Sylvester Stallone Felt Doing This Movie Was Like Writing ‘Rocky’ All Over Again

Sylvester Stallone starred in a variety of action films after making Rocky. So, he was already a veteran by the time he was cast in this lesser-known sports movie. But in the process of getting the project made, it reminded him of what it was like to be an unknown again.

Sylvester Stallone felt ‘Driven’ took him back to his ‘Rocky’ days

In 2001, Stallone released and starred in his passion project Driven. The film saw the Creed star play a veteran race car driver taking a young prodigy under his wing. The movie’s title was also appropriate given its journey to the big screen. Stallone came up with the story and helped pen the script, which reminded the actor of making his breakthrough film Rocky. Similarly to the 1976 classic, Stallone also had trouble getting Driven made despite his A-list status.

“It’s almost like starting out as an unknown, because you’re dealing with a project, racing, that a lot of people are wary of,” Stallone once told Female. “There have been racing movies in the past, but they haven’t performed as well as say, football movies, so there’s a little hesitancy. So we had to start from scratch. In this day and age you can imagine how expensive it is for a race car film to be, so to put the whole thing together and do it within a very frugal budget, is pretty impossible.”

But Driven being so difficult to develop was a rewarding experience in itself.

“Because it puts your life and soul in perspective, in that you realize that this is how you started and some things that are hard fought are the ones you take great satisfaction in, unlike the ones that come too easy, like the guys who inherit $100m and end up like junkies jumping off a building. If it all came too easy, they feel unfulfilled because they haven’t accomplished anything. So I think with all these hard-fought wars, you just don’t quit,” he said.

Sylvester Stallone found ‘Driven’ harder to write than ‘Rocky’

Stallone thought writing Driven would be similar to writing Rocky, but he quickly realized this wasn’t the case. His Oscar-winning picture took three days to write and had a very self-contained story focused on a few key characters. Whereas with Driven, Stallone had to divide his attention between a much larger roster.

“It was very, very difficult,” Stallone told Cinema about the experience. “I thought it’d be quite easy. I said, ‘OK, it’ll be like a Rocky-type formula, but that doesn’t apply here at all, as there are 15 characters you have to deal with. It’s also spanning three different generational groups. You have the 19-year-old racer, the 30-year-old, and the prehistoric racer – me, the Fred Flinstone of racers.”

Stallone also touched on how the movie expanded from focusing on a single character to more of an ensemble piece.

“I’d gone through – and this is not bragging but showing my inadequacies in being able to get it right – about 25 drafts. And of those, about 20 were about this one man’s journey, myself, through this film, and all his trials and tribulations. He’d fallen from a great height career-wise,” he said.

But the problem was that Driven became too dark with little room for a silver lining.

“And then the more we worked on it, it became the dark side, a little seedy, and I didn’t know where the upside of it was ever going to be,” he added.

This prompted Stallone to make a few changes to Driven. Stallone reduced his own role in the film and focused more on the other characters he crafted. In the end, Driven became a much different movie than Rocky, with Stallone not being the main driver behind the sports drama.