Rambo 2 Cameraman Talks Working With 1980’s Stallone

The legendary film maker Jack Cardiff had many movies under his belt and not just as a director.  He was also the cinematographer/cameraman for Rambo: First Blood Part 2 in 1985.  This was when Sylvester Stallone was at his peak and probably somewhat unsurprisingly, had a bit of an ego too.

In the booklet Conversations With Jack Cardiff, the man spoke on working with Stallone.

Stallone wasn’t someone who you could take very seriously, although he wasn’t a very serious person.  He didn’t have a particularly happy personality, he was always very quiet and reserved, but just like Schwarzenegger he would train, spending an hour or more each morning doing his exercises before he came on set.

He would go to his trailer to get made up and when he came out he had his own make-up man, hairdresser, costume expert, secretary and a hood [bodyguard].  A whole train would come out of this huge trailer.  He would come on and do one take and go over to the television set next to the camera, where they would play it back for him.  He would just say, ‘let’s do it again’, his word was law, it was like God.

I know on one occasion I was lighting a scene and he said to me, ‘shouldn’t that key light be higher?’.  And I told him it was fine.  I went up to him afterwards and said, ‘Look, don’t ever tell me where to put the lights’.  And he never mentioned it after that.

I’m not really surprised, Stallone was rapidly approaching Elvis territory for an actor, I’m sure the man was paranoid as fuck, with a head not totally all there…