You see, while I already posted those video interviews, I got to do those due to my partnership with the Brazilian website Omelete. However, earlier in the same day, I also got to participate in a mini press conference with Sylvester Stallone. Since the Q & A turned out so great, I wanted to let you all read it as well.

And like I said when I posted the clips and other interviews, I had to sign an embargo so I can’t tell you my thoughts on the film. It’s weird that I had to sign it…cause they really shouldn’t be worried.

Anyway, since I want to be careful what I say about the movie, here’s the official synopsis followed by the interview. I was also able to participate in interviews with Graham McTavish and Matthew Marsden as well as Julie Benz. So just click on their names to listen to the MP3's. Finally, if you'd like to listen to Sly instead of reading it....just click here.

Twenty years after the last film in the series, John Rambo (SYLVESTER STALLONE) has retreated to northern Thailand, where he's running a longboat on the Salween River.  On the nearby Thai-Burma (Myanmar) border, the world's longest-running civil war, the Burmese-Karen conflict, rages into its 60th year.  But Rambo, who lives a solitary, simple life in the mountains and jungles fishing and catching poisonous snakes to sell, has long given up fighting, even as medics, mercenaries, rebels and peace workers pass by on their way to the war-torn region.

That all changes when a group of human rights missionaries search out the "American river guide" John Rambo.  When Sarah (JULIE BENZ) and Michael Bennett (PAUL SCHULZE) approach him, they explain that since last year's trek to the refugee camps, the Burmese military has laid landmines along the road, making it too dangerous for overland travel.  They ask Rambo to guide them up the Salween and drop them off, so they can deliver medical supplies and food to the Karen tribe.  After initially refusing to cross into Burma, Rambo takes them, dropping off Sarah, Michael and the aid workers... 

Less than two weeks later, pastor Arthur Marsh (KEN HOWARD) finds Rambo and tells him the aid workers did not return and the embassies have not helped locate them.  He tells Rambo he's mortgaged his home and raised money from his congregation to hire mercenaries to get the missionaries, who are being held captive by the Burmese army.  Although the United States military trained him to be a lethal super soldier in Vietnam, decades later Rambo's reluctance for violence and conflict are palpable, his scars faded, yet visible.  However, the lone warrior knows what he must do...

 

Question: What happened to the shot where you punch the guy's head off?

Sylvester Stallone: I know, that's an optical confusion. What it was was the knife and it was such a bad print, it looked like I punched his head off. No, that's the shot, absolutely. I kept reading blogs and said, "Guys, look closely. No one can punch someone's head off."

Q: Do you ever imagine a world where you shot the ending of the book First Blood and didn't have Rambo with you all these years?

Q: Did you have to go back and rewatch the previous Rambo’s to get back into character?

SS: Yeah, you know kind of just the ponderousness that comes with aging, the sense of weight, the sense of knowledge, knowing too much, the lack of naivete which happened in my life, sort of set the stage for me. I wanted Rambo to be this heavier, bulkier, that's why his first line in the movie is pretty negative. He's given up. He has nothing. The other Rambos I felt had a bit too much energy. They were a little too spry. I'm not trying to run myself down but there was much more vanity involved. Tank tops, it was all about body movement rather than just the ferocity and the commitment of what he was doing. This character to me is much more interesting. I like First Blood and I like this one, just like the first Rocky and the last Rocky Balboa. Everything in between was kind of trying to figure out what I should do.

Q: Talk about the tone, can you enjoy the gratification with the realistic depiction of violence?

SS: If you notice over the opening credits, I had to live up to a certain kind of responsibility because people are dying as we're making the film. Therefore, to just have me running through the film doing these extraordinary heroics I thought would demean what they're going through. So they had to have their moment where you see a village that is decimated. That's what happened. As a matter of fact, it's even worse but I said, "I don't know if that other stuff would fly today. I think the audience really wants something that's hard hitting but has a semblance of reality." We went too far in the old days. We got away with murder. "Jump out of a plane? Well, I don't need a parachute. You use mine." And you made it. Somehow you made it. You landed on a convertible roof and you did it. I said no, this time I'm going to really show it and the violence has to be extraordinarily brutal because we see people beheaded on television. How much harder can you get? You cannot water it down, at least I didn't feel. That was a big bone of contention really. The other thing was do you do a film about a caper, like they wanted to have the corrupt CIA guy and he was trying to sell plutonium rods. I said no. The biggest and most interesting crises in the world is the human crises. It never gets boring. Just like Shakespeare. You don't need a gimmick. It's just man against man, just their intolerance of each other.

Q: How did all the production companies come in?

SS: I don't know any of them either. [Laughs] What happened was Weinstein came about 12 years ago. They said, "Would you want to do a Rambo?" I said okay. He goes, "We've got this great idea where Camp David's attacked." I go, "I'm out." It just can't be. There's something about nature as part of the character. There's something about the primitive man. He's almost like an Indian. Set in the city, I just didn't think it would fly. So it died for 10 years, resurfaced. At one time, Mark Burnett was talking about doing it when I was doing The Contender and then that didn't work. Then I called Harvey Weinstein and talked about these missionary groups that were going to Afghanistan. I said, "This is interesting." No, never got called back on that. So Avi Lerner bought it, New Millennium. He was open to this whole idea. The thing was, I was going to do something about Mexico. Actually the whole Coyote Mexican, remember the people disappearing in Juarez and that whole world. So we went that way and I said, "No, not working. I need something more international." So I did research and found that Burma is one of the great hellholes on the planet. But no one knows about it. It's exotic and it's near Vietnam. The synergy was perfect so that's why.

Q: Discuss location scouting before the movie and the shooting conditions themselves?

SS: Funny you bring that up because the location scouting was truly hell. We had to go to places where we were not going to be so confrontational with Burmese agents that are all over Thailand and they're very, very sensitive to their image. Especially down in Mae Sai where people have disappeared. It's a serious situation. The Thais were very, very worried about their image so we decided to go up north to Chiang Mai, try to find something that would sort of be obscure to both of them. We wouldn't be in their faces but the locations themselves were so inland, sometimes we would have to use elephants to get inland. We spent days on the river. I just wanted to try to find something that hadn't been- - we couldn't afford to find extraordinary. In the mountains would have been great to go up to these areas, but just something that felt as though this would be Rambo territory, would be as rugged as his life had been and bleak, but also serviceable for some of the actors who I didn't want to put them through the kind of hell that they had to be put through. But it was a lot of work. It took four different trips back and forth. 18 hours each way is a lot of scouting back and forth, a lot of jet lagging. But we found, we were using these [Karen is the closest I can find] natives that were showing us these very, very obscure areas that had never been seen before.

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