Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. John Wick holds a pretty special place in my heart. It's rare that a movie gets to surprise me these days, but John Wick did just that when it premiered at Fantastic Fest and blew the roof off the joint.
It's even rarer still that a sequel can top the original. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say John Wick Chapter 2 is a better movie than the original, but it's a seamless continuation of every single thing I loved about that first film. The action choreography, the rich tapestry of the hidden assassin world hidden in plain sight, Keanu Reeves being a badass... it's all built upon in this kick-ass, unflinching sequel.
So, I was really psyched to sit down with director Chad Stahelski and stunt coordinator J.J. Perry to dig a little deeper into the world of John Wick. We talk quite a bit about all the ingredients that go into making John Wick such a cool character and just how much prep goes into a film like this.
Lots of good stuff below. Enjoy, squirts!
Quint: One of the things that I loved so much about the first movie was the world building that went into it. I wouldn't say I was nervous about the sequel, because I trusted you guys, but...
Chad Stahelski: This is the tree of trust. You can talk openly. You were worried we were going to fuck it up. It's alright. (laughs)
Quint: No, no, no. It's just that so many people reacted to the brutal action scenes of the first movie, the great action and the cool gunplay, that I was worried perhaps some of my favorite part, the crazy assassin's world, would be put on the backburner for the sequel. But you managed to up the ante on an action level and also dive in headfirst with the worldbuilding. Was that something you prioritized going into the sequel?
Chad Stahelski: Yes. Quite frankly we were terrified. We never intended to do a sequel after the first one, but the studio came back and said “Wow, people seem to like this. Would you be interested in a second one?” Keanu and I got together and we said, “Yes, we'd be interested.” We liked working together, we like the world, it was a fun experience. It was just a matter of doing it again without duplicating ourselves and doing something interesting, instead of us feeling like we were doing it for a cash grab.
We started talking about it in January and it wasn't until, like, June when us, Basil Iwanyk, the producer, and Derek Kolstad, the writer, kinda figured out we needed to stop worrying about the plot so much and go back to what everybody loved about it, which is what you said: the world-building.
If we can tell more about the character by going deeper into the world, that's interesting to us. Trying to overcomplicate the plot wasn't. We wanted to do the Sergio Leone/Man With No Name thing and stay with John, let him be your tour guide to a deeper level of the world that we had created. That's what we stuck with.
That means a little a lit of expansion on character, on the world, our supporting cast and, of course, the action design, which we had to take to a different level.
Quint: Yeah, you have to escalate from the first movie, which was amazing, but different from what you guys ended up doing here. A lot of John Wick's action in the first movie seemed pretty contained, in smaller rooms or hallways.
Chad Stahelski: Time and money! Luckily we had a little bit more insight into what we wanted to create and because we did fairly well on the first one we had a little bit more resources, a little bit more time and a little bit more money. After talking to JJ, our stunt teams and our cinematographer, we wanted to put (that money) into prep.
Really how you start with better action isn't necessarily bigger explosions or longer car chases. What people like when they say when they liked the action, it wasn't really the action, it was Keanu Reeves DOING the action. If you want to expand on that you have to start with Keanu Reeves.
If he's a 7 you have to go to a 10. If he's a 10 you have to go to a 13. We have to take him. We gave him over to JJ here and JJ, you can tell him about what he went through in the training.
J.J. Perry: The biggest challenge was not to repeat what we'd done in 1 and how do we make Keanu Reeves better. To make his gunwork better, we reached out to a fellow named Taran Butler up in Simi Valley, who is a 14 time three-gun world champion. Three-gun meaning pistol, rifle and shotgun.
Chad Stahelski: That's what that YouTube video of Keanu is. That's up at Taran's place.
J.J. Perry: We spent a lot of time in a real range shooting real bullets. It's an interactive range, so he shoots a course once or twice and then we change it. That lends itself quite a bit to choreography. We also built in reloads and even put dummy rounds into the guns so he'd have to correct his malfunctions. So, he no longer became an actor that's shooting in a movie, he became a competitive shooter.
Then we brought him back to our gym at 8711. This is the laboratory of all that is fight choreography. We have this amazing team of martial artists that we surrounded him with. I figure if you surround him with a bunch of killers it's going to rub off on him.
Keanu is very intelligent. His ability to retain choreography is second to none and his work ethic is second to none. He embraced this process. Chad gave us this opportunity with three and a half months prep, which you very rarely get unless you're doing a huge, huge film. We took advantage of that opportunity to really prep Keanu Reeves. Watch the first movie to see what we were not going to do again. We came up with some great, new, cool gags for Keanu Reeves to do.
(JJ's on the left in this photo from the above-mentioned Eighty-Seven Eleven Gym)
Quint: I imagine a lot of little details in the action that really stick out, like how he reloads the shotgun in the catacombs sequence, for example, came out of this training, right? That doesn't seem to me to be something that would be written into the script.
Chad Stahelski: When you talk about action design, it has become a trend in Hollywood that there's story and then there's action. There are two different crews, two different teams, two different directors. Any great action movie, whether you're talking about anime or Asian cinema or a great western, Sergio Leone or Akira Kurosawa... you go back to any great Asian or American action movies of the '70s and '80s you can't tell the line.
Quint: You learn character through action. The Bruce Willis in Die Hard approach.
Chad Stahelski: Exactly. You can't divide. We're very, very big on that. That's also an evolutionary process. As your cast member gets better, as your story gets better the story details come. That's also through exposure. Like JJ said, we got introduced to Taran Butler, who showed us not just proper ways, but tactical ways, competition ways... probably a dozen different ways to load a shotgun and we take and choose and pick for the situation. We had him load the shotgun up in the crook of his neck so he could quickdraw with his right hand right afterwards. We tried to put some logic behind it. What would John Wick be?
You see it in most action movies where you're told how badass a guy is. There's two guys in suits in a room telling you that “Bob” was an incredible Navy SEAL and he's killed all these people and he's a guy you don't wanna mess with and then you never see it. They'll give you some fast cut, swishy-cam action sequence and it's like “Well, I didn't really get to see Bob do anything.” We're never having that scene.
Why is John Wick such a badass? Just pointing a gun and pulling the trigger can get repetitive, and we should know because we've done so much of that. So, what are all the other things we can do? Yes, the Jiu-Jitsu, yes the martial arts, yes the gun-fu. Okay, he knows how to hit things with cars. That's one thing. He knows how to reload a pistol, he knows how to reload a rifle. He knows just know one reload, he knows five reloads. He can constantly do all this stuff on the fly. What does that do? It builds credibility that John Wick is a badass, or even more importantly that Keanu Reeves playing John Wick is a badass. That's what we tried to do.
Quint: It works. You buy it. It's almost a laugh line at the beginning when Peter Stormare is giving that exact speech you're mentioning because we already know he's not overselling the character.
Chad Stahelski: And who could deliver that better than Peter Stormare? We love Peter. Not everybody could have pulled off the John Wick mythological tale.
Quint: I love how you populate the world. You did it so well in the first movie with the other assassins and the employees of the Continental, and I love how you have people Franco Nero in this one.
Chad Stahelski: Franco Nero, the original Django. How can you be in Rome and not use Franco Nero?
Quint: You said going into the first movie you didn't have a sequel in mind, but by the time we get to the end of this one it's pretty obvious there's more story to tell.
Chad Stahelski: There was so much we didn't get to put in the first one. Once you start down that path of what this world could be, like why go with coins? What is a marker? There's a hotel, there's an autobody shop. What else is there? We had pages and pages of notebooks.
When we were doing number two the danger was we'd overplot. John Wick's gotta save the world and he's gotta look out for the giant robot, but the meteor's coming, but at the same time the CIA is looking for him. You know? So we tried to keep it a very character-drive, simple plot, unapologetically Man With No Name.
We wrote this overall timeline of what we wanted to happen and it seemed like there was a natural break in there. We wanted to show more of the world. The first movie we showed you what John Wick has and in the second one we wanted to bring you up to speed: this is the world and these are the resources he has. The second part of the film is taking away everything he has, both as John and as John Wick. We take away all John's stuff, his house, his family, his friends, his dog... any memory he has we took away. Then we take away his John Wick stuff. We take away the Continental, we take away everything he's got. There's a natural break there.
What we really want to do now is have John face off against the entire world that spawned him and maybe hopefully build an alliance and wrap it all up.
Quint: It's really interesting to me that you fully committed to stripping him of every protection, every rule that has kept him safe and the next time we see him it'll just be him alone.
Chad Stahelski: Which I find very fun; isolation.
Quint: That sounds a little daunting, but if anybody can get through it it's John Wick. We've talked about what you've done to show that he is the best there is at what he does, but I liked that you also highlighted his intelligence in this movie. The catacombs sequence is a perfect example. It's not just that he's great with guns, but that he can anticipate a double cross and plan for it.
J.J. Perry: Yeah, he laid a trap.
Chad Stahelski: Our day job... JJ was a second unit director, I was a second unit director, our other friend Darren Prescott who helped out a lot with the car stuff is a second unit director. We're all usually called in to do all these sequences for other people and what you do is you compile this massive notebook of what can go wrong. Then we figure out why are we there. Are we there to enhance and work hand-in-hand with the first unit guys to come up with cooler stuff or are we there as fixers? Half our careers were spent fixing movies that may have lost their way a little bit. So you realize what can and can't go wrong.
A lot of times the bigger, better thing can get you into more trouble than it's worth. Sometimes you're like “Guys, let's just stay with what this guy is supposed to be and just make it cool.” Being creative just means using a little bit of brain power. It doesn't necessarily mean more money or more pyro. We tried to be that way (with John Wick 2).
I love shooting wide, as you can tell. I like establishing cool locations. I like the wish fulfillment aspect of taking the audience to places. Very few people get to go where we went, which is 2,000 year old Roman catacombs and even fewer people get to do a gunfight there. Other than one or two things we shot all on location. That opera and the catacombs? That was all one location, we just went under the stage.
You put a lot of time into your scouting, you find a cool place and then your cinematographer, your production designer, your cameraman and your stunt team and you all go down there and start devising. We throw it over to JJ's guys and they come up with what a cool sequence would be motion-wise and then JJ and I talk about what the character's doing. Okay, well he's setting them up, he's anticipating. Then you bring your crew down there and go “How do we show this place off and show off what JJ's come up with with the moves and show off a character trait for the story we're trying to tell?” It's a big group effort and I take pride in the fact that our crew did a really good job bringing those pieces together so it doesn't come off as fragmented.
Most of action design today is hiding things. If shaky-cam or fast editing is your style, great. If you're using that to hide the stuff you didn't prep well, bad locations, bad choreography, stunt doubles, wires, pyro or your cameraman wasn't in the rehearsals or your cast member wasn't good enough, we're going to call bullshit on you.
We wanted to be brave and put our money where our mouth is. We found cool locations, we shot it the right way, we prepped and had everyone in on it. We did it like that.
J.J. Perry: In expanding on that as a guy who works in a lot of movies, I don't always get the opportunity to do that, but having a director like Chad that is a great filmmaker that knows action, but also knows every other aspect; the camera, the lighting, everything down to budgeting. He creates this opportunity for us to succeed. I could tell you that happens maybe 5% of the time. 95% of the time there's one team doing one thing, another team doing another thing and we have to evolve on the set.
Working with someone like Chad creates a perfect storm for the film crew because he's going to bring the team together and make everything linear and seamless interdepartment-wise.
Quint: So that's the secret recipe for making a movie like John Wick: a lot of prep, a director who can make his crew work as one unit and someone like Keanu who is super into making the movie work.
Chad Stahelski: It starts with a clear vision of where you want to take it. You know you want to make a 5 star meal, but cooking is irrelevant until you get the ingredients. That's not always easy because you can't always find the filet mignon.
As much as we'd like to take credit, if we didn't have Keanu on the first one... You're talking about a 50 year old cast member who has to act, have charisma, has to cry over a puppy and emote real emotions and be empathetic and at the same time do a fight scene in boxing shorts with another cast member and go that distance then in the second movie go “You know what? Throw all that out. We're going to do one better and you're going to learn a whole new skill set.” Not a whole lot of cast members would say “Sure” and risk it. It really started with him.
Quint: Thank you both for your time. I really appreciate it.
Chad Stahelski: Of course. We enjoy the website. Tell all the boys there we said hello!
Hey, guys. Chad Stahelski, director of John Wicks 1 & 2 says hello. There, I've done my part.
The movie has the goods, guys and both of these dudes were great chats. Hope you dug the interview as much as I did!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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