Sylvester Stallone threatened to knock Richard Gere's ‘teeth out’ in on-set clash

Sylvester Stallone has looked back on his decades-long career in his new memoir, The Steps.

Released on 29 September, the 80-year-old looks at the incident that led to his long-running feud with Richard Gere.

The Rocky star ended up on set with him for the audition process for the 1974 film, The Lords of Flatbush, where he also met Robert De Niro.

And in an on-set clash, Stallone says he threatened to knock Gere’s ‘teeth out’ after the Pretty Woman actor had ‘begun to stir the emotional cauldron inside’ him.

The star claims ‘everything went pretty well initially’ with DeNiro but the improvisation with Gere in the audition ‘went bad’.

“When Gere grabbed my T-shirt and his fingernails dug into my skin. I told him to back off, but he did it again on the second take,” Stallone claims.

Stallone in The Lords of Flatbush. (Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)

“He couldn’t have known, but Gere had begun to stir the emotional cauldron inside me.”

The actor continues in his memoir that he asked the director, Stephen Verona, if he could react to Gere the way he ‘would actually react’ if it happened his real life.

“‘What would you do?’ ‘Do? I’d knock his teeth out.’ ‘Please don’t,’” Stallone recalls.

Tensions continued to apparently get worse between the pair and it’s said to have really hit the pan when they were taking lunch in a car parked on set – and Gere spilled on him.

“A stream of chicken grease spilled off the foil paper onto my leg,” Stallone writes.

He says he ‘elbowed’ Gere across the chest before getting out the car to go around to his side and pull him out.

“‘Hey, man, I don’t want to get physical,’ Gere said in a thin voice. ‘Too late ...’ Stephen Verona put himself in front of Gere,” Stallone claims.

Gere was dropped from the film. (Art Zelin/Getty Images)

“It was clear to everyone that this wasn’t working. One of us had to go.”

And well, Stallone did end up staying on the project as he claims Gere was fired instead.

De Niro apparently left to join another project with Perry King and Henry Winkler replacing them in The Lords of Flatbush.

The film also stars Paul Mace and Susan Blakely and Stallone also got credits for writing additional dialogue.

The LADbible Group has contacted representatives for Richard Gere for comment.