Last year it was revealed that director Ryan Coogler will reunite with his Fruitvale Station star and upcoming Human Torch Michael B. Jordan for Creed, a spin-off of the Rocky franchise centred around the grandson of the late Apollo (Carl Weathers) as he is taken under the wing of the Italian Stallion (the returning Sylvester Stallone). During a chat with Digital Spy ahead of the Sundance London premiere of Fruitvale Station (yes, it’s really not out here yet!), Coogler offered a little insight into how the project came about:
“My dad and I are real close, and we were going through something pretty intense in our relationship around the time I was getting ready to make Fruitvale, and that’s how I came up with the idea for Creed. He was a big Rocky fan, and I watched the movies with him. I never thought in a million years I’d get to do it, but I told my agent and he got really fired up about it… By the time Fruitvale was done I was able to come back and talk with [Sylvester Stallone] some more about it. We’re writing the script for it right now and hopefully we’re in the mix.”
As for Stallone’s input into the script and Balboa’s involvement with the story, Coogler stated that, “He wrote every Rocky movie there ever was, so although I’m writing the script, I’ll definitely talk to him about it. Not only because he invented these characters, but because he’ll have to be an actor in the film, so it’s talking to him in both ways. Rocky isn’t the main character in the story, but he’s a major supporting player. And nobody knows that character like him; in the few meetings that I’ve had with him, sometimes he’ll talk like Rocky. We’ll be talking about a scene, and he’ll kind of go into acting mode. It’s unnerving how good of an actor Stallone is – if I can get Stallone and Mike together in the same frame, the camera might explode.”
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