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| John Wick: Chapter 4 director Chad Stahelski |
As we get into awards season proper, it’s clear that this year is going to be a tight race, with titles like Barbie, Oppenheimer, Past Lives, Maestro and All Of Us Strangers duking it out for the top awards. There’s one category in which it’s much easier to predict a winner, however. Since its inception, the John Wick franchise has stood out when it comes to stunts, and with star Keanu Reeves constantly working to improve his technique, the fourth instalment packs in more action than ever. With this year’s Mission: Impossible instalment falling short of expectations, it’s hard to see anything coming close.
In light of this, I was glad to get the chance to chat to John Wick: Chapter Four director Chad Stahelski, and I asked him how he balanced style and surprises with fatigue and humanity and emotion in those scenes.
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| John Wick: Chapter 4 |
“That's a big stew pot there, isn't it, Jennie?” He grins. “Look, sometimes they seem random. We do have a pretty good thought process going in. It's not like we just throw moves together there. I know sometimes other shows may do that. Keanu and I have a long talk. I love my stunt teams. I have some amazing choreographers on my team that understand that much like a live performance or a dance routine, it's a human thing that makes it work.
“When you have Keanu as your lead dancer, there's a lot of empathy there. There's a lot of emotion that he puts into it. Desperation and fear and loyalty and hope. And you try to roll that in the spectacle of it all, that we're very aware of because we want it to be entertaining. We love the comedy of it all.”
It’s hard to pin down any single influence, he explains.
“I grew up watching Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, so I don't know – between that and about a million episodes of Bugs Bunny, and Jackie Chan, I don't know. It's just kind of the way I think. I think you can go pretty crazy as long as you make them laugh every couple beats. That's the kind of movies I like to watch. I like seeing something intense, like Die Hard or Lethal Weapon, but then there's a little bit of comedy at the end. I just want the audience to know that we're having fun making them, and you should have fun watching them, no matter how little crazy we get with the action. But we really beat out the stories. It's almost like writing a good song, right?
“There's a bridge, there's beats, there's the intro that builds you up, that introduces you to the staircase or the roundabout or the mirror room or the glass house or the underwater thing. And then you have this repetitive bridge that you can kind of hook yourself onto, the way Keanu will double tap or the rhythm of his gun or the num-chuks. And then we kind of build you up, and then we want a nice little drop and then that one little sustained note at the end. We speak a lot in musical terms or, I guess, rhythm or beat and the emotions that any good musical song can give you. We try to do the same thing.”
I tell him that I was I was intrigued by the way that the fights in two key scenes are surrounded by dancers and car drivers who don’t seem to notice what's going on, almost as if John and his foes are part of a different, intersecting universe.
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| John Wick: Chapter 4 |
“What was the idea behind that look in the beginning?” he muses. “We wrote down a million things that we hate about action movies at the time, and a million things we didn't. And one of the big things I talk about – we had no money on the first John Wick, so we needed people to help train Keanu with firearms. And we had a close friend that was in the LA SWAT department. His name was Steve, and he came in and he gave us a lot of his free time. And were talking one day, and he was like, ‘You know, all these action movies, they're always shooting police, and they're making the police look like the bad guys.’ And we kind of made this promise. Me and Keanu looked at him and went ‘Hey, man, don't worry about that.’
“We won't involve police. We're never going to shoot a police officer or anything like that. And we kind of stuck to that, thinking it'd just be one movie – but then, like, four movies later...” He laughs. “So rather than that, we just chose to not kill innocents, not to kill bystanders, not to do some of these things that other action movies do. There's nothing wrong with it, we just made that creative choice.
“In our world, unless you're in the John Wick world, it's kind of like a metaphor for the fantasy. Regular people just walk by. So in a nightclub, you wouldn't pay them any mention. John Wick walks around like a ghost or like he’s in a different dimension, and that's just how we wanted to separate fantasy from reality. Believe me, I'm as shocked as anybody else that it's worked for four movies.”
John Wick: Chapter 4 is available to watch on Amazon Prime and Apple TV.
