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After the huge success of Rambo: First Blood Part II, and a massive hit in the form of Rocky IV, Sylvester Stallone was riding the Hollywood high wave, and was pretty much able to demand whatever he liked to return to the role of John Rambo. So he did! Stallone asked for a Gulfstream jet, at a then cost of $12 million dollars, as part of his pay for the film. He got one!
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As with the previous two films, Stallone re-wrote the script for a co-writers credit, and had final say on just about every aspect of production. Highlander director Russel Mulcahy was originally hired by Stallone (a fan of both Highlander and Mulcahy’s extensive music video work for Duran Duran, among others) to helm Rambo III, but several weeks into filming Sly fired him, along with many of the film’s crew. As Stallone recalled,RELATED:
Why Sylvester Stallone Chose To Shoot Rambo III In Israel
The canvas of this movie is so large you have to constantly think 10 scenes ahead. You can’t wing it. They didn’t go into the Battle of Waterloo not knowing what their strategy would be. Well, this movie is kind of like a cinematic warfare. We have a huge cast and crew (more than 250 people) and tough locations to deal with. Everyone and everything has to coordinate.
These men were suppose [sic] to make your blood run cold. When I arrived on the set, what I saw was two dozen blond, blue-eyed pretty boys that resembled rejects from a surfing contest. Needless to say Rambo is not afraid of a little competition but being attacked by third rate male models could be an enemy that could overwhelm him. I explained my disappointment to Russell and he totally disagreed, so I asked him and his chiffon army to move on.
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Mulcahy was replaced by Peter MacDonald (above), a veteran second unit director. It was MacDonald’s first film as director but he was very experienced and had directed the second unit action sequences in Rambo: First Blood Part II. Even still, rumours circulating production stated that Stallone called many of the shots himself. MacDonald later said,I tried very hard to change the Rambo character a bit and make him a vulnerable and humorous person, I failed totally. I knew instinctively what was a good and bad shot, Stallone knew his character because it was his third outing as Rambo. I wasn’t shooting Shakespeare and at times it was hard to take it seriously.
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Stallone and MacDonald soon found out that there were so many restrictions in Israel, to where you could and couldn’t shoot. MacDonald, though, was working around this for authenticity, but one day he arrived on set to discover……Stallone decided [we] would go back to Arizona where they had looked long before I was on the film. There was a group there called the re-enactors. We had around two hundred and fifty of these guys who re-enact the [American] civil war. They were called on to do fight sequences, which they loved.
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Fun fact for you – the horse John Rambo rides is the same one ridden by Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.RELATED:
Rambo 3’s Deleted Ending Would Have Dated Horribly
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This was the last Rambo film to star Richard Crenna as Colonel Sam Trautman. He passed away on January 17th 2003. But in 1993, Crenna sorta resurrected the role. After being approached by the producers of the spoof Hot Shots! Part Deux, which was a parody of the Rambo series, Crenna spoke with Stallone about whether he should take the part of Colonel Denton Walters. Stallone was more than happy to give his blessing. Just like Colonel Trautman, Crenna’s character personally sought out the main protagonist (played here by Charlie Sheen) in a location somewhere in Southeast Asia to ask for help, and was also captured by the enemies forces, this time the Iraqis.
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The ending of Rambo III should have been different. In the original version, when Rambo and Colonel Trautman leave the camp of freedom fighters, as seen in the theatrical version, Rambo decides not to return home with Trautman to America, but to stay with the freedom fighters, feeling that he has finally found something. . he belongs. Trautman understands and says goodbye to Rambo. He wishes him luck and returns home to America alone.
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Sixty five seconds of the film were cut in the British version for distribution in cinemas. In some later video releases, the reduction almost tripled. more than three minutes have been removed. In both cases, it was primarily about violence with a knife and cruelty to animals. In the DVD release, all fragments have been restored, except for a two-second frame of animal cruelty (in this case, a horse falling).
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According to the director Peter Macdonald in the comments on the DVD, during the shooting of this film, the Russians actually invaded Afghanistan, as shown in “Rambo III”, however, approximately four weeks before the premiere of this film, the Russians left. from Afghanistan and were no longer in a state of war with this country. McDonald felt that such a turn of events and the opening of
communism in the West under Mikhail Gorbachev, which had already significantly changed the image of the Soviet Union by the time the film ended, damaged the box office of “Rambo III”, because the idea that the Russians are the main villains in This film was not realistic. At the same time, Macdonald was somewhat happy to think that the events in “Rambo-3” may have contributed to the withdrawal of Russian troops from Afghanistan.
