Sylvester Stallone talks about his classic 1976 hit ‘Rocky’ at TIFF

Sylvester Stallone, when he was 12 years old, claims that watching the 1958 Steve Reeves-starring adventure fantasy film Hercules transformed his life.

“I was very lucky, in the golden age of films, when dialogue was important. But the dialogue didn’t move me as much as the actual physical embodiment of overcoming odds,” Stallone said of films that draw on ancient legend during an in-depth interview at the Toronto Film Festival on Friday afternoon.

He also drew inspiration from comic novels when imagining himself as an action hero. “Coming to the rescue, not so much as a superhero, just as a guy who was forced to,” Stallone said of early artistic inspirations.

In order to do more than just accept tickets at the turnstile, he even mentioned taking a job as an usher in a movie theater after graduation. He received training in filmmaking.

“Watching those films over and over and over, you get to see the magic. You realize, here comes that scene again. And then I said, I can do better than that. And then I realized I couldn’t, okay,” Stallone recalled.

Nevertheless, he persisted and used his work as an usher at the cinema and screenwriting 101.

“I just wrote about what I knew. I was writing about this little kind of mentally challenged guy who happened to have a lot of heart,” Stallone said of his early Rocky Balboa character as it came into shape in his mind and on the page.