6. A Worthy Opponent

While Rocky had love, he also had an opponent, in the shape of Apollo Creed.

"I couldn't have come up with a better Apollo than Carl Weathers," admits Stallone.

"He was magnificent on his feet, an amazing body, this perfect voice and this incredible bearing.

"We'd cast Ken Norton, but he'd dropped out two nights before to do something else, and Carl walked in and starts his audition.

"He gets up, and he starts to box with me, landing a couple of my head, and I thought, 'gee, this guy doesn't care if he gets the part, does he?' He sits back down and says, 'Mr Avildsen, I could have done much better if you had a real actor reading with me.' And Jon says, 'You know Carl, that's Rocky, he wrote the script.'

"And he just sits back and says, 'Well, maybe he'll get better!' And I said, 'hire him! That's exactly what we need!'"

Prior to shooting the fight between the pair, Avildsen decided that the scenes needed to be shot in a unique way so as to make the boxing more realistic than in other boxing movies of the period.

He, Weathers and Stallone all went to a ring and began to block out the moves, but it wasn't working, and the fight was coming across as staged and not very energetic.

Avildsen then told Stallone to go home and literally write out the fight: "Rocky throws a left, Creed moves back, Creed goes right, Rocky goes right Creed jabs low…" The next day, Stallone returned with 32 pages of specific directions for the fight, which he and Weathers learned off like a ballet over a period of weeks. In total, Stallone and Weathers rehearsed for over 35 hours.

Every fight in the film was actually shot twice to give it that feeling of realism - once with Garrett Brown and his steadicam in the ring, another with him in the audience.

The movie itself was shot in a swift 28 days, with one extra shoot - to change the ending. While the original finale features Rocky and Adrian walking quietly off together, hand in hand (as in the original poster), Avildsen and Stallone agreed that the best way to finish was a freeze frame of Rocky at his most triumphant.

But triumph for its writer/star would have to wait a little while…

Next: Knockout Success