Teaming up always a 'Plan' for Schwarzenegger, Stallone

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Trailer: 'Escape Plan' Trailer for the action movie "Escape Plan," starring Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger star in %27Escape Plan%27

Stallone has been looking for the right projects to do with his fellow action star for years

Schwarzenegger already signed up for %27The Expendables 3%27

SAN DIEGO — Arnold Schwarzenegger found an important common thread in politics and movies: Do the work that is good for the people.

And judging by the uproarious crowd that came to see a special Comic-Con fan screening Thursday night of his new action movie with Sylvester Stallone,Escape Plan, no one's vetoing what he does best.

"It isn't always successful, but that's what the intention is, and you've got to do movies for the people," the actor and former California governor says as he and Stallone sign autographs for fans, some of whom are dressed as Schwarzenegger's cigar-chomping camouflaged character in Commando or shouting the familiar Rocky catchphrase "Yo, Adrian!" at Stallone.

Directed by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström,Escape Plan (in theaters Oct. 18) stars Stallone as a master jailbreaker who may have met his match when he is tossed into a high-tech slammer called "The Tomb." There, he meets another inmate (Schwarzenegger) with similar goals of escaping, and they work together to free themselves and also take revenge on the bad guys du jour.

Separately, the actors defined the action-movie genre in the 1980s, but recently they've been on screen together more often than not. Stallone cast Schwarzenegger in a cameo in 2010's The Expendables, then wrote a bigger role for him in last year's sequel and has already signed the former bodybuilding champion for an Expendables 3.

"We'll be doing Expendables from here to eternity. We're going to make up for the time we lost in the '80s," Schwarzenegger says.

Stallone, 67, calls it "bilateral cooperation" that's been occurring in their later years. "We finally ran out of opponents and it's just us left in a room. 'Hey, you wanna dance?' 'Sure, let's go.' "

He regrets not being able to work with Schwarzenegger, 65, back in their heyday, but they just couldn't find the right project.

"They say, 'Hey, why don't you do one where you dress up as female cops?' Yeah, that'll work. No one will suspect that," Stallone quips. "Or then we were a dog and a cat, so it's a metaphor. And then we were bickering neighbors."

Putting both of them in the same futuristic prison? That was more like it. "Finally, we get to smack each other and everything happened the way it happened," Stallone says.

To Håfström, they're larger-than-life personalities in many ways, but that icon status off-screen gets set aside when they're acting.

"Their friendship has grown over the years and now it's come out to full bloom in a way. They like to work together, they've done it before, and in this case they did it more than in any other movie. I'm sure they'll continue to do it," the director says.

"It's been a relationship that has evolved through the years, in a good way."

There is a definite competition between the two stars, though, and Håfström noticed that healthy tension and used it in scenes such as their big throwdown in the middle of the prison.

"He'd come to me and say, 'Sly did the scene a little bit stronger than you. …' He's firing us up like that," Schwarzenegger says. "We were competing in the fight scenes and in the running and with the chase scenes, and it really worked out great for the movie."

He couldn't see himself going into politics 30 years ago, but Schwarzenegger always envisioned himself doing films and action movies, with more to come.

"It's a very risky business to be in because one day you can be down, the next day you're up again, and then you can be down again," the actor says. "You never know, but that's what makes it fun. I love operating without a safety net."