As the go-go '80s drew to a close, Mario Kassar, the free-spending impresario who'd built Carolco Pictures on the international success of the Rambo movies, was having problems of his own. With his company near bankruptcy he, too, needed a splashy action movie that would blast the competition off the screen. Calling upon his long friendship with Stallone, he convinced him to hook up with Harlin, who was just coming off the noisy success of Die Hard 2. In 1991, Stallone and Harlin began working on Gale Force, in which the actor was to square off against a hurricane. After script problems proved insurmountable, Kassar suggested Cliffhanger, written by Michael France, a former script reader at TriStar Pictures. But both director and star were worried that the action-packed screenplay didn't have enough character development to counterbalance the stunts. So just weeks before last April's start of filming, Stallone, who has doctored scripts for his movies since F.I.S.T. in 1978, knocked out eight revisions. "It was like, 'Now, Coach, will you put me in?'" says Stallone, who claims he wasn't looking for the screenwriting credit he eventually got. Finally, Harlin was satisfied that the hero, Gabe Walker, had become "not a Rambo but just an ordinary human, vulnerable and troubled, who has to rise to the occasion." Stallone did more than punch up his own part. He toughened John Lithgow's cold-as-ice villain, a former British agent who masterminds a midair heist of $150 million before crash-landing in the Rockies. He gave additional scenes of jeopardy to Gabe's plucky girlfriend (Northern Exposure's Janine Turner). And he inserted a lot of Sly one-liners along the way. Meanwhile, Kassar was scrambling to find financing. With a budget approaching $50 million, he convinced TriStar, the movie's American distributor, to chip in $28 million. Foreign partners, including France's Studio Canal Plus, took care of another third of the budget. With Kassar desperately fending off creditors, the cast and crew set off for the Italian Alps, which Harlin had chosen to stand in for the Rockies because they promised snowy scenery in a more temperate climate.
"It was brutal," says Stallone. "When cold sets in, all you can think is, 'Get me off this mountain.' I had a couple of scenes where the wind was so cold, my face was swollen shut. I couldn't articulate-and I don't articulate that well anyway." The group suffering came at the insistence of Harlin, who was bent on putting the actors right up there on the mountains, then capturing them with swooping camera moves designed to leave moviegoers gasping. He'd enlisted special-effects expert Richard Edlund's Boss Film Studios to design a 70-foot elevator rig (first developed for Batman Returns) on which a remote-controlled camera could travel over a cliff edge and pan down a mountain. By the time the Cliffhanger crew arrived in Italy, Harlin had readied 2,500 sketches of how the sequences would be filmed. But no planning could really prepare the company for the vagaries of the weather. The first major sequence found the actors shivering on a narrow path in a snowstorm. Equipment kept freezing. Lunch never arrived. The next day, the sun shone so clear and bright that the crew had to wait all day for shadows to lengthen so that shots would match. Even though there were indoor sets just outside Cortina d'Ampezzo, the picturesque village where the company was headquartered, the high-altitude filming quickly put the production more than two weeks behind schedule and $10 million over budget. Though Harlin, displaying a Scandinavian cool, maintains the production was never at risk, Stallone reveals, "Mario was under incredible duress. We had the bondsmen on the set. They were in a position to shut it down anytime they wanted to." That action was avoided only when Harlin spliced together a six-minute reel to convince the money men that the footage delivered the goods. / As production continued, the actors seesawed between exhilaration and exhaustion. Turner struggled with-as she puts it-"reverse claustrophobia," adding, "I was a bit off balance. There was no time to rehearse. The first bit I did was sliding down a mountain and saying a line." "The first month was hard," concurs Lithgow, whose role was still undergoing massive rewrites. "(We'd shot) what felt like about two minutes of film. Renny and I finally had to go off to the side and have it out." Having survived the arduous location work, the company moved on to Rome's Cinecitta studios and a new set of small disasters. Turner banged her head against an artificial stalactite. Stallone gashed his right hand on a helicopter blade, developed an infection, and missed several days of filming. "It was cursed, that set," he recalls. "I went to swing at John, I caught a chopper blade, and the blood was like a gusher." With money running out, one of Cliffhanger's showpiece sequences, a spectacular two-plane hijacking to be filmed over Colorado, was in danger of being scaled back, until Stallone objected. "They wanted everything to take place on one plane-the money, the feds, the bad guys. I said, 'Are you kidding me? What kind of plane is this-Noah's ark? You got two of everything. (The movie will be) a disaster if you do that.'" Stallone prevailed by putting up $750,000 out of his salary to ensure that the scene be filmed as written. Still, several expensive action sequences that test audiences judged just too farfetched were ultimately cut-including the incredible ravine leap that figured prominently in the movie's acclaimed trailer. Also on the cutting-room floor are many of the quips Stallone had scripted. As the actor concedes, "People don't know whether to laugh when I say something-whether it's a bad reading or an intentional joke. They don't want me to be funny in that situation." But the most strenuous audience objections were reserved for a shot of a bunny who happens into the cross hairs of a villain's gun, never to be seen again. Test audiences were outraged. A second shot of the rabbit was added to reassure viewers that-unlike the human characters, most of whom fail to make it off the slopes alive-the bunny just keeps on going.
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