I’m Peter Farrelly, I’m Peter Farrelly, and this is Anatomy of a Scene for my movie “I Play Rocky.” “Why didn’t you ask? Why didn’t you just ask me, kid?” “Look, I asked for your help, but you never heard nothing!” “I Play Rocky” is about the making of the original “Rocky” in 1975. This is the scene when Rocky is having it out with Mickey, the boxing coach. We wanted to do some scenes exactly the way they did it in “Rocky,” but we’re showing it being shot from a different angle, from the perspective of the crew of making “Rocky.” Anthony Ippolito, who plays Rocky and plays Stallone in the movie, he opened the door and just chased after Mickey. “OK, cut.” John Avildsen, the director of “Rocky,” played by Jay Duplass, stopped him and said, “Why are you chasing him?” “It doesn’t make any sense, OK? You’ve been fighting with him the whole movie. He leaves. Suddenly you just change your mind and you go running after him?” He made a really interesting note that every movie has a moment — he called it “the thing” — takes a movie from good to great or great to phenomenal. “Tell me what it is, and I’ll fix it. We can do it.” “I don’t know — I need to believe you, when you go out there and you get him and you say, OK, now you can be a part of my team. Why? Why now? I’m not buying it. You need to figure it out.” “What’s going on?” AnnaSophia Robb is playing his girlfriend and then wife, Sasha, who’s, like, the heart and soul of the movie, and she understands him. “What couldn’t you put on the page?” “I don’t know. What are you talking about?” “Who never gave you a chance?” Let’s pause here. She’s talking about his dad. She’s saying, “Who never gave you a chance?” We were just in the editing room talking about, “Do we go back on him now and see him get it?” Like, “Oh yeah, my father.” Or do we not? And we didn’t. We went right from here to go ahead to his back — we never went back to him — and then, he’s like, “Let it rip.” “Just roll the camera and take it from when Mickey leaves.” “OK. Action!” “Took you long enough to get here. Ten years, you don’t come to my house, huh? What’s the matter? You don’t like my house? Does my house stink? That’s right — it stinks!” Big deal. You want to fight the fight? Yeah, I’ll fight the big fight. I’m gonna go and fight that big fight. You know what’s gonna happen to me? I’m gonna get that! I’m gonna get that!” This isn’t the scene people talk about ever. He lets everything unload in a very organic way that’s not scripted. And when he wrote the script, he knew that Mickey represents his dad. And he got it out when he did this scene. “And you come around here. You want to move in here with me? Come on in! It’s a nice house!” This movie is about the difficulty that Sylvester Stallone had getting “Rocky” made. And a lot of people forget, but he wrote the screenplay. And people read the screenplay — they’re like, this is amazing, here, 20 grand, go away. And he said, no, no, no, I play Rocky. What are you talking about? No, you’re not playing. It’s going to be a movie star. It’s going to be Burt Reynolds or, you know, Ryan O’Neal. He goes, no. They finally get to 365, they offered him, which is the equivalent of $2.2 million today. And he didn’t take it. And that’s the beauty of this story. It’s like, it is its own Rocky story. All the things that he’s going through in “Rocky” is what Stallone was going through, and the fact that he stuck with it, didn’t break, and it turned into one of the all-time great movies — that’s a story. “OK, cut! You know what that was?”
