No Copping Out

Sylvester Stallone is having a problem with his waist.

It’s too trim. Too trim at least, for the shirt bagging up around his pants’ 31-inch waistline, as a photographer snaps the star and his latest director, James Mangold.

Stallone’s slim physique seems doubly miraculous for a man of 51: a year ago, he gained and lost nearly 40 pounds to play Freddy Heflin, a chubby, ineffectual sheriff in Mangold’s drama “Cop Land,” which opens Friday. It’s the follow-up to the director’s 1996 Sundance winner “Heavy”--and a project Stallone calls his own “rebirth.”

Question: Jim, was Stallone your idea?

Mangold: No, I think it was his agent, Arnold Rifkin. I’d be insane if, when I wrote it and I was starving, I imagined I’d be on a set in two years with Sylvester Stallone . . . and Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. I don’t write that way. It breaks the rule about selling a screenplay if you’re thinking about known stars.

Stallone: Jimmy was at the disadvantage of watching a great deal of my work, which is the antithesis of the character he was writing. It took great insight and foresight and pliability to say, let’s put him in an alien space, and eliminate what he’s used as an asset for 19 years.

Mangold: But I sensed from the moment we started talking a desire from him to try something different. I thought, here’s this guy who has so much “Freddy” in him. There’s an intense tenderness, sweetness and openness to Sly.

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Q: But putting on the weight was tough, right?

Stallone: Meeting with Jim I said, no problem, I’ve done this before. Well, I’d done it a little in “F*I*S*T” but mostly it was padding, and I was 30 years old! I didn’t realize how much of a crutch [my body] had been. It was like Batman’s suit, my armor.

The first 10 pounds I said, this is acceptable. Then, when I began to really go through a metamorphoses and lose any security I had, I started making excuses--before I was hardly introduced to people I’d say, “Uh, this isn’t the real me, I’m working on a movie, I’ll be back the way I was. . . .” [Mangold laughs] I wasn’t ready to play this part.

Usually I’ve been very cosmetic, exterior, because most action films are cosmetic. You don’t realize you have to give up all your crutches to learn how to act through your eyeballs. So Jim stayed on my case. He came down for a fitting and I thought I was huge, I thought I was Koko the Clown. . . .

Mangold: He’d put on a little baby fat! [Laughter]

Stallone: It was nothing! Finally when I realized I had to let it go, that was exhilarating.

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Q: I heard you let too much go in one scene that got cut.

Stallone [to Mangold]: You tell it.

Mangold: It was a scene early in the film. Freddy wakes up and rolls over in bed. . . .

Stallone: [shakes head] Woof!

Mangold: Sly’s gut fell out of his T-shirt, and we all went, Wow! That’s gonna be an amazing moment! But it became a moment that wasn’t about the movie, it was about a superstar gaining weight. For an audience, that moment was . . . Stallone . . . with a gut!

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Q: Good line for the poster.

Stallone [grins]: Yeah!

Mangold: We’ll put a single frame of it somewhere on the laser disc.

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Q: So what was the gain-weight diet?

Stallone: 100% carbohydrates. It’s called the forbidden diet! Bread pudding, rice pudding . . . the guaranteed-to-kill-you diet. There was a place in New York called the Canadian Pancake House that serves pancakes up to literally 12 pounds. . . .

Mangold: They’re the size of manhole covers and I’m not exaggerating.

Stallone: Throughout the film I continued to eat what I thought Freddy would eat--sweet things, adolescent food. Because he’s a man that has no aspirations. In Freddy’s house there aren’t many mirrors. He doesn’t like to look at himself, ever.

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Q: And you’re doing all this as you turn 50.

Stallone: I was at my birthday party in Miami about a week before filming and I felt like Freddy at my party. People didn’t understand I was doing the movie and they thought, OK, midlife crisis really came crashing down! The Dorian Gray syndrome had run its course!

But for me it was a perfect time. Not only was I 50 but it was the 20th anniversary of Rocky. The birth of my daughter. Everything came together.

And Jim [who’s 33] brings an unjaded enthusiasm that I have not really been privy to for 20 years. When you work with older people they tend to be wily, or hurt. . . . He’s about the film. Also being in the presence of such great actors, you’re forced through common sense and artistic competition to go to an unsafe place.

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Q: You grew up with an inferiority complex . . . how much of that kicked in working with De Niro and Keitel?

Stallone: All of it. I don’t think you ever shed that. All it takes is the confrontation or realization that you’re in the presence of greatness, and you begin to question your own talent. So the fear comes in--which fuels you to shore up these insecurities by filling yourself full of preparation. The fear of being an embarrassment to my fellow actors forced me to work harder. That’s where fear works in a positive way.

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Q: “Cop Land” feels like a mix of a ‘70s corrupt-cop movie and an old-fashioned western . . . the small town, the sheriff who stands up to the bad guys. . . .

Mangold: I wanted badly for the movie to feel iconic, like a Western. And with Sly I get a bigger-than-life quality, the hero-waiting-in-a-cocoon. I didn’t want the movie to be perceived as an expose on cop corruption. I wanted an old-time morality play with good guys and bad guys. The more the cast was iconic, the more they lifted you out of “This is a true story” being written at the front of the movie.

This is a fable about law and order. . . . “Once upon a time there was a town filled with cops. And in this town lived this man who wanted to be one but couldn’t.”

Stallone: The simplicity of it is what makes it so complex.

Mangold: You have sympathy for every side. Sly’s character is like all of us, caught in the middle . . . we’re seduced by the stick-to-your brother rhetoric of Harvey Keitel [as a crooked cop] . . . we’re wooed by the idealistic, this-is-the-Constitution rhetoric of Bob De Niro [an Internal Affairs investigator] . . . we’re wooed by the screw-everyone-but-myself cynicism of Ray Liotta’s character.

That was the inspiration for the movie, putting what I thought of as the real American male stuck between these persuasive voices, which produce a lot of our confusion in this country, because we believe in each one of the three.

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Q: Sly, at Cannes this year you didn’t just praise this film--you ripped apart most of your other films, including “Stop or My Mom Will Shoot.”

Stallone: That was off the cuff. How long can one deceive oneself? Especially when the movie has moved on and the passion has gotten cold, you see the lack of quality in the work. You start to analyze, why did you do this? You did it for all the wrong reasons.

What most of those projects didn’t have was a constant nurturing and reworking that this script had. The negative reactions were truly deserved.

Mangold: I’ve learned from this man, always tell the truth. No matter how much studios or agents amp it up, it’s me and you with a lens, and we’d better make something good.

Stallone: The end result rests on, if an actor is willing to say words and do actions and know they’re not right, he has to accept responsibility.

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Q: This last year, you’ve had plenty of drama in your personal life. Your daughter’s heart operation . . . the windshield of your plane to Cannes blowing out. . . .

Stallone: I know.

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Q: And Andrew Cunanan was trying to get to you?

Stallone: That’s true. I was at the golf course [in Key West] when federal agents contacted me. They wanted to borrow film that we shoot with our Planet Hollywood cameras, because he was in the crowd. He’d made his way down to Key West and he was inquiring about us.

They felt it was not a coincidence he was down there, except to act out his fantasies. Two hours later [after the agents called], I hear six helicopters above me. Three hundred yards away is where they found him.

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Q: Does that heighten fears for your safety?

Stallone [eyes cast down]: Yes. Yes. It . . . it does. People so frustrated with their lives, they’re willing to do something that bizarre . . . and there’s an abundant amount of these people. They’re not in short supply.

It does make you want [to retreat]. But it’s a transitory feeling.

I like people, so I will go right back to being accessible. I worry more about the people in my family than I do for myself.

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Q: Speaking of which, how’s your daughter?

Stallone: She’s great. She turns one this month. We had our complications with my wife [Jennifer Flavin suffered a miscarriage last month], but other than that, it’s a very optimistic time.

You know, this month my “Biography” [on A&E;] comes on, and I sat there dispassionately watching it, like an audience. People that knew me 30 years ago were talking about my childhood--which I’d thought was wonderful, and they’re talking about how horrible it was! I realized why when I saw [bodybuilder] Steve Reeves it was such an epiphany, because I had been discouraged as a young man in so many, many ways.

I didn’t have a healthy ego. Then after “Rocky,” when I was presented with a forum, I took it to abuse. All those years of suppressing . . . it came out with almost a vulgarity. A pompousness. People would say “I like Rocky, but I can’t stand Stallone.”

Then I saw toward the end of the hour, with [Sophia’s] birth and “Cop Land,” it arced into a calmer phase. Like a movie. I really haven’t enjoyed my life this well since . . . 1946! [Laughter] Since one minute before I was born, I haven’t been quite this content!

“Cop Land” opens Friday in general release.