RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II Behind The Scenes #3 (1985)

I wish I did it in Thailand, actually. My first choice for me, personally, was in Thailand. We went up to Chiang Mai, northern Thailand, and it was beautiful and stunning, but so difficult to work up in those jungles, you know? So somebody says, why don't we go to Mexico? So we all went to Mexico to look. I said, Acapulco has good jungles. I look and say, Acapulco has good jungles. It's all nightclubs, you know? So right into behind Acapulco on the beach, it's all jungles. So like half an hour from the hotel, you find everything. So my thing was how to find the more interesting jungle, the boulders, the rivers, the waterfall, to give it a variety, and try to make it as Vietnamese as possible. We even built a rice paddy and started growing rice to have it ready for the film, because to give it the idea that you're in Asia. I said, I want the water buffalo to prove that I'm in Asia. We couldn't. They tried the cow. They put phony things. It's a joke. Mexico presented a lot of problems because of the logistics, number one. We've been through every realistic thing in the world, like mud. Heat. The long hours. Snakes, like yesterday. I was about three snakes. You get trashes. Salome would get very mad at me, because I had the ability to stand there in my wool uniform and not sweat. He says, how do you do that? And I said, I won't allow myself to sweat. I think I went into a Zen mode. All of Acapulco got so flooded that nobody could get to the sets, and it took us a week to clean up the mess. As I wake up, there's five Mexican guys over my bed. I say, what's the matter? What's the matter? And I look up, and the bed is in one foot of water. In the middle of the scene, you see a scorpion going up your leg, and you say, wait a minute, do you have an actor's guilt card? And because of the political situation, mainly having to do with permits and being able to get certain equipment into the country. We had the helicopters waiting in Texas, ready to come into Mexico. They said no. So we had to grease a lot of bombs and things to bring these bloody helicopters in. We're using a Mexican Air Force hangar, and there's a captain there, and he said, the general wants you to have a drink with him and Mr. Stallone. I explained to him that we can't do that today because we're filming right now, and Mr. Stallone isn't here. And he said, no, you must go now, or we won't have no more electricity. So we went over and had some drinks with him, and then we could shoot, should do anything we wanted to, you know. And we had this huge Buddha made out of Styrofoam, and he wanted that Buddha. And I said, you can have the Buddha, but you've got to wait till the picture's over. After that, everything was fine. You know, thousands of people go to Acapulco every year for vacation, so as an actor, you can't really complain when you go there to work. There were a few nights out where we took the Slymobile out. You know, he became like the unofficial mayor of Acapulco. I don't think we stopped dancing until 2 or 3 in the morning, and Stallone keeps a grueling schedule because he's up in the morning, and he works out every day without fail and every evening. And I have to say, it's probably one of the few movies I've done where the guy looks better than the girl. When I first met him, he probably weighed 185 pounds. That guy remolded his entire body. I've never seen anybody do that. I mean, you can't imagine what he put himself through. We'd get up at 5 o'clock in the morning. He would go and work out on heavy weights, free weights, doing all kinds of exercises. We'd finish the day's work, a very hard day's work. He'd go back to the gym again and work out again. You are strong, very strong. It was about 8 months of training, 4 hours a day, toughening myself up. The SWAT combat courses, the archery courses, the survivalist courses. I think the man is nuts because he's given himself things to do in this picture that nobody should ask of themselves. He worked his butt off in that movie. He went into diseased water, mud. He dragged himself. The technical advisors on this show, the men that have actually been through the tours of duty, keep me honest. Keep the story honest. Yeah! Dead center, how about it? In the movie, we take shots as far away as 185, 190 feet. We got lucky on a couple of them. Sly did have another note when he saw the picture. I remember he called it arrow fly time. And it was the amount of time it would take for the arrow to go from the bow to its target. And he had me kind of lengthen, whereas I had cut Sly, let him go, and maybe got cut away. He wanted me to hold it a beat, and then hold the next shot a beat. It kind of worked. It's the old arrow fly time. Arrow fly time, that's what he said. They're both very good editors. But the only thing, I like to smoke a cigar now and then, and he hates smoke. So I had a problem, I had to leave the room and all that. And we used to joke about it because there was always a pile of cigarette butts outside the door. Right. Just a pile that high. The director of photography was Jack Cardiff. I remember when I was on location and I was actually working with him, we'd be talking about stuff, and I was pinching myself. I'm working on a movie with Jack Cardiff. This is the man who shot The Red Shoes. What a great cinematographer. When you do an action movie, you have to make it different and original. And we had to invent actions going through the movie, so I started thinking, how is he going to kill more Russians today or more bad guys today? They had a maiming montage, if you will, in the first picture. It seemed to work, so they put one in the second. He kills this guy, he kills this guy, he kills this guy. And we do it fast, and the audience responds like, whoa, you know? They really responded when he's covered in mud and you rack focus to the eye, and the whole audience always went, oh, cool. So you had to think all the time how you're going to do all those action scenes, which were all different. Most of the special effects were actually shot or created through the editing.