New Delhi, Oct. 15 -- For the first day of filming, I pulled on a gray long-sleeved shirt. A pair of faded black denim pants that I'd had for a while. An oversized pair of Beatle boots that I'd gotten wet so many times they shrunk and I had to cut an X into the arch to fit my feet. And before I walked out the door, I threw on my cheap black leather jacket that I bought from some now-defunct department store in North Philly when I was eighteen years old.

If those items sound familiar, they're literally the clothes Rocky wears whenever he's not training or fighting or wearing that goofy reindeer sweater, which was also mine. In fact, 90 percent of Rocky's wardrobe were my real clothes. This wasn't all that unusual for a tiny movie with a s...