The Telegraph spoke with Joyner for a piece in 2023 looking back at the making of the movie, and she explained that she really was up on that mountain for a long continuous establishing shot that saw her and Rooker stranded. “Renny said, ‘There’s no place for the helicopter to land, so you’ll have to be dangled out of a helicopter on a line, and someone will be there to grab you, pull you down, and anchor you to the mountain with a harness,'” she said. “That was the first thing we did. It wasn’t fun!” And while Stallone shot all of his parts of the scene on a soundstage (he “never got more than a few feet off the ground,” the actress remembered), Joyner, Rooker, and Stallone’s stunt double, Mark De Alessandro, were out there for real, tethered to a line and dangling thousands of feet above the ground. (In a behind the scenes video, Harlin says it was at 8,000 feet, while the Telegraph puts the height at 4,000 feet. The scene was shot in Italy’s Dolemite mountain range at a site called Vajolet towers, which has a high point listed at 9,255 feet, but an exact elevation of where this specific moment was filmed is tough to come by.)

“When I watch it now, it’s really convincing that Stallone was up there,” Joyner said. “There’s no way you can tell that he wasn’t. I think, ‘So, did I really need to risk my life like that?'”

I’d never heard this before, but rewatching the opening scene, it’s now something I can’t ever unsee. The way the filmmakers accomplished all of this is actually pretty ingenious — especially a shot that starts with Stallone dangling from a cliff…

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… but then uses a helicopter passing downward through the frame to hide an editing transition to a shot of a professional climber who completes impressive climbing maneuvers with his face mostly away from the camera:

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Was a safety net or some other protective gear placed under Stallone on that actual cliffside for his shot, or was that whole rock face recreated inside a sound stage? Either way, movie magic!