Peak Performance

By John Elson

IN HIS NEW BEAT-'EM-UP BLOCKBUSTER, CLIFFHANGER, THE audience first glimpses Sylvester Stallone crawling along the underside of a mountain ledge, a zillion feet above sea level. Indeed, most of the movie is devoted to gorgeous Alpine scenery and daredevil feats by its star, who gets to scale icy slopes and trade gouges with villainous John Lithgow atop a chopper perched on a sheer cliff.

All in a day's work for the man who turned Rocky and Rambo into household names? Well, no. Stallone, as it happens, is deathly afraid of heights. He also suffers from tinnitus, which makes him feel dizzy and off-balance. So how did Sly, who says he handled about 75% of his own stunt work, get over his fears? "I didn't," he says. "I was just able to manage it. I'd sit near the edge. Then I would move about 5 ft. closer, 2 ft. closer, not look down, psych myself out. Then when they'd lower me down on a cable to a rock face that might be 4,000 or 5,000 ft. straight down, I would look straight out and say over and over, 'Don't look down; don't look down.' "

The director helped. Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Nightmare on Elm Street IV) took Stallone on location months before shooting began to get him used to the heights. He also reassured Stallone by first doing some stunts himself. That included the daring opening sequence: a failed rescue attempt that has Stallone hanging upside down on a cable between two peaks, 13,000 ft. in the air. "I was shamed into doing it," Sly admits. "And that's a pretty hairy stunt."

Not nearly so hairy, though, as a later scene in which he clutches a ladder dangling from a helicopter as it crashes into a cliff. Or a sequence in which Stallone and a hood roll down a sharp incline together. "We were going 200, 300 yds. straight down -- sheer face," Sly recalls. "You don't know if there's a branch or a hidden jagged rock under the snow. That really worried me."

Stallone trained for the film on a 30-ft. concrete wall built next to the tennis court at his Beverly Hills home. Despite vertigo, he was drawn into the sport's intoxicating lure: in one shot he was doing upside-down situps, hanging from a chopper, when a crew member noticed that he had no safety belt. Stallone was bothered most by scenes filmed on a seven-story indoor wall at Rome's Cinecitta studios. "That was a lot scarier than the Alps," he says. "There's something about knowing that the floor is there and you could go splat at any time."

What about rock climbing as a hobby? "Are you kidding?" Stallone says. "The pleasure climbers get from ascending cliffs is worth the pain they incur while attempting it. I never got the pleasure. The pleasure was not worth the pain."

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York