Speedy & Sylvester

The first thing you notice about Sylvester Stallone in person is how small he is. Not short, although his compact frame does seem bigger on screen thanks to the outsize characters he plays. Just small. At 54, Stallone's face is well tanned and tighter than a kettledrum. The signature upturned snarl on the left side of his mouth — the result of a nerve severed during a forceps delivery — dances when he laughs. And his sleepy eyelids hang like a pair of half-drawn blinds. Of course, all these things are vaguely familiar from watching any of the 30-odd films Stallone has made since he wrote and starred in 1976's Rocky. But for some reason it's hard to get past the impression that up close, the whole Sly package seems smaller.

Then again, that may just be what humility looks like.

You see, after a string of box office misfires, Stallone is hungry again. Hungry for respect. Hungry for the rush writing once gave him. And more than anything, hungry to repeat the past with the knowledge he's gained over the last quarter century. In short, the Italian stallion refuses to be knocked down...and that is what brings us to Montreal.

On any other day, the circuit Gilles-Villeneuve is a Formula One race-track. But on this bone-chilling afternoon in September, it's doubling as a German speedway in Stallone's $72 million auto-racing spectacle, Driven. Rain machines pelt the skid-marked asphalt, while buzzing hot rods zip by like 150-mile-per-hour hornets. Dressed in a scarlet jumpsuit, Stallone watches the high-speed action and calls it the ''manifestation of a daydream.'' After all, everything on the set — from the ragged crew of mechanics to the very last Allen wrench — is here because he thought it up and wrote it down on an old-school pad with a low-tech pen.

Stallone has scripted other movies since Rocky vaulted him from an anonymous actor to, arguably, the biggest star in the world: Paradise Alley, First Blood, Staying Alive. But it's been a while since his last outright hit, Cliffhanger (which grossed more than a quarter billion dollars worldwide). Eight years, to be exact. So when Stallone began to write Driven, he says he was fueled by something larger. ''I wanted a second chance to re-appreciate the gift I've been given,'' he says, with a quiet air of contrition. ''I didn't appreciate it the first time around. I took it for granted, and then I put down the pen and paper for years and let it just sit idle and took scripts because I was too lazy to write....Now I'm doing the exact same thing I did 25 years ago with 10 times the enthusiasm.''

The story of how Stallone sold his script for Rocky is a sterling lesson in integrity and guts. Written out of equal parts frustration and desperation, the semiautobiographical tale of a world-weary bruiser who scrapes his way to stardom almost exactly mirrored Stallone's offscreen trajectory once the movie opened. But it almost never happened. The producers offered Stallone $360,000 for the script if he wouldn't act in Rocky. (He has said that at the time he had just $106 in his bank account.) But when Stallone insisted that he also star, they offered him a mere $20,000 for the script plus a small fee for acting. He took it, and leveraged the lowball deal into one of the smartest bets Hollywood's ever seen. Before long, he'd be making four sequels and millions of dollars.