“Little did I know that running up the steps would be the most famous shot in the entire movie,” Stallone writes in his memoir The Steps. He adds, “Those towering steps were the embodiment of success for me. They were a symbol of all the times I had failed to make it to the next level in my life.”
In an interview this year on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, Stallone admitted this iconic scene was improvised in the early morning hours: “We didn’t have any money to shoot there. We didn’t have the license. I just got out of the car. I said, ‘Let me just run up the steps; get a shot of it and we’ll get out of here before the police come.’” History was made that day.
The end of the scene is actually reversed in the movie. Director John Avildsen originally shot Stallone in close-up, then pulled the camera back to a wide shot, but when he played it back, he felt it didn’t work. So instead, he reversed it, going from a wide shot to a close-up for greater emotional punch.
Interspersed with this famous run up the steps, we see Rocky’s endurance and stamina in full effect: one-armed pushups, running while carrying bricks, punching the speedbag and, just as the music tells us, “getting strong now” by running faster and faster. The training montage would become a staple of every Rocky (and even Creed) film that followed.