"Most action is based on redemption and revenge, and that's a formula. Moby Dick was formula. It's how you get to the conclusion that makes it interesting"
About this Quote
Stallone is doing something sneakier than giving screenwriting advice: he's defending the “obvious” as the engine of myth. Redemption and revenge are the two oldest fuels in popular storytelling, and he names them without apology because his career is built on proving they still hit. The jab is at a certain strain of cultural snobbery that treats “formula” as an insult, as if art must arrive without recognizable desire. Stallone’s counter is practical, almost blue-collar: patterns aren’t the enemy; laziness is.
Calling Moby-Dick “formula” is the provocative move. It yanks a sacred cow of literary prestige down into the same arena as Rocky or Rambo, insisting that even canonical masterpieces run on primal programming: a man trying to save himself, a man trying to settle a score, sometimes both. The subtext is democratic. If Melville gets to use obsession and retribution, then genre filmmakers don’t need to self-flagellate for doing the same.
The second line is the key: “how you get to the conclusion.” Stallone isn’t pretending originality lives in the destination; he’s arguing it lives in the route - tone, character specificity, the texture of setbacks, the moral price paid along the way. It’s also a quiet manifesto about his own persona: audiences don’t come for surprise endings; they come to watch a familiar vow tested until it either earns redemption or collapses into revenge. That’s not formula as constraint. It’s formula as a promise, kept (or broken) with style.
Calling Moby-Dick “formula” is the provocative move. It yanks a sacred cow of literary prestige down into the same arena as Rocky or Rambo, insisting that even canonical masterpieces run on primal programming: a man trying to save himself, a man trying to settle a score, sometimes both. The subtext is democratic. If Melville gets to use obsession and retribution, then genre filmmakers don’t need to self-flagellate for doing the same.
The second line is the key: “how you get to the conclusion.” Stallone isn’t pretending originality lives in the destination; he’s arguing it lives in the route - tone, character specificity, the texture of setbacks, the moral price paid along the way. It’s also a quiet manifesto about his own persona: audiences don’t come for surprise endings; they come to watch a familiar vow tested until it either earns redemption or collapses into revenge. That’s not formula as constraint. It’s formula as a promise, kept (or broken) with style.
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