Stallone On Making “Rocky”

People really like having something to root for. 

Anger and rooting against something works too, but only to a degree. What we really love is an underdog we can get behind.  

Sylvester Stallone wasn’t getting any major roles before he wrote and acted in Rocky. His idea for the movie centered around how all of the movies coming out at the time were so negative. 

They were focused on what people were cheering against. He wanted to make something people could cheer for. 

His explanation (quote and video below) is an inspiration. It’s about taking a shot. It’s about encouraging others to take their shot. It’s about how when we have something to get behind, the negativity and pessimism around everything else can fade into the background, even if only for a brief moment. 

But I felt that, jeez, if I was gonna go down – at least into professional obscurity – I wanted to at least have had the opportunity to say to myself, “You tried. You put your best foot forward, and you didn’t make it. So that’s what, I guess you might say, provoked me into writing the script. Because it wasn’t something that I had given a lot of thought to, I just knew that I had to do it one time.