an “effete voice”, and had to be advised to adopt a baritone.)
The shoot was a nightmare. Fog frequently interrupted filming while daylight leaked away at 2.30pm. Andrew Laszlo, DOP, opted to make the most of the conditions by employing only natural light in order to present a grey-blue palette that was murky and moist. Not that he could do anything about the hazardous terrain, with Kotcheff recalling, “The floor of the woods was three feet deep with fallen trees and branches, so as you walked along you’d sink down. [ Crew members suffered broken ankles and snapped fingers]. And the river banks would collapse. We all had to tie ourselves with ropes to trees, in case it gave way. When it gave, it was like an atomic bomb going off, rocks falling down into the canyon. It was freezing and rained all the time… which was terrific because you got the sense of discomfort.”
It wasn’t until the shoot began that Stallone hit upon how he should play Rambo: “Incredibly guarded but very childlike, almost nebbish, a non-physical creature,” he has noted. “He’s a modern-day Frankenstein creature, created by the American military. It escapes and, like the Frankenstein monster, just wants to be absorbed into society.” Cast out of Hope, spurned by society, this alienated man-child with his hooded eyes and hangdog face reverts to a killing machine. And if Stallone ever wanted any first-hand advice on how such a rebuff felt, he need only talk to his co-star.
“Dennehy was a Vietnam veteran,” says Kotcheff. “The last day he was [ in Vietnam], he was in a big gunfight. Then the light came and they said, ‘OK, Dennehy, you’re done, go back to America.’ The plane landed at San Francisco at midnight and they dumped him out on the street. Within 18 hours he’d gone from this massive shootout with the Viet Cong, seeing the bodies of his friends, to being dumped on the street. No bands welcoming him, no one there.” [ Dennehy did serve as a marine but his involvement in the Vietnam War has since been called into question.]
But as much as First Blood is a Vietnam movie – Kotcheff received letters of thanks from Veteran organisations for verbalising their plight – it’s also a seminal action film, with its huge weaponry, death-defying set-pieces and fabulous stunt work pushing the genre to new limits. Many of the enduring action sequences were performed by Stallone himself, with the actor streamlining his bulging Rocky II physique to 164lbs of lean muscle to better hurtle a motorbike through icy streets, and to leap from trees onto a speeding army truck. Consulting a Navy SEAL over a scene in which Rambo fights his way out of the police station, Stallone used only practical fighting techniques, more animal than martial arts, and in so doing kicked Dennehy six feet across a room and laid out three actors, one with a broken nose (“These things happen,” said Stallone after the incident.) Dennehy, by no means a small man, was in the wars again when Teasle had to crash through a skylight and drop eight feet onto a desk. As with the stunt when Rambo falls through the trees, Kotcheff cut from a stuntman performing the initial fall to the actor making impact. Dennehy did indeed drop eight feet onto a desk, and was rewarded for his dedication with a broken rib.
Meanwhile, a scene where Rambo is dropped by a billy club to the back of the knees was filmed 14 times, bruising Stallone significantly, and the fire hose that’s cruelly turned upon him was so fierce it tore off the fake scar tissue on his back and chest – the make-up team needed two hours to reapply it each time.
Worst of all, though, was the set-piece in which Rambo escapes the National Guard by navigating a network of subterranean tunnels choked with freezing water and hundreds of rats. “We shot in these real underground caves,” Kotcheff explains. “Sylvester was up to his waist in icy water. I said, ‘How much are we paying you?’ And he said $2m, or whatever it was. I said, ‘No, you’re doing the picture for free – here is where you earn the $2m.’ The rats were terrified of the icy water, so what happened is they dug their claws into his bare flesh. As he ripped them out, he lost chunks of flesh.”
This was pre-CGI, so Stallone was required to “outrun” a real explosion that blows through the
‘He’s a modern Frankenstein. He just wants to be accepted’
sylvester stallone
tunnels when the National Guard let fly, while the climactic scenes in the town of Hope saw the crew really blow up a gas station. Now, of course, we’re used to seeing entire cities destroyed in the summer’s event movies, but as Stallone rightly points out, back then “it was massive”, and clearly laid down a gauntlet for the likes of Schwarzenegger and Willis to respond to. Rambo, of course, finishes the film by shredding the police station with an M60 strapped to his chest – he has literally become a walking weapon, for M60s weigh 30lbs and require a tripod to hold them.
And yet all of this new-level action and machismo was almost undercut by a single incident. Concerned that Stallone planned to leap onto the back of a wild boar to establish Rambo’s hunting credentials, the filmmakers suggested they change the creature to something a little less perilous. A deer, perhaps, or maybe a rabbit. Fortunately the star waved away such foolish interference, spitting, “Rambo can’t be bit by a jackrabbit.” Viewers were thus spared the embarrassment of watching a highly trained killer tussling to the death with a bunny, and instead treated to Rambo riding rodeo on a 600lb honking beast as it crashed through the woods. Taking its theatrical bow on 22 October 1982,
First Blood took more than $6.5m in its opening weekend – an October record at the time – and went on to net $125m from a $15m budget to become the 13th highest grossing film of 1982. The reviews were mixed, with Roger Ebert dismissing the final scenes but saying “First Blood is a very good movie, well-paced and well-acted”, and Variety sniffing, “Director Ted Kotcheff has all sorts of trouble with this mess.” A hit on VHS in the medium’s early days, First Blood’s fan base and reputation escalated over the years, with most critics now considering it a superior action movie with socio-political heft.
In the 32 intervening years since its release there have been three sequels with a fourth, Rambo:
Last Stand, in development, though the original movie is considered by far the most accomplished of the franchise. The second entry, Rambo: First
Blood Part II (1985), was the biggest commercial hit, taking more than $300m worldwide as it sent Rambo back to ’Nam to retrieve missing prisoners of war. With Rambo growing his muscles and his body count (67) in this pumpedup sequel, Kotcheff wanted no part of it.
“I had the right to do the sequel, but I read the script and said, ‘I’m not going to do this. My film is against the war, and you’re having a jingoistic celebration of the war. You’re turning my first film upside down. This is against everything I was trying to say’,” he remembers. “They prevailed upon me to do it, but I didn’t, because of all the killings.”
Stallone disagrees, insisting Rambo was, is and always will be against the military, contending people misread the character in the sequels when he came to personify Reagan’s right-wing foreign policy. “Reagan said, ‘After seeing Rambo, I know what to do with Libya’,” Stallone has said, incredulous. “I was like, ‘Oh God…’”
Whatever your take on the sequels, First Blood stands up. It is the missing link between Vietnam movies such as Coming Home and The Deer Hunter (both 1978) and the late ’80s wave that began with Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning Platoon, and there can be no doubting that it was a gamechanging action movie. With The Expendables 3 currently on the horizon, Stallone calls First Blood “the best action movie I’ve ever done”, and such is its place in popular culture that a steady stream of pilgrims continue to visit the town of Hope, where the Chamber of Commerce provide tours of the film’s locations. You can even take a helicopter ride over the gorge where that famous leap took place – just be careful not to fall out and smash your head on the rocks…
First Blood is available on DVD and Blu-ray, separately or as part of the Ultimate Rambo Collection.