Downloaded from YTS.MX
[people chattering]
[person 1] You want to try one?
What do you say? [person 2] Let's do it. Yes.
[person 1] Let's shoot. [person 2] Yep. Shoot.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
John, shoot.
[crew continues chattering]
[person 2] Let's go.
Roll Keanu back up. Let's shoot.
[person 3] Okay, let's mount up.
[person 4] Here we go.
[person 5] Keep the charge. Go time.
[person 2] All right. And let's roll.
[person 6] Quiet, please.
[pistol clicks]
[person 2] And let's roll.
[person 7] Rolling. Very quiet all around, please.
[person 8] B. [person 9] Victory 88 Charlie, Take 1. A-mark.
[person 10] Guys doing the shell casing, it will come this direction.
What's a good eyeline here to look at them?
[person 10] Let's see. That's good.
[person 11] Here to here to here?
No, uh, bring it around a little bit.
[person 2] That's good.
[person 3] That's better. You like that?
So, I'll start here. Three, two, one, and I'll just be like, "Fuck."
[person 3] Stand by. [person 7] Standing by. Here we go.
Yeah, let's see what comes. But if we can get the pull and--
[person 3] Quiet, please. All right, very good.
And thank you. Okay. Ready and action.
[grunting]
[groans]
[grunting]
[person 3] Good. Cut. [person 7] Cut.
[person 3] There you go. [Reeves] You like that?
[person 3] A little bit of anger is good.
[Reeves] When we say, "John Wick is pain,"
it's kind of like a "Fuck yeah," you know?
It's like a "Fuck yeah. Wick is pain."
It's like, "It's so good, it hurts."
Or, "It hurts so good."
Um...
And I think...
I think that's why the audiences like it, too.
I think you can see it on the screen,
and there's a kind of B movie, B-action genre to it,
taken to, like, a super high artsy level in a way.
But there is the joy of people getting hit by cars
and falling from impossible... Like, "You can't survive that."
And-- And then John Wick kind of getting back up or struggling.
It's like an invitation, you know?
And it kind of takes care of you, and it feels authentic.
I believe that that's in the movies,
and that when you watch them, you're like, "Yeah, this is like..."
As John Wick says in John Wick,
"It's personal."
[upbeat electronic music playing]
You know, I always looked at it with, like, art envy,
with, you know, Scorsese and De Niro.
You know, like, De Niro had his director, you know?
And so, when I think of that, then that's what I think of.
Like, with the John Wick role, I had-- I had my director there.
[Stahelski] This is 87eleven.
I try to start my day here every morning at 6:00 a.m.
before I go into the office.
[stunt performer grunts]
[Stahelski] This is where all the stunt performers come to train.
We've trained for all the John Wicks here.
It's also where I have to come and try to keep the joints working.
Yeah, a lot of miles on the body.
The wear and tear of not just stunt work,
but of all the martial art and the physicality that I've done.
I've broken my hands, both ankles, both knees, both hips, both shoulders,
both elbows, both arms, several concussions.
But if you're passionate about something, pain's part of it.
I don't think you can have one without the other.
It's really about choice.
What you're willing to do to achieve what you want to achieve.
Nice.
Growing up, my dad was very athletic. Mom was very athletic.
Everybody in the house got up at 6:00.
Before we went to school, we did laps with Mom in the pool,
or we went for a jog, we went for a run with the dogs or something like that.
They had that discipline of get up, go do something physical.
It was already instilled in me way back then.
[Eusebio] I-I remember Chad goes, "What are you doing? You wanna train?"
I go, "It's Christmas Eve." And he's like, "Christmas evening."
"You can train in the morning." Like that kind of shit.
[Stahelski] I, for some reason, never gravitated towards team sports.
I was a shy kid.
But when I was probably only like ten years old,
I saw a Bruce Lee movie. I'm like, "I wanna do that."
So I started doing judo when I was like ten or 11.
That kind of led to the martial art career
that I started when I was in California to go to USC.
In college, I had met a student who was one of the associate instructors
at the Inosanto Academy in Marina Del Rey.
Dan Inosanto trained with Bruce Lee,
and he was one of the greatest martial art instructors of the time.
The Inosanto Academy had almost a collegiate setting.
It wasn't one martial art.
He'd bring in instructors from all over the world.
Amazing instructors.
Literally, if I wasn't going to school, I would either jog the four miles
or take the city bus down to Marina Del Rey from Downtown LA
and take classes or spend my weekends down there.
I would sleep on the floor or whatever.
[Eusebio] Chad was probably the best kickboxer in that school.
I used to watch this guy just beat the crap out of everybody.
[grunts]
I just remember, if we were training kickboxing,
he would try to come up with the best training drills,
the best kickboxing drills.
Everything to just be the best at what we were doing.
That's always been his thing.
[grunting]
My last year in college, I had met a few stuntmen through the Inosanto Academy,
like Jeff Imada and Brandon Lee.
[grunts]
Brandon was working on his acting career,
trying to, you know, follow in his father's steps.
Super motivated guy.
Had the best laugh on the planet. Really talented martial art guy.
[grunts]
Every weekend, we'd get together,
and we'd do what we thought, hopefully, was martial art choreography,
but it was a bunch of us just trying to figure out how to sell a punch
and learn how to be stuntmen.
We'd have our old, big VHS camera, trying to figure out the angles.
[chuckles] I still have some of the tapes.
I go back and look at them going, "How did we not kill each other?"
I remember Brandon coming into the gym one night before a workout,
going, you know, "I fucking got it."
We're like, "What you get?" and he's like, "Look, they're gonna make The Crow.
I got the job being Eric Draven."
It was really, really cool. Like, we were so happy for him.
It was a big deal. Big deal for Brandon to get that.
And that's, um, that's kind of how I got my first big gig in Hollywood.
I was still competing at the time and getting ready for a big bout in Japan,
and Brandon had just gone off to North Carolina to Carolco Studios,
where they were shooting The Crow.
And we got a call saying there was an accident.
We're like, "He'll be fine. It's Brandon."
You know, we didn't think anything of it.
And he died, I think, 14 hours later.
And then the show shut down. They were still a couple weeks from finishing.
Between Alex Proyas, the director, the studio, and Linda Lee, Brandon's mom,
they decided to finish the film.
Jeff Imada had contacted me, and he knew how close we were to Brandon.
He knew I was already doing some stunt work at the time.
And Brandon and I had very similar body types.
You don't know what to think.
Selfishly, one part of me is like, "Wow, this could be really cool to finish, man."
The other thing is like, "What the fuck are you talking about?"
You're like, "Your friend's dead."
I-I can't recall what my actual head or mindset was at the time,
but I decided to do the job.
And Alex brought me down to a little basement in the studio there,
and we watched for like two days straight every daily we could of Brandon.
And he'd make me mimic walking, talking, sitting,
just every mannerism Brandon had.
And since I had known him for a couple years,
it was one of the most surreal experiences you'll ever go through.
Your career starts because of that.
[Bernhardt] Chad, when I first met him,
had, like, this long, beautiful hair down to here.
Insane. It was incredible.
He looked like Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans.
We actually met through a mutual friend at one of the first UFC fights.
Somebody was watching it at home, and we all met at somebody's house,
and Chad and I just met, and we started talking about martial arts.
Totally hit it off.
And I said, "Hey, I'm up to do the sequel to Bloodsport."
He was like, "I love Bloodsport. I'd love to be involved."
So he came onboard.
He became one of the fighters. He did one of the fights with me.
And Chad actually choreographed that fight.
And at the time, Chad was really into trapping.
We did a lot of trapping.
Chad used all my kicking. I'm a Tae Kwon Do guy.
And it turned out to be my best fight in the movie.
So when Bloodsport III came around,
I ask him, "Would you like to be the fight coordinator?"
So he came onboard.
This time, it's my turn.
And I actually think the fights Chad did at the time were incredible.
Even if you watch it now,
it's still a little bit like, you know, '90s, like... [grunting]
But the techniques are already great.
Then I did a movie called Perfect Target.
It was a smaller movie. We shot it in Mexico.
So, Chad tells me, "Hey, listen. I have this buddy
who's gonna come and visit and wanna hang out and maybe do some stunts."
I'm like, "Absolutely."
And I meet David Leitch.
[Leitch] I started training at a martial arts school in college
called the Minnesota Kali Group,
and they were affiliated with Dan Inosanto.
Once I was exposed to those martial arts
and that sort of martial art community, I was, like, obsessed.
And that's where I met a lot of my friends for the first time
who are still my friends today. And one of them was Chad.
He was just saying one day that he really wanted to go into acting.
And I was like, "Well, hey, if you wanna be cast, why don't you come out?
We'll put you in the movie. We'll teach you how to be a stunt guy."
You know, I was gonna go to LA for holiday.
And he's like, "Why don't you just come to Mexico and get on a movie set?"
And I'm like, "Well, I'm not gonna be working. It's gonna be weird."
And he's like, "Just come. It'll be cool. You'll get to see it."
So, yeah, I took my money that I was gonna spend on that trip, and I flew to Mexico.
It was an awesome experience.
[Stahelski] We just put him to work as little background extras
and then started teaching him stunts.
And then he looked like one of the guys.
So, "Hey, just double this guy in this fight scene."
He's like, "What do I gotta do?"
"Just snap your head like this."
I got to work one day on that.
Brian Thompson throws me through a wicker chair.
I was so excited. Couldn't wait.
Just do it again. Take 2. Take 3. Let's do it.
But luckily it was a low-budget movie, so they could only afford one take,
so one breakaway, and I was done.
[Stahelski] Dave wasn't pretentious at all,
so it wasn't about looking cool like stunt guys are trying to look cool.
He would play any part. He'd play the guy that would cry.
He'd play the homeless guy. He'd play the cop.
A lot of stunt guys just wanted to do the stunt.
They didn't want to act.
Dave was like, "I'll do the part."
So, very quickly, his career kind of took off.
After that couple of years, we ended up getting a run on television.
Chad was doubling the lead on The Pretender,
and I was doubling a ton of different guys.
There was another thing that was happening too.
Martial arts had started to come to America in terms of action.
Shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Martial Law.
And the stunt world at that time was very cowboy,
car, motorcycle oriented.
But now when you had this really specific need for martial arts stuntmen,
we became hot commodities.
And that's when Chad got his break on the first Matrix.
[Stahelski] Oh, my God. That was the first time I met you.
[Reeves] The Matrix.
It's impossible to really talk about any of the John Wicks
without talking about Matrix.
-Yeah. -That's where we all met.
I got this call saying they were looking for martial art doubles
for Keanu for a sci-fi movie.
A sci-fi movie! It was a sci-fi movie.
So I got the call, and I literally just went in for an audition,
and that's where I met Yuen Woo-Ping and all the guys.
Then they introduced me to Tiger Chen.
[Reeves] Two-time national Chinese wushu champion.
[Stahelski] Yeah. It was pretty mind-blowing actually.
This is Chen Hu. Call him Tiger Chen.
He was in charge of training Keanu Reeves for all the Matrix movies.
He's also my coach.
One of the best performers ever in wuxia.
So, when I got called to do the audition in Burbank,
all that was told to me was it's a Keanu Reeves sci-fi movie
and they need some kung fu guy. Sci-fi movie.
I'm like, "You need kung fu?"
He said, "Just go down there and audition."
I meet Woo-Ping, I meet the Wachowskis, and they say, "Okay, follow him."
And he goes fucking Wile E. Coyote and just does the Tasmanian Devil thing.
Some of the best martial arts stuff I've ever seen.
And I'm like, "Follow him?"
Every tumbling pass, every kick, every form, everything.
I'm, like, in jeans and a T-shirt, dripping in sweat, going,
"Well, this is a different kind of audition."
He was like jumping, kicking, punching. Woo-Ping says, "This is good.
He looks like Keanu, too."
From the very first day, he's training all the time.
Every day, even the weekend.
Every weekend he's just calling me.
I was like, you know, trying to go out and play,
you know, go somewhere to play, he was calling me, like--
-No, please. Please. -"Can we training? Can we training?"
[Stahelski] Please don't go karaoke.
I just didn't want to suck.
'Cause I saw Keanu, and how much they had trained him,
and he had like a six-month head start, and he was already, like, really good.
I had to go through so much training to learn, like, the kung fu and stuff.
Hong Kong style. All the wild wirework.
[Stahelski] And wirework wasn't huge even in mainstream stunts at the time,
so I'm almost learning from Keanu a lot of the times.
He had already been doing the choreography a couple months at least, right?
And some of your kung fu was outstanding.
Well, no. Movie kung fu.
The movie kung fu was pretty-- [Reeves] Movie kung fu.
[Stahelski] You'd already got the forms right, everything looks good.
You had the flexibility going. [Reeves] Yeah.
Oh, yeah. There you are helping me out.
Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Fucking awesome.
That's Chad into the wall.
That's Chad into the ceiling.
Oh, yeah. Then he's gonna break his knee coming down from that.
That's right. Yeah.
[Reeves] There he is on crutches.
[Stahelski] Before and afters. [Reeves] Before and after.
Yeah. We learned so much on that show. Oh, my God.
[Leitch] Chad came back from The Matrix,
and he was like, "Here's what's happening, guys.
Like, they shoot and edit their own stuff.
They choreograph, and they cut it all together.
And they're telling their own stories in their own sequences."
And they're like, "We gotta do this.
This is the way we should be approaching all this stuff."
[crew member] And action.
[stuntmen grunting]
[Leitch] We started to do it ourselves,
and we would get all the martial art stunt guys together,
and we would choreograph and edit fight scenes
as an exercise, but also because we just loved it.
[Perry] We would go and take a scene from Jackie Chan,
and we would recreate that scene.
And it became very apparent that Chad and Dave
were thinking like directors.
Like, why did the camera go there?
Why did we use this lens? How many shots?
How many moves do we hold here before we move here?
Previs was a game changer. Now directors saw what we can do.
[Stahelski] Soon we became known for that.
People would request them. Directors would request them.
Somewhere along the way, we started a stunt team.
Then we started a stunt company.
-[barking] -They don't like that camera.
[cameraperson] They don't like it? No. I can tell.
[Moneymaker] The idea behind 87eleven was that it was a one-stop shop.
They were an action design company.
You come here and you get a fight team, a fight coordinator,
stunt coordinator, second unit director, the whole package in one.
Whoo!
[Moneymaker] We were all kind of with this team,
we worked together, we trained together.
Chad and I got married.
So it was a very fun time.
Cheers.
I'll talk to you in a bit. Bye. See you later. Bye.
[Hernandez] Even if we didn't have a project,
Chad would just make us do drills like we had a project.
Put us in situations like, "Choreograph this.
You guys gotta learn this martial art. Let's do this. Let's spar.
Let's put a knife in hand. Let's see what happens when we do this."
[Stahelski] Our company started to get bigger,
and I was the one that was more of a coordinator first,
so Dave was working for me a lot.
Dave and Chad. Okay, let's step out and narrate this for a second, okay?
[Stahelski] All right...
Two partners. Two best friends. Here we go.
Aw, see, there's the hug. Aw. [chuckles]
They were best friends, thick as thieves.
You know, always training together, always working together.
But then we were very fortunate, we had a lot of work offers,
so Dave started doing his thing.
And he became a stunt coordinator and a choreographer as well.
[Leitch] Switch your lead to the right lead.
[Renae] By that time, they were like this old married couple
that bickered and fought, but also, like, tight as can be.
We used to call them Dad and Uncle Dad.
[Leitch] Before John Wick, Chad and I had directed
a lot of second unit together.
And then our company was getting so many calls
that we started to work separately.
I was doing big second units. He was doing big second units.
Action.
We were seeing each other every day and talking every day.
We'd riff different ideas for choreography.
He'd be on, like, TRON and be like, "Hey, how do I do laser disc things?"
And I'd be like, "There's some ideas," and bounce things off of each other.
[Leitch] You start to realize, "I'm telling one third of the story.
I might as well tell the whole story." [chuckles]
[Stahelski] Dave was already going down the first unit director
before I was actually.
I was still, you know, pretty content doing all the second unit stuff.
I was really getting the itch,
and I was, like, out there looking to find scripts and get them developed,
but to not much success.
They were offered movies left and right,
but they were all like the $5 million specials,
and they turned everything down.
They were waiting for the right, right project.
At the time,
I had finally optioned my first screenplay to Voltage Pictures.
It was 1,500 bucks which, at the time, was two months' rent.
And I was trying to figure out what to do next.
I remember just kind of going, "I haven't done a revenge movie."
And our neighbors were heading out of town,
and they had just adopted a chorgi,
which is a Chihuahua-corgi, puppy named Moose.
And I always write slouched in my chair with a pillow across my chest,
and the puppy slept on the pillow.
And I started writing, and I'd be like,
"Man, what if someone killed this fucking puppy?" [laughs]
We had met Derek on a general meeting. I'd read another script of his.
And he pitched this. He's like, "I have this action script I wrote called Scorn."
I remember vividly reading it that weekend and emailing Basil.
I still have the email, and it was like, "There's something about this script.
I think it's 'cause I love dogs.
The villain's really thin,
and it's not perfect by any means,
but I think we should go for it."
And he wrote back, "I agree."
There was just a clean, crazy hook.
"You killed my dog, and now I will exact revenge."
I wrote it with Paul Newman in mind.
So, he was in his early 70s. It was a Robert De Niro type.
His wife dies, he gets the dog, and the car is stolen,
and he kicks some ass.
The dog was the last tenuous connection he had to his wife.
But the body count was, you know, less than two dozen.
[Iwanyk] But I realized soon afterwards
that I may have backed myself into a corner because of the age.
And so then I was thinking, "Okay, do you go with slightly younger?
You know, what's that age underneath it?"
Then we started thinking about Keanu.
Keanu's agent is Basil's best friend from childhood and my first boss.
And he was like, you know, "Keanu is looking for something."
[Iwanyk] He just did 47 Ronin and was just finished shooting Man of Tai Chi.
He's ready to lean into his movie star-ness.
'Cause the thing about Keanu, and a lot of actors like this,
but especially Keanu, when he feels like he's repeating himself,
he runs the other way.
And sometimes you have to get an actor
when he or she is ready to give the audience what they want.
And Keanu was at a moment in time where he's like,
"I'm ready to be an action star again."
And so we met, and soon afterwards, he attached himself to the project.
We took about six months of developing the script
with Keanu's notes with Derek Kolstad.
We spent a lot of time together on that first one,
and it was slow going, like page, line by line.
He spent just as much time on other people's dialogue as he did on himself.
At a certain point, it was like, "Okay, how much longer could this go?"
We could develop this forever.
And then, always-- there's always an inflection point on these movies, right,
in development, when you develop with an actor, where you go,
"Okay, can we bring a director on?"
And he said yes.
But in the period of our development, couple things happened, unfortunately.
47 Ronin came out, and it didn't do well.
Man of Tai Chi came out and disappointed.
So the narrative that Keanu Reeves is an action star just evaporated.
And all of a sudden, our director list went from here to like here.
We're gonna have to really work hard to find a proper director for this.
Keanu was like, "Listen, I'm gonna give the movie
to Chad and Dave for second unit. They're action directors.
What if they directed?"
So, from my notes from an email, in the forensics of John Wick,
you met with Basil.
I wanted you and Dave pitched to them to be the directors
on April 29th, 2013.
A week before, you had sent me the script.
Yeah. And we had talked.
Well, you had sent it to me
for the action. For the action. Yeah.
I was like, "Yeah"-- Well, no, I had called for action,
but then I think you came back to me saying,
"Dave and I would like to direct it."
Oh, no. I think you smiled and went, "Yeah, that's why you're..."
Yeah. And so, then I was like, Basil--
You were manipulating us. [laughs] I was... [mumbles]
But I was hoping.
And then I saw from Basil's email to me,
he wrote, "Best directors meeting he's had."
We put together this incredible lookbook here,
and we started to sort of build the worlds of John Wick in the way we saw it.
It was a lot more stylized than I think anyone saw on the page.
Peace. He's looking for peace. [chuckles] Look at that shot of Keanu.
Emotional connection.
See, we said all the right things.
We talked about it being a modern fable.
We talked about this sort of visual minimalism.
She knew he needed an attachment.
Yep. And that was a whole week of casting for Daisy.
[Leitch] We wanted to have a world of, like, fun cars.
We wanted to have sort of our exploration of action and gun fu.
Yeah, and again, sort of the love letter to graphic novels
and anime and all of that that we love.
Transformation. Guns, lots of guns.
Boogeyman. World. New York City. The Continental.
They just didn't talk about the action.
They talked about the emotion
about what the world looked like and about everything.
I was blown away.
This is-- It's a pretty damn good lookbook. [laughs]
You have to remember, we saw John Wick as like this tiny little thing.
Two stunt guys directing, like, "No one's ever gonna see this thing, so fuck it.
We'll just try some weird ideas. We'll use it like as a training exercise."
And, you know, then they said yes.
And now we're like, "We better know what we're doing."
I remember thinking, "Oh, my God, we got these two great action guys
before anyone else can get them.
What a home run."
And I'll never forget, like three weeks after we hire them,
Ed Pressman, the famous Ed Pressman who's since passed away,
calls me about something else.
And he goes, "You stole my directors." I'm like, "What do you mean?"
"Yeah, we're about to go into prep on a movie that I was producing.
They were gonna direct it."
I'm like, "What movie?"
And they're like...
It was a movie like Midnight Run with Jean-Claude Van Damme
and PSY from "Gangnam Style."
And I'm like, "Those are the directors I got? That was the other option?"
[Kelley] Uh, the shorter the beard is, the harder it is to make it look real.
[Leitch] Well, we would want it to be a bushy one.
Okay. Right, right.
I mean, we have to make some hard choices.
I mean, I was just like pulling, like what is--
I didn't know what exactly.
Are they more in this happiness?
Yes, this is more in their happiness.
We're hoping for that. Okay, okay.
And of course, what I worry about this is,
you can see it on this side, is how patchy that beard is.
I mean, that doesn't bother me.
If you guys can live with that, because if we get that short,
I can't add hairs to fill that in.
[Smith] That doesn't bother me. This bothers me.
[Stahelski] Anything we do is gonna get a picture taken
and sent to people making a decision.
[Leitch] They'll approve and we'll figure it out.
[Stahelski] We want the beard.
[Leitch] The distributor wants him not to have a beard.
Like he's supposed to be the Keanu Reeves of The Matrix.
And we're afraid to shave it off because, you know,
he's done that look a million times.
Unfortunately, they're distributing the movie and have sold it foreign,
and they know what their people want, so...
I guess nobody cares what we want. Asia hates beards.
[person] I know.
[Stahelski] Asia hates-- [Leitch] That's what they said.
If we leave a beard, no one's gonna see the movie.
The movie's gonna flop.
[Stahelski] Can't be a first-time director--
"First-time directors, you want to hang it out there and have a beard? Okay."
Bye-bye, John Wick.
Partial bye-bye. We're not going bye-bye all the way yet.
[Stahelski] Yeah, no. It's like, "Hello, new John Wick."
[Kelley] So, this is the next guard down.
[Stahelski] Still looks like a beard.
That's what I'm concerned about too, and what they're gonna think.
Looks just like a beard. [chuckles] [Reeves laughs]
[Leitch] Go to the next level? Gotta go to the next level.
Go one more down?
Well, that's beard.
[Smith] We're all just like, holding on. I know.
They were pretty straightforward about...
[Kelley] No beard. Yeah.
[Kelley] Yeah.
[tense music playing]
[Stahelski] We're going to get action out of the hair.
Gotta get it a little bushy.
A little...
Okay.
Chuck it! Chuck it! Chuck it!
The suit definitely helps.
It's all about the suit.
[cameraperson] Tomorrow will be the first day, right?
Tomorrow will be the first day.
Tomorrow will be the first day of photography.
[Leitch] We are looking at the John Wick house,
and it's sort of three-quarters of the way dressed.
And we're gonna block some scenes here
and be ready to shoot tomorrow, hopefully.
We're getting on with it.
[laughs] [cameraperson] What does it say?
[Leitch] We're shooting on Monday?
[phone ringing]
Oh. Peter Lawson.
Pete.
I'm great. I just got the email.
We are temporarily shut down until further notice.
It seems our equity investor
who had to come up with the 6.5 to cover the gap,
um, he's five and a half short.
We had some financiers coming in to gap finance
because Lionsgate presold the international,
but there was still a delta of what we needed to make the movie.
No one was ready to get onboard for the domestic.
So it was really something that, you know,
we were gonna have to figure out how to find the money.
I mean, maybe if we get Lionsgate onboard,
and they take the domestic, and we could keep moving forward,
but I doubt it at this point.
I think everyone's just gonna have to take a kick in the nuts,
and it's all probably gonna fall apart.
That's what I think.
I think this is, uh, the nail in the coffin. So...
[cameraperson] You think so, really? Yeah, I do.
[cameraperson stammers] Wait, hold on. No, I mean, I do.
I'm not trying to be dramatic for, you know,
editorial reasons for our documentary,
but I don't know how you find six-and-a-half million dollars by Monday.
[Stahelski] What little I know of Basil, I know he's not a quitter, so...
He's a bit of a fighter, so we're not dead yet.
We are doomed. I mean, we are completely fucked.
We just had a gigantic hole. There was just... The money wasn't coming.
And I spoke to my lawyer and I'm like, "Well, say, if this movie falls apart,
who's gonna sue me?"
And he's like, "IATSE, SAG, the WGA, DGA." This...
It was, like, horrendous.
And he's like, "Listen, you gotta just get this movie made."
[cameraperson] Say if I was to give you like six million--
Hey, hon? Can I call you back?
I got Keanu on the other line, so I need to talk to him.
Thanks, hon. Bye.
[Leitch] Hang on one second. He's on the phone.
Hello.
What's going on? How you doing?
Nice. Did Basil give you a call?
He did not, huh? You haven't talked to anybody in the office?
Excellent. They're probably stalling on him.
It's... Yeah, I... [Leitch] Fucking...
[Stahelski] I'm a little annoyed, so I think I'll just tell you myself.
They've had a problem with their gap finance.
They're coming in.
We've recalled everybody, and they've pushed us again.
I'm sure they're scrambling trying to figure something out.
We have a few options around.
Luckily, we know a few people, so we'll try and close the gap as fast as we can.
So we'll get back to the office probably in the next 45 minutes,
storm into the office and try to retake the beach.
What did Keanu say?
[chuckles]
You know, Keanu is a little different.
When he yells and screams, it's a good thing.
When he gets really, really, really quiet...
Was he getting really quiet?
He was the most quiet I've ever heard him.
I reckon we'll lose about 20% of the crew.
There's already people gone.
[Iwanyk] A big part of the production office
just stopped coming in to work.
But then another part of the production office came in,
and they would come in my office, and like,
"Do you feel confident the money will come?"
And I'm like, "I do."
Uh, now, I was lying because I had no idea.
So much so, I had to give my credit card to the costume designer
to buy wardrobe, and it was really, really, really dodgy.
Any chance of reducing the budget by six-and-a-half million dollars
and making the movie happen?
That script would look radically different,
and then you'd have to go back to all of your international buyers
and go, "Hey, you paid us, you know, 250,000 for the rights in Germany,
but this is the script you're getting now."
And then everyone can go, "I don't want that script.
-I wanted the one that I bought." -Right.
And so, you kind of have to keep the integrity.
You can change it.
Slightly, but not--
[Leitch] Yeah. Six million dollars.
[Leitch] Keanu gave back money, Chad and I gave back money.
Like, we all gave back money of our salaries to try and close the gap.
I think Keanu had to defer and write a check...
[Reeves] Yeah. Some of that going on.
[Stahelski] ...just to keep our department heads.
[Iwanyk] I remember I would walk to my hotel
from the production office for hours because I was like,
"I need to get so tired so when I get back to the hotel, I pass out."
Because if I don't, I'm gonna sit there and I'm gonna be like,
"I'm fucked, I'm fucked, I'm fucked, I'm fucked."
We gotta fucking start.
If we don't have guys on planes by Monday,
you might as well cut the end sequence. It's gonna be a gunfight.
[Leitch] We've already pushed for seven days
and that's like a half million dollars' worth of money
that just went out the fucking window
when the mo-- when we were 600 short to start.
[Stahelski sighs]
[Leitch] It's a fucking mess.
[Iwanyk] And then, out of nowhere, the money came through.
[laughs]
Should be fully financed by tomorrow.
Ready to shoot on Friday.
[Iwanyk] We were blessed.
It was insane that we pulled this off in the amount of time we did.
It's gonna be... This movie's about vengeance.
Not John Wick's.
Ours. [chuckles]
[Iwanyk] And then we find out while we're shooting
that the money was never from this guy,
but it was Eva Longoria's money.
And I didn't tell Keanu until after the movie wrapped
because I didn't want him to be like, "What the hell is going on here?"
So yeah, if you look at John Wick 1,
Eva Longoria, thank God, pretty much saved the movie.
We got through it,
but I think that it broke a little bit of Chad and Dave's spirit
because they were first-time directors,
and they didn't realize that sometimes this is the game.
Things happen, especially in independent movies.
And so, we went into shooting the movie. We were already exhausted as we started.
[Reeves] I mean, I remember when I got to New York, and I...
You know, I like to visit the production office.
See what's going on. Yeah.
And I took John Saunders, who was the first AD, and I was like,
"John, let's look at the board," you know, the shooting schedule.
[Stahelski] I remember that. You wanted to see the schedule.
[Reeves] Yeah. [Stahelski] You're a schedule whore.
[Reeves] And I was just like, "How are we... We can't shoot that.
Like, how are we gonna do that?"
I remember you just were shaking your head.
I was like, "No, we need more days."
And he's like, "I know." I'm like, "We need to get more days."
[Leitch] We could not wrap our head around what could go.
How do we do that? How do we do this?
And Keanu couldn't, and the writer couldn't,
and the producers couldn't.
So we're like, "We're just gonna make the movie with less time."
[Stahelski] You know, we laugh and joke about it's just a movie,
but we all know, every crew member knows that you take it really seriously.
You wanna do the best job you can.
You don't wanna let down the people that stuck their neck out for you,
so you put a lot of pressure on yourself to do it.
I mean, at the end of the day, we had known Keanu for like the ten years,
eight years at the time from all the Matrixes.
But it's still Keanu Reeves.
You don't wanna let this guy down. Like, he's a pro, man.
This is Keanu-fucking-Reeves.
Like, you do not wanna let him down
no matter what you think the movie's gonna be.
So we decided to give it our all and put a lot of stress on ourselves.
[crew member] Guys, gotta keep moving. Gotta keep moving.
[crew member 2] Rolling! [crew member 3] Rolling!
[crew member 4] Action!
We were just assaulted with problems.
Go, go, go.
Shoot, shoot.
[intense music playing]
[Leitch] Problems from different departments
and then budgetary problems.
Gotta figure out what scenes we can cut.
[indistinct chatter]
The usual on John Wick, what scenes we can cut.
'Cause we never have time to shoot 'em all.
In low-budget filmmaking, you have to be in your own movies.
I would like to say this was a creative choice, but it was budgetary.
And then logistically shooting in New York problems.
[crew member] Excuse me, you gotta keep moving. Active walkway.
[siren blares]
[Leitch] I think it was just the movie gods hated us.
So we are on the cover of the New York Post today.
Vinny's fine work in the prop department is featured.
Makeup's fine work. Hair's fine work.
-[Reeves] The all-hands-on-deck... -[Stahelski] That really helps.
...on John Wick 1 was extraordinary.
When we went in to start crewing up, I mean, we were a tiny little movie.
No one was sure if we were gonna go. So, we couldn't really book a lot of crew.
So, it was catch-as-catch-can with the crew.
We just take interviews and whoever was kind of available,
whatever we... You know.
People had to cut their rates.
And then for the prop department
we got, no joke, Vinny Mazzarella and Joey.
[Reeves] Yeah, Joey Coppola. [Stahelski] Joey Coppola.
I mean, Vinny Mazzarella and Joey Coppola, those were our prop masters.
And they were just the coolest guys, and they just got it.
I mean, Vinny, like, stopping-- Like, we needed a garbage truck.
And he's running on the street. He's running down the street.
[Stahelski] 2:00 a.m. in Chinatown in New York on John Wick 2,
we decided we wanted a garbage truck to come in the alley and back like--
Yeah, back John Wick up.
Vinny just said, "What do you guys got in your pockets?"
We gave him a couple twenties. Yeah.
He came back in five minutes with a garbage truck.
With a garbage truck.
He paid the city garbage truck driver a hundred bucks.
[Reeves] I mean, you make connections on films,
but the connections that were made on this were really special.
They were pretty good. Yeah, we got lucky.
Personal and creative. Yep.
You know? Good people.
Loving, who love their work, who are amazing at what they do.
And they love the pain. [laughs]
And they-- And who love the pain.
They love to suffer.
Literally the day before we started shooting,
I saw Chad in the corner like brooding, angry.
I went to Dave, I'm like, "What's Chad upset about?
Like, somebody from the movie?" He's like, "No, it's his wife,"
and this and that. I'm like, "What do you mean?"
He's like, "Yeah, I think they're separating."
I'm like, "Now?" This movie?
We just got through hell financing the movie.
I wasn't getting paid.
Not only was I not getting paid,
I took money out of our house to fill some holes.
And I'm like, "How can this be?
How many more hits can this movie take?"
Hey. Hey. How are you?
[Iwanyk] And I spoke to Chad about it.
I'm just like, "I don't care what you're going through.
You gotta just suck it up and get through this."
And he's like, "Absolutely, don't worry about it."
He's like, "I'll be dark and self-loathing in private."
[Stahelski] We went through a horrible breakup.
So I did the whole movie separated from Heidi.
When he's locked in on something,
when he's focused, it's really hard to penetrate the wall, right?
So, I think in a relationship, you know, it's hard,
because when you're looking for an emotional connection,
or you're looking for some kind of, you know, something,
and he's just laser focused on something, you can't get through.
She felt she needed something more,
and fortunately I agreed with her.
And then we managed to get back together again,
of course after post when I have all this time,
only to get divorced on John Wick 2. [laughs]
So, you can see I'm laughing at my own complete ineptitude
to sort that out and balance my life.
[Leitch] What was really frustrating for me was that,
when we got our one fucking chance
that I personally had been working on potentially a lot harder than you
to get out there in the director world, and you're gonna blow it up.
It was hard for me to be empathetic 'cause it didn't feel fair.
Two weeks in, Basil called me on a Sunday and was like,
"You need to be in New York. These two are not talking to each other."
[Iwanyk] I actually thought that two first-time directors
would be better than one first-time director because,
you know, two sets of hands, you get more done than one set of hands.
Their disagreements seemed like it was a progression
through the course of shooting.
It's almost like the outside enemy of getting the film produced was gone,
so now the infighting could start.
I remember they spent an hour fighting over colors of bedsheets.
Fucking, it's supposed to be a fucking cool, hip place where you wanna be.
And it's like a fucking lavender purple fucking thing.
[Iwanyk] You know, in retrospect, I was naive to be surprised.
I think we probably argued every day.
But I don't think it was an actual argument.
I think it was we were both stressed out,
and we kind of took it out each other 'cause when you love each other,
those are the people you take it out on first.
[Leitch] You know what, do your fucking job.
Making that movie was like watching my parents get divorced.
We would wrap at like 3:00 in the morning, and I would like cry walking home,
being like, "What is this?"
It's horrible, man. [laughs]
It's like Mom and Dad fighting all the time. I'm gonna need counseling.
They're busy thinking.
I think they're working out their information for the day
in their heads, maybe.
At least that's what I'm hoping that they're doing during the silence.
It wasn't about creativity. It was about management styles.
And I think that Chad,
he gets a lot of juice by blowing things up for a second
and then having people run to put them back together.
And I just don't operate that way.
Do you like this or do you like that?
Does he put anything in his... He takes his coffee black?
[Stahelski] Black like his snot. [Leitch] Like his soul.
Like his soul.
[Reeves] How about that.
[Stahelski] Is he a single serving kinda guy?
The irony of John Wick 1 was Chad and Dave were really,
really, really comfortable with the action sequences.
The dramatic sequences and the acting sequences,
they were less so, because they'd never really done it.
And so, it was a strange paradox from what you usually deal with
from first-time directors.
Usually, first-time directors get overwhelmed by action sequences,
and the performance stuff comes naturally. It was flipped on this movie.
I think we shot inside the house for like nine days, or seven days.
Yeah. No, we camped out there. There was a lot of John Wick moping around,
and we're like, "This is the character."
Remember how much we did? Yeah.
[Reeves] Because he's breaking up you two, right?
[Leitch] He's breaking up your...
[Stahelski] Dave and I were so nervous
that they were only going to see us as stunt guys.
We can't focus on the action. We have to focus about the acting,
and the emotion, and the pain that this man is suffering.
So we spent nine days of a very small budget,
very small schedule movie of Keanu moping around,
of Keanu cleaning out the closet and packing his wife's clothes up,
and sitting there staring into the darkness and the abyss.
I remember like on day three, Keanu didn't say a word for three days.
He'd wake up,
brush his teeth,
look into a mirror,
go across the floor,
fill a dog bowl,
say, "Come over here,"
wake up,
and the footage was like mind-numbingly boring.
And it was endless.
You have a lot of John Wick eating cereal by himself.
Book making, right? Remember he did book restoration?
I forgot that. We wanted to show something, that he's very precise...
Precise. Methodical.
So we shot for like two days of Keanu doing bookbinding.
That's how terrified we were of being pigeonholed as action guys.
Oh, the kick in the head.
[groans]
I like this reaction. I do too.
You don't see that reaction a lot with, you know, like that kind of spasmy thing.
You know, you fucking vapor lock when you're in fucking pain.
[dog whines]
-[Reeves] Oh, right, killing the dog. -[Stahelski] Yeah.
[dog yelps]
[imitates yelp] Oof.
You should have heard that test screening the first time. Oof.
Never won that audience back.
Oh, yeah? [laughs] Oh, yeah.
Our first test screening--
How'd that go? That dog-- That dog went.
The audience went quiet,
and people were walking out.
The movie was still pretty rough. It was still really long.
But yeah, it got weird.
It is one of the most famous principles in Hollywood
is you never kill a dog.
As soon as a dog is killed,
you almost always are losing a big chunk of the audience.
[Reeves] Oh, yeah, the blood shot. [Stahelski] Yeah, blood shot.
The puppy crawled his way back to his owner before he died.
[imitates dog whimpering]
When these dailies got back,
we actually got a stern talking to about,
"Oh, fuck, you guys. What are you-- like, what the fuck are you guys doing?"
You cannot kill the dog.
"You're doing puppy porn, like, gore."
I'm like, "No, man, we got the baby lens on. It's going to be really artistic."
They're like, "The puppy's intestines are on the floor."
I'm like, "It's not intestines. It's just blood."
We had a whole argument about that shot.
I remember shooting the dog's death,
and Keanu was on the floor crying with this stuffed beagle.
And at that moment, you're like,
"This is either genius or,
like, the worst thing I've ever made."
We always knew we were gonna do it.
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's the movie.
There were others that kept trying to talk us out of it,
but we're like, "No, we got to kill the"--
You got to-- [stutters] Where's the movie?
Yeah, we didn't have a movie without the puppy.
[Reeves] No, you got to kill the puppy so you're killing the attachment.
But I think there was more talks about that.
There was that and then killing Alfie at the end.
You can't just kill Alfie Allen cold-blooded like we did,
'cause that's pretty icy fucking cold.
Iosef, got to go. You can't kill the puppy.
And his wife-- Puppy's gotta go.
And his wife has to-- We have to find out
that his wife was poisoned by the bad guys.
No, the wife has to die.
Those were the three notes we got back from certain peoples.
Even the night we were doing the puppy, we knew we had something good when--
I think because we shot that push-in over the blood first.
[Reeves] Yeah.
And then, you're just petting the puppy.
Yeah.
We're like, "That's awesome.
That's going in the movie."
And there was a lot of talk behind monitors that,
like, "Oh, no, we got to shoot a second... a second version."
Chad wasn't much of a dog person back then.
Now he's got dogs, and he's a dog person,
and he's embraced them, and he's done movies with dogs,
and he's trained them since they were puppies,
and they bite people in the neck and the balls and shit.
But he never had dogs back in John Wick.
Like, he wouldn't go, like,
"Chad's gonna direct this heartwarming movie about a dog,
a guy and his dog."
That would have not been Chad's first choice.
Which is partly why it was so easy to kill the dog, maybe.
He was just like, "We just get rid of the dog,
then I don't have to direct a dog."
And now it's funny.
All there are are dogs. [chuckles]
If that's the journey that Chad's taken away,
like he's become a dog lover, then I'm glad we created John Wick.
Because it's huge for me.
There's a guy that could be getting a bead on you here.
Which is why you're hauling ass...
Okay. It's more like, "Oh, fuck."
Sometimes people ask us, "What shot in John Wick 1 is Dave's and what shot is yours?"
I'm like, "I don't fucking know." Everything was a conversation.
He'd be setting up A camera, I'm setting up B camera.
It was just such an organic process. We'd worked together so many times.
We just knew this is what we ought to do. We gotta get this done. Let's go.
Let's come up with the best idea.
[Stahelski] Dave had a much more grounded sensibility.
I was influenced more by Tolkien and Japanese anime and manga.
And Dave wanted to be more grounded, gritty, emotional.
We gotta make it painful.
So we both saw the movie in different ways
and we landed in that sweet spot.
Especially in the time period with all the shaky cam stuff going on.
That's why John Wick clicked.
Dave and Chad created that-- we called it the John Wick style,
which was like long takes and 30-beat fight scenes
where you're doing like judo/jujitsu with a gun in your hand.
That was something created out of necessity
because of lack of time and money.
When you do the punches and kicks, you need the coverage, right?
You need over the shoulder. You gotta sell the hit.
And we just didn't have that kind of time.
So we all talked about, "Well, how are we gonna do this?"
Well, we're gonna take judo and aikido and like--
Wick is kind of the guy that's going to grab you.
If I got your collar... Yeah, you got him.
...it was over. Yeah, he got you.
It was over.
But that's the vibe we wanted. It was over.
It was just like if I got a collar, inside, anywhere,
if I got a collar coming-- it's just like, "We're going, bye."
You have no choice. You're in the machine.
You're going down. You're spinning. You're being twisted.
But you had thought about using that before you did John Wick--
Yeah, we just never really had the character for it.
You kind of implemented me into like, "Let's see if this can work."
Yeah, well, we had-- Take actor.
And experiment. And experiment.
"Oh, yeah, he'll do it. I know that guy. He'll come to train."
We had the close-quarter choreography kind of worked out with the gun stuff.
We just couldn't find the test subject. Yeah.
Once John Wick came about, Chad and Dave right away were like,
"Bring up the Safe footage. Bring up the Safe concepts.
That's Wick right there."
[Eusebio] Back in the day, we used to do-- well, we still do.
We do a lot of Jason Statham films.
I remember there's one movie called Safe.
And we were designing concepts for that film.
And Chad challenged everybody to combine jujitsu and judo with gun stuff.
And if you look back at the Safe previses,
it's all the moves and all the style of John Wick 1.
For gun fu, you did the mix of airsofts
and use visual effects for the muzzle flashes and blood spurts.
Because back in the day, we were using blanks, real guns to shoot.
So you can't do close quarter stuff. It's dangerous.
At a certain range, it's still lethal.
Usually it's like, once you fire a gun, you cut.
And show the guy firing the gun,
and then you're on the reverse so you know you're in the safe zone.
So we're doing shots that aren't cut right in front of each other,
shooting each other point-blank.
When they cut it together and put the muzzle flash
and the blood splatter on it, we all were like, "Oh, shit."
It was cooler than anything we were doing in any movies we were working on.
[Perry] We sent it to Chad and he damn lost his mind.
[Leitch] And I was looking at it like,
"Dude, we got to get this in a freaking movie.
Like, this is insane. This is awesome."
[Marinas] What's funny is we all thought Jason would murder that.
Like, he's so good at action, that should be easy.
And in classic Jason style,
love him to death, he had notes, he had thoughts.
You know, maybe he didn't want this. Maybe it was a little too stylized.
I don't know what it was, but for some reason,
Statham didn't gel with the style.
I was kind of like, "You got to be shitting me right now.
This is the coolest stuff I've seen in so long."
That being said, they ended up doing some small pieces of it.
If you watch Safe, there's a little bit hand-to-hand.
It's the introduction of it, you know, in that one fight in the restaurant.
There's just like a couple moments where, like, you see gun fu come to life.
But I think at that point, Chad was like, you know, "Fuck this.
We're holding this until we get our shot.
Like, we're not letting anyone else see this, because..."
He was right. It was gonna blow people away.
And I mean, we were so excited to put it into Wick.
Like, we couldn't wait.
[Eusebio] It's funny because even though they're both great action icons,
Jason's a bad-ass physical specimen too,
it just looked different when Reeves was doing it.
[Eusebio] If you say gun fu, you automatically think Keanu Reeves.
It's his style.
The great thing about Keanu is, I mean, he was just such a stud.
He does like 98% of all his fighting.
His stunt double comes in only when there's something really sketchy,
like me throwing him over the balcony.
He's so good. It's amazing.
One, you go right here. Grab.
[Bernhardt] I remember Chad and Dave coming up to me saying,
"Daniel, pad up."
I'm like, "What do you mean?"
We're doing masters, you know,
where you do the fight from the beginning to the end, no cuts.
And I really haven't done that in a long time.
And they're like, "We don't have the time. Pad up."
[Stahelski] Go, go, go, go.
[both grunting]
We shoot a master, and I remember me and Keanu's double, Jackson,
we were both so exhausted.
But it turned out to be a really good fight.
[Stahelski] We're rolling, guys.
I think it came out better than we had ever thought.
Because you've made it a character.
-Now it's like-- -[Reeves] Right.
This is where John Wick got to be like,
okay, he's the gun guy.
Yeah. Like, holy shit, it worked.
Yeah, but I mean, I think that ties into your philosophy
and David Leitch's philosophy
coming out of the school of the Wachowskis with the Matrix
was that character drives the action.
The story of the action,
the character of the action has to be so connected to story.
[crew chattering]
Last take of John Wick principal photography.
All right, that's a wrap on principal and additional photography.
Thank you all very much.
Good job...
[Stahelski] Hey, Dave, you just directed your first movie.
What are you gonna do now?
Smoke crack. [laughs]
To everybody that said we couldn't do it.
[Stahelski] We thought the hard part was gonna be training Keanu
and killing it with cool action.
We wrapped, we were like, "Oh, my God, we did it. We're in the clear."
And then there's this thing we found out called post,
where you actually have to find the movie.
[Stahelski] If you want distance, you got distance right there. Look at that.
[Leitch] I think post was where I had the biggest learning curve,
because you don't really do it as a second-unit director.
[vocalizing noises]
And then cut to the fast outside like...
We cut the assembly and we thought, "Oh my God, we did it."
We watched the assembly and we're like, "What the fuck? This is terrible.
Like, this is-- We're gonna never work again."
We showed it to some friends and family, and they're just going, "Yeah."
Tapping us on the shoulder, "Good job, guys. Yeah, yeah.
You did your first movie."
I think that devastated them. It was like,
"Guys, it's too long. It's too long. It's too long."
The first cut of John Wick, he was moping around his house.
It was like a Swedish noir movie.
It was very blue. He's crying, making coffee.
And you're like, "Okay. I don't--"
I think people are-- They're gonna wanna know when he's gonna start killing people.
We were trying to hold on to the script so tight
that I think we fought everybody for the first four, five weeks.
It's sometimes harder when you're like, "No, but this is the way I saw it,
and I just need to see it that way until I don't see it that way. Then I can..."
You know, and I'm like, I've already forgotten about that way
'cause this way is already so cool.
Basil, he got mad at us for being so depressed.
He's like, "What the fuck you guys doing? Like, get to work."
We're like, "Well, it's terrible. We failed."
He's like, "That's your assembly.
Like, now you gonna go make the movie, guys.
Like, you got 20 weeks. You know, hurry up. Go."
We're like, "I guess this is directing, huh?"
[Reeves] You know, they had to figure out the film in the cut,
and then the battles that you have to fight with the show business part of it.
You know, what do other people think of the movie
that you thought you made?
"There's too much action." "Not enough action."
"You can't really kill the dog." "Wait, what? What's the ending?"
"The ending doesn't work." Gotta redo it, you know.
And I'm sure they had a lot of, you know, [exclaims] "Is this fucking terrible?"
We kind of found the movie very, very slowly.
It was very slow. But yeah, we were panicked.
You know, at the time, remember, it was all about fast editing
and shaky cam and all that stuff. And we didn't have a single shaky cam.
Our stuff was very slow and with no VFX.
Yeah, we thought the movie was terrible.
Everybody but Keanu.
Keanu and Basil were just like, "No, just keep hammering.
Keep going. We'll see you in a couple weeks."
Part of it is like your baby, you know?
It's the art you created
and you're really into it and you're excited.
But then you're feeling like self-conscious about,
"Is this moment gonna be cheesy? And are people gonna like it?"
And I know I like it, but I've got to put it out in the world.
And it's all of that confidence and insecurity colliding.
I gotta believe in myself, but I also gotta deliver this
to an audience and it's gotta work.
[Iwanyk] We previewed the movie for the first time.
And the audience didn't know what to make of the movie.
They're like, "What is this? It's like Keanu depressed and crying.
And what is happening here? It's supposed to be an action movie."
And I'll never forget, it was the most important moment
in the entire Wick franchise history
where Michael Nyqvist calls John Leguizamo... Aurelio speaking.
[Iwanyk] ...and says... [Viggo] I heard you struck my son.
[Iwanyk] And John says... [Aurelio] Yes, sir, I did.
Because he stole John Wick's car, sir,
and, uh, killed his dog.
[Iwanyk] And Michael Nyqvist just goes...
Oh. [sighs]
-And the entire audience laughed. -Okay, we have them.
It's the greatest performance ever in a movie where someone says...
Oh. [sighs]
And I realized, okay, they finally got it.
We're supposed to have fun. This movie is crazy.
And from that moment on, it played great.
I remember the first screening,
they give you these little questionnaires to fill out.
And the first question was like,
"Do you think the killing of the dog justifies all this death?"
And we divided it up by demographics.
And I remember the men were only on board at about 60%.
But like 98% of the women were like, "Kill 'em all."
Because they knew it was not about a dog.
[Iwanyk] We had a really cool movie.
We had a movie that I think we were all like,
"Boy, there's like a world there that we never realized."
And Ian McShane and Lance Reddick really popped.
And Willem Dafoe was just cool. We pulled it off.
And we should have a number of domestic studio offers
because this movie really works.
And then, we started to screen it for the studios, and everybody passed.
-Literally everybody passed. -We didn't sell it? Like, nobody wants it?
Like, this is better than so many movies that I've been asked to fix. [laughs]
It was heartbreaking.
I misread the marketplace,
and I put these people in a really tough spot
because I advocated making this movie
and put this movie together that no one will ever see.
But someone at Lionsgate said, "You know what? Fuck it.
We might as well take the domestic
because we've already got the territories for international."
There was a separation between church and state at Lionsgate at the time.
There was a domestic piece and the foreign piece.
Lionsgate had only sold the film foreign.
And so Lionsgate bought it, but for no MG, for zero dollars,
which is, you know, not a great deal.
I'm like, "Okay, that's better than nothing."
They're not believing in it. They're not guaranteeing us theaters.
But then out of nowhere, their head of marketing sends this trailer
that is awesome.
No!
And he's like, "I could sell this thing."
This feels like a Lionsgate movie.
You working again?
No, just sorting some stuff out.
Let's figure out how to do this movie, and we are gonna do a wide release.
And then something else happened which was like a miracle,
but there was a slot open in October. A movie fell out.
There was this wide-release action movie called Kingsman,
and for whatever reason, they have moved the date to next spring.
There's this opening here in October. Let's go for it.
Then we were like, "Okay, well,
we need to somehow let people know about this movie
that's about to come out in two months."
And so, the marketing team says, "You know what?
We could premiere it at the Fantastic Fest Film Festival in Austin,
and that would be like a week or two before our opening weekend."
We've worked on so many big action movies before,
and we've mentored under a lot of great directors.
And it's been-- It's really incredible to get a chance to,
like, show people what we can do storytelling-wise and action-wise.
We show the movie, blow the roof off the place.
People freak out. Twitter-space goes nuts.
Fanboys went apeshit for it. They love it.
[Constantine] Then all of a sudden, reviews start coming in.
Reviews are fantastic. Everyone's saying,
"This is not just a typical action movie. This is inspired."
I was more surprised that nobody wanted it in that buyer screening
than I was when we showed it for the fanboys,
who I kind of deep down knew would like it because I'm one of them.
And so, one minute, we didn't even really have a theatrical release.
It was gonna just go straight to video.
And the next minute, it's like 1,200 screens. It's pretty awesome.
It was a huge win for all of us, huge.
But there was one thing about that first movie that I was so happy for.
It reminded the audience why they love Keanu.
And it reminded them that he was a movie star.
[Wick] People keep asking if I'm back.
Yeah, I'm thinking I'm back.
And now, you have an opportunity for a sequel.
But if we make John Wick 2 and it comes out in six years,
it doesn't have the same value in the audience.
I knew at this moment in time, we cannot slow down
with the idea of if we're making a John Wick 2.
We couldn't come up with an idea,
and Chad and I were attached to this other project
that I was really falling in love with,
The Coldest City, which is now called Atomic Blonde.
I thought we could do it first together.
And I don't know, Chad felt like he really wanted to do Wick 2 next.
And part of me was like, I want to do Wick 2.
But I know there's nobody they could hire that could do Wick 2.
We just-- It was such a unique thing that we'd created together.
It was either Chad or me or nobody.
Like, who are they gonna hire to do Wick? And I'm like, we have time to do Wick.
This has Charlize. It's ready to go.
And we can go make another movie, you know, and come back
and make Wick 2 when we have a great idea.
And he was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah," for a while. And then he started to get cold feet.
And I think he really wanted to stay in the Wick world.
And he-- And although we didn't have a script,
he's like, I think he really wanted me to stay, too.
I think Dave wanted to direct on his own. We all want to direct on our own.
That's directing. We all want to be on our own.
The co-directing thing, if we did three films together like that,
yeah, we would have done three films together like that.
Long and short of it, I just went to Chad,
and I said, "I want to direct Coldest City."
Um, and he's like, "Keanu's got a window. I'm doing this at the same time.
So, you got to choose. And I'm like, "Coldest City."
He was just like, "What? You're gonna do that?
You're gonna leave our franchise behind?" I think he felt like that.
I think he probably said those words.
It was a big blow. It was-- It was like, oh, my God.
At the time, I was fucking furious.
I was like, "Are you out of your mind? Like, this is a franchise.
Like, we're the luckiest people in the world. What are you doing?"
It was very dramatic.
And that was the straw. Like, that was like, okay.
To me, it sort of felt like people became Team Dave or Team Chad.
It's not like Chad ever said, "Don't work with Dave."
Dave was still a very integral part of who we all were,
'cause to us, he was Dave, no matter what he was to Chad.
When he left, it was more just like, "Oh, man, I miss Uncle Dave.
He was the cool one."
So, yeah, you feel a little bit like,
"Is it me? Is it them? Is it that?" You know.
It felt like I was an asshole.
Like, you know, of course. Like, no one just leaves for no reason.
Your ego says it's them, but hopefully your brain says it's you.
You kind of-- Maybe it's something in the middle.
Up to that point, they just went their separate ways.
They ran a business together, and they were very close friends.
But being in the same creative cockpit, I think it was too much for Dave,
and I think Dave was like, "I want to go do my own shit."
That made sense to me, you know?
I never had, like, "Oh, Dave's not gonna do it?"
That was like, "Oh, yeah, right. You're both directors,
and one's gonna go do that, and another one's gonna do this."
I was just glad Chad said, "Yeah, let's do it." [laughs]
'Cause if he hadn't have said that, I don't know what would have happened.
I don't know.
I know you called for John Wick 2.
[both] "Do you want to do it?"
I'm like, "What are you thinking?"
And he's like, "Look, all I know is we just got to know
-why we're gonna do it again." -Yeah.
But we didn't have a script. We didn't have any ideas.
We really didn't know why the first movie worked.
I know it sounds dopey to say, but it's not a science, right?
[Stahelski] They came back and said,
"So you guys think you're pretty clever.
Let's see what you got for John Wick 2. " I know, right?
Usually, when people talked about John Wick 1,
they were like, "Yeah, the dog. I mean, geez, that was great."
And we're like, "We don't have a dog anymore."
What are you gonna do? You gonna kill the dog again?
-Kill a cat? -Kill the parakeet?
-What are we doing? -It would've been laughable if we did it again.
And so, we're like, "Well, what-- Fuck. What are we gonna do here?"
And so, creatively, it was a big challenge
about how do we emotionally connect the audience to what's going on.
We kind of killed ourselves on the second one
because we didn't want it to be John Wick 1 and 2 and done.
When you think of franchises that get to 3 and 4, beyond, they did the sequel right.
A movie is not a franchise until you've made a second movie
and the second movie worked, right?
Once you have two movies work, now you have a franchise.
That was probably the most stressful.
It was like, "Did we get lucky or are we good?"
[Kolstad] We went through, I want to say a hundred ideas.
Massive universe builds, Nigerian mob, the triad,
any number of iterations.
It's not like we talk about it, hand the script off to a writer,
and then, "See you in six months." Like, Keanu's writing is like,
out of the blue he'll text me a scene, and then I'll have a set piece.
He'll text me, "I was thinking, John Wick should"--
And it's like two pages of dialogue.
We don't know where to put it yet, but we know it's a scene.
You know, I write for Winston.
I write for the Bowery King.
I write for John. I'll write scenes. You know, I'll send pitches of scenes.
Full scenes. But they all have, like, "We want this to say, the theme is this."
Yeah. Right. "The scene should be about this."
And then, how do we get there?
It comes together in the most haphazard way,
and it's kind of like that for like six months.
Just, "We don't know! We don't know!"
For the first one, it was just a handful of people in the trenches.
And the second one, it was a thousand people in the command center.
And the third one, you're just like, what in the hell?
But that was the hardest job I've ever had, was John Wick 2.
No one gets out and comes back without repercussions.
[Iwanyk] There were two things that broke the dam on the development.
One was the marker, and then the idea of, like,
we wanted to go to Rome.
[tense music playing]
[Stahelski] I remember we talked a couple of times, going,
"What if there's a Continental in every city?"
I said, "Where do you want to go?" And you're like,
"Where's one of the old-- What's cool?"
[Reeves] Rome. [Stahelski] Then we're like,
well, how does he get called back in? Well, he's got to have a marker.
Somebody... I think...
Marker, I think, was Derek--
Derek? No, Derek came up with the marker.
And then, Derek and I sat down and went, well, what if the marker is like a check?
Yeah. You can buy something. You trade it with it.
If you don't do this, you know the consequences.
I'm not that guy anymore.
You are always that guy, John.
You give somebody a marker, you have to honor it.
Otherwise, you risk being on the open market.
It's a whole arcane world of its own.
Market.
It's wonderful bullshit, you know? Wonderful.
[Winston speaking Italian]
We're kind of all under the table in this weird, twisted world.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like the development of it, right?
I mean, the high table was introduced in the second one as well.
[Stahelski] Number two is where we really kind of found our feet, I think.
-[Reeves] Yeah. -[Stahelski] With the whole world.
The John Wick world that it would become.
[Stahelski] When you're trying to do new or fresh or sell an idea,
a picture's worth a thousand words.
So I will usually storyboard a scene before I write a scene.
[Harris] The thing about working with Chad,
it's like working on a college film with your buddies,
and you guys spend most of your time
watching kung fu movies and anime together.
And all of a sudden, you gotta do a project.
So that's kind of how it was 'cause we would geek out about the same things.
[Stahelski] Todd is part of my inner circle creatively.
He's someone I like to riff with, not just about visuals,
but about story arcs, characters.
On top of that, he's incredibly gifted with a great eye, with perspective.
They throw some ideas at me. I throw some back at them or bounce them off the writer,
take those ideas, put those in the script.
[Stahelski] I'll tweak, he'll tweak, go back and around and around
and around and around. And it won't stop till the day we shoot.
It helps everyone's imagination see the scale of what you're trying to do,
the depth, the color, the pattern, the framing.
[Harris] It was always about getting into the psychology of John Wick,
what kind of character he is, what visually signifies who this guy is
and what makes him different.
This is very much noir
filtered through kind of a digital MTV aesthetic.
We kind of made the decision, like, what do we love?
And we wrote it up on the... "We love wuxia films.
We love chambara films. We love Westerns.
We love John Ford. We love Sergio Leone.
We love Bernardo Bertolucci. We love Tarkovsky.
We love Wong Kar-Wai. We love Zhang Yimou, you know, Akira Kurosawa.
We love Steven Spielberg."
All these great directors of action at the time,
or storytelling, and we just went, "Well, fuck it.
We're just gonna combine everything we love
and build our own franchise."
I think one of the best things about John Wick is
it wasn't an existing IP already.
Yeah. You know, so, there was no rules.
Yeah. We could make...
We could steer John Wick wherever we wanted.
We could do whatever we wanted.
We're like, I don't know, is he that guy?
Sure, he's that guy. He loves Mustangs. He's that guy.
Is he this guy? Does he like... Ah, he's that guy.
-Like, he speaks all these languages. -[Wick speaking Italian]
It's like every movie we could reinvent him a little bit.
I know, I love it.
[director] Ready, and three, two, one. Action!
[Iwanyk] All the Wick movies are very, very difficult to shoot.
None of them are easy, at all.
Fuck.
[Iwanyk] But 2 was hard, but I think we were all like,
"Do you believe this shit? We're here again. This is incredible."
John Wick: Chapter 2.
Like he never left.
[Iwanyk] And Keanu was just so happy.
He starts working out and training four or five months before he starts shooting.
And I don't mean like every couple of days.
I mean like five, six days a week. It's a full-time job for him.
But for Keanu, it's where he's the happiest.
My bad.
[director] Good take, good take, good take.
Going again.
I think you'd like to have,
I mean, I like it too when John Wick suffers,
but I think you like it when Reeves suffers too.
Um... [chuckles]
Not gonna say no.
When you see Keanu in pain on screen, it's probably for real.
Bad knee.
[Marinas] His knee doesn't work,
his right shoulder doesn't work, and his neck has a fusion.
So when you see John Wick limping, that's Keanu limping.
[grunts]
[Iwanyk] Chad told Keanu early on,
"I'm gonna push you past your comfort zone."
And Keanu was like, "Do it."
Now on 1 and 2, it was kind of healthy.
On 3 and 4, it was becoming like almost barbaric.
But Keanu would never ever, ever, ever, ever in a million years tap out.
[Spidell] Keanu's work ethic and training regimen
that he wants to do for these movies was just really impressive.
[Schultz] First thing you see Keanu walk on set.
He can barely move. He's got his head down.
He just looks like he's been beat to shit for the last two months because he has.
Um, I guess we can start here. And then there.
And then we add, this is fun.
That one's not bad.
Got a little rug burn. [Stahelski] Those carpet burns?
Yeah. [Stahelski] You already got the job.
Right there, got a little bit there.
[Stahelski] Action star. [person laughs]
John Wick.
[Spidell] For Wick 1,
it was really kind of starting from ground zero.
Building up from nothing.
[grunting]
[Valera] It wasn't gonna be the typical punch-kick.
It was gonna be more gritty, hard-style, messy.
So, we had to kind of beat on him a little bit.
Get him used to contact. You know,
just grabbing on to one of the guys and pulling him in.
That was just a drill.
He would just do that for 20, 30 minutes.
And then, pull him in, step, pull him in, step. [exhales]
We sit there and we do rolls for 15 minutes
and then break falls for another 15 minutes.
Like that alone is taxing on anybody.
I wish I could get an ice bath.
[crew member] I'll get it. [crew member 2] Still rolling.
Ice bath. I need an ice bath.
[crew member talking indistinctly]
[Marinas] In the training room, I got so used to four months of him collapsing
on the ground, coughing for ten minutes straight.
-[imitates coughing] -[coughing]
[Marinas] He sounds like he's gonna die between every take of rehearsal.
I've seen him go straight to the bathroom.
Like he's done that. He's definitely barfed during training.
He would go in the bathroom, come back out,
just white face and just be like,
"All right, what's next? Where we going?"
Which I think for all of us was just like, "Fuck yeah."
[grunting]
Chad used to get a camera and he goes,
"I want Reeves to do 50 throws before he leaves, in a row."
And he's like in New York and I'm in LA, but he puts a camera there.
So I'm training Reeves.
And then, it's like, he does like take-- He does 30.
And he's dying. Like he's fucking like passing out.
And I'm like, "Ah, we should let him go."
'Cause whatever, right?
Then I get a text. It's like, "No, that's number"-- Like he counts it.
"That's like number 31."
You know what I mean? I'm like looking. Right? He's watching.
So, it's like, he had-- he had to do it.
It's nuts, man.
He knows Keanu so well. He knows like how much he can do.
I'm like, "Dude, he's not g-- [chuckling] He's gonna die, right?"
Like most people are just like... They would have, like, stopped for sure.
So he knows how much you can push him, not just physically, but mentally.
[grunting]
[Stahelski] When you know you have someone as your lead actor go down those roads,
you have a whole nother level of opportunities
that a lot of directors don't have.
There's actors that directors meet on the day.
You know, I knew Keanu for years before I directed him.
I don't know if you realize what kind of advantage that is.
[Prescott] No better union could have happened in the film business
than Chad and Keanu.
Keanu is the hardest training actor
I've ever worked with, right?
He's so committed, but it's the same as Chad.
They're both the same.
They see something in their head,
and they will both bleed profusely to achieve it.
Do you remember the origin of "Wick is pain"?
Day one? [chuckles] No.
"Wick is pain" didn't evolve until John Wick...
3.
I think it was during the antique fight.
My knee had blown up. [Stahelski] Oh, my God, I remember that.
[Reeves] The first week of shooting and I'm sitting there,
and I'm like... [groans] And I think,
in the fog of our... in the fog of Wick,
I think I was sitting there and then you--
Like, I was there and maybe I was like, "Hey, how's it going?"
And you looked at me and you were like, "Wick is pain."
[chuckles] And then you-- [chuckles]
That sounded like something a director would say.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. [chuckles]
I remember that. Your knee was fucking swollen.
It wasn't that bad, but it was a little swollen.
We were trying to get Patrick and to get the doctor in.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I had the thing and it was a bit of a situation.
But that's my recollection of when like... That's the etymology--
...of when "Wick is pain" became formalized.
[Prescott] I think with Chad,
there needs to be a healthy amount of suffering
that is in direct relation with the success of the film.
When we were on the first John Wick
and we were doing the fight at the Navy Yard at the end of the film,
and it's freezing
and it's rain and it's terrible,
he was-- he was so--
I don't think I've seen him that happy before.
He loved it, you know?
And I'm sure Reeves was right there with him.
They're just both miserable suffering.
Anything hard is always gonna be a little painful.
Is good. Yeah, that's good.
I mean, honestly, if it didn't hurt, if we weren't stressed out by it...
I mean, it's more than just the stunts. Like we'd be working on the script.
Yeah. Trying to figure out...
And then that's-- that's a different kind of pain.
When you're trying to figure out these scenes,
you can sense that there's something cool,
we could do something really neat, but it's-- You can't quite get it.
And I think that's sometimes more painful than the-- [chuckles]
Well, almost as painful as getting hit by a bus.
Could you recommend anything for the end of the night?
Something big, bold?
May I suggest the Benelli M4?
This is where we wanted to up the action a little bit,
so we started Keanu training with Taran Butler,
the three-gun champion of the world.
[beep]
I didn't know that I was getting gun hands in John Wick 1,
but in Chapter 2, I was like, "The manipulations. Oh, yeah."
[Stahelski] We went from John Wick 1,
where it was like 100 rounds at a shooting session,
to when we got to Taran on number two, it was like 3,000 rounds.
Yes.
Did I not hit it? [trainer] Nope.
Chad's obsessed with weaponry and guns,
and I think always like the cutting edge
of what would be next and what we could do.
[guests screaming] [gunfire]
[Iwanyk] The airsoft thing at the time we thought was not revolutionary,
but we were like, "This is incredible."
But it was like 70% of what we wanted.
As we increased the sophistication of the weaponry,
Chad was like, "I want to be able to do an enormous amount of gunplay.
I never want to worry about it, and I hate airsofts."
And I'm like, "Well, that leaves us nowhere."
Because we can't have blanks, obviously. It can't be plastic guns.
You've got to remember, Chad was Brandon Lee's stunt double in The Crow,
so Chad more so than I think any person
that comes out of the stunt world in Hollywood
is hypervigilant and aware of gun safety on a set.
That's bad. Yeah, yeah.
[Iwanyk] And a lot of the gunfire is close combat.
And so, how do you do that with, you know, a gun that looks real?
So, you are the speed of light.
I'm gonna name the gun that.
Speed of light. All right.
[Marinas] But then Chad found Taran,
and they actually found the secret sauce of plugging guns.
Chad likes to have so much close contact action that he solid plugs everything.
What that means is a normal blank gun in a movie,
when you fire it, the flame comes out the front.
When he solid plugs it, you don't get that anymore.
You get the ejection of the casing flying out,
you get the reloads, you get the smoke, you get all that.
The action's operating, but it's safe.
You can go right up against somebody and pull the trigger.
It's not going to hurt them.
As soon as you put a blank with a blank gun,
you're basically shooting a pistol that's been fitted for blanks.
And you can get wadded. I've been sprayed a thousand times with wadding.
I've been shot and burned.
Nobody can get killed with a solid plug gun.
Nothing comes out of the front.
[shells clattering on floor]
And now the gun cycles. It's totally safe.
You can have your hand in the front. It won't do anything.
There was also a very big benefit audio-wise for the stunt performers.
Things are going on.
There's a hundred guys Keanu is fighting,
so people are yelling, making kung fu noises.
So, the fact that we had a plugged gun
that actually sounded like a real gun,
you know, it was easier for our stuntpeople
to take their cues off the sounds of the guns.
[both chuckle] That was awesome.
I like that press.
Ah. So fun.
-Now we're just gonna slap on the Benelli. -We better get that shotgun.
[grunting]
-Oh, yeah. Match saver. -Match saver.
When he runs out of ammo, this is called the match saver.
In the old-school way, you'd have to reach down to your belt,
grab a shell, drop it in, and drop the bolt.
And that takes, like, almost two seconds.
This way, I'm shooting, I run empty,
I know immediately.
I throw it in and hit the bolt.
-Also on that one did the jacket pull draw. -Jacket pull draw. Yeah.
Jacket pull draw. [Reeves] Jacket pull draw.
Very slick. So good. Jacket pull draw.
[Stahelski] A lot of the DNA, like we say, is always in the first one, right?
But I keep going back to number two as the real experiment.
[EDM music playing]
[Stahelski] John Wick rock concert.
See, where's Dave now? This is his cup of tea.
Dave would be up there rapping.
When we were in Rome and we were doing the concert stuff,
that was when we decided, okay, we have this huge crowd of people.
We have music going, like, how kooky are we gonna get here?
Like, is John Wick really gonna run up on stage and shoot somebody?
We're like, yeah. Yeah.
[Stahelski] This is where we were like, okay, we're going.
The crowd's cheering for shooting people in the head.
So, it's kind of like Red Circle from the first one.
[Stahelski] We do like a club scene.
That whole concert, for me, it came together
so big and so larger than life, and when we heard the music going
it was like, "Okay, we got to pump this up a little bit."
Then it was you like, "I'm gonna jump down the stairs. We're just gonna go.
I'm gonna run through the crowd."
It was this different kind of energy than number one.
It was a lot more aggressive.
[Reeves] Yeah.
Bang, bang! Bang! Bang!
Bang! Got to go in here.
Oh, no. Bang, bang!
Bang!
[grunting]
Shit! Bang!
We did invent this choreography in the night.
Literally did that on the night.
[Reeves] Flick. Look at that. That's legit.
John Wick's just got a lot of angry arms. Yeah, look at that.
I love that, the pullback.
I just want to see the heads explode. I just want to see a little bit of that.
[crowd clamoring]
[Stahelski] Yeah, pretty much just made this all up on the night.
[Reeves] But I think this introduced, too, the idea of the toolbox,
the way that you guys trained me.
The magic of what Keanu went through is we built a giant toolbox for him...
[crew member] You're out.
...that at any moment, we can pull out tools from and plug and play.
Secondary. [Perry] I built the training very similar
to the way we do choreography.
I would put a dummy round in the mag
so he would have to correct a malfunction.
So, I would create problems in the middle of this
that he would have to solve.
All that prep gives you this luxury of, like,
we can be flexible and in the moment,
and almost ad-lib the action
because he's already gotten so good.
What? Cut it!
This is what Reeves can do.
And see, that spoiled me for the rest of the movie.
So, now I know you can do anything. I'm like, "I can change shit on the day."
In most action movies, you can't change the choreography.
Yeah. You don't want to upset "insert name."
Yeah. After this, it was like, "Oh, no,
we can change everything on Keanu. He's great." [both chuckle]
All the stunt teams are like, "So we can still change things?
This is great." We can still change things.
Sorry. [crew member] Back to one. Reset.
Fuck! [crew member] It's all good.
[Stahelski] That's what I like about the John Wick action.
John Wick always feels a little back on his heels.
Kind of like he just learned the choreography that day.
Yeah, yeah. Which is awesome.
And after this, now it was a challenge to us.
How do we keep up with Keanu? [laughs]
Whoever comes, whoever it is,
I'll kill them.
I'll kill them all.
When John Wick 2 was being put together,
there were certain actors that were saying, like,
"We would love to be in John Wick 2."
You're not having a good night, are you, John?
Once they put Rome on the map, it was like, "I need to be in John Wick 2."
Chad, man, like, I have to be in there. I have to be in that world.
I reached out to Keanu, I was like, "Dude, all of our friends,
all the guys that worked on The Matrix pictures,
like, everybody's in the movie. You gotta hook me up."
Mr. Wick doesn't remember, but we met many years ago.
[Constantine] And then there were other actors that we thought,
"They would be great. Let's try to get them."
And at that point, not everyone was in on John Wick
as such a big thing that it's eventually gonna come out to be.
[grunting]
Oh, you motherfucker.
[Constantine] When you get to John Wick 3,
now there is this corner that has been turned
where pretty much everybody is aware of John Wick.
We can literally call it a franchise
because number one worked, number two worked even better,
and we're planning on making number three.
Now you have brilliant actors, Academy Award-winning actors,
like Halle Berry and Anjelica Huston,
who really understands what John Wick is,
wants to be with Keanu, wants to be with 87eleven.
I was a fan. I mean, there's not a dull moment on screen.
I don't need to see the script. Just sign me up.
I gotta tell you,
I've been looking forward to meeting you for a long time.
I'm a huge fan, John Wick.
[Iwanyk] We're part of the establishment all of a sudden.
When we weren't,
John Wick 1 was way out of the establishment.
Even John Wick 2 was, like, a foot in and a foot out.
And I said this to Keanu, I'm like, "Listen, for better or for worse,
we are now a place where in the economics of film and television and studios,
we have to expand this world."
Like, there's no version of us going, "Ah, guys, we're good."
You know, the shareholders of Lionsgate's like, "No, we want more."
And so I think we've all kind of collectively realized that,
and now we're like, "Okay, how do we make things just a bit cool, a bit different?"
[director] All right. Picture's up. Lock it up. Here we go.
Cool location, right?
[cameraperson] It's awesome. Thanks.
Fuck yeah. John Wick 3. Manhattan. New York City Library.
[Reeves] I feel like every John Wick film has had, like, the what and the why.
But what's the character? What's the why?
And then along that,
each film has had two or three,
like, action, not even sequences,
but, like, I want to be here. It's a mirror room.
[Reeves] It's gonna be the fight in the library with Boban.
It's gonna be the stairs in Chapter 4.
There's always been these impulses of action or set pieces,
and somehow the story has to go through here and here, you know,
and that kind of relentlessness of trying to figure it out.
Dogs, horses, pigeons, Grand Central.
Grand Central.
All right, get out of here. I gotta go to work.
This is Ballet Land. That's these ladies. What are we shooting right now?
Tell 'em. [both] John Wick 3.
That says it all, doesn't it?
-[Reeves] We're going to Marrakech. -[Stahelski] Sounds good.
Going to Morocco. Halle Berry in the desert with some dogs.
[exclaims] [Berry] It's one of the hardest things I've ever done.
I pushed myself to the limit. I had some broken bones.
[chuckles]
But I survived.
[dog snarling]
Dogs. We need dogs in the movie.
What are you gonna do? Well, we're gonna train dogs to attack groins.
-[man screaming] -[dog barking]
That was one of the concepts. That was one of the concepts.
John Wick 3. If you knew the budget we spent on dogs.
That was the concept.
[Stahelski] We're gonna train Halle Berry with dogs.
Got an actress who wanted to say,
"Yeah, I want to train dogs for seven, eight months."
And that's not from a book series. That's not from a graphic novel.
That's from us going, "Hey, man, you like dogs?
I like dogs. You like dogs? I like dogs. Let's do something cool with dogs.
We did guns and cars. Let's do dogs. Yeah, I like dogs."
Dog fu. Dog fu, man.
[barks]
And then, Keanu's going, "John Wick's got to be on a horse."
And I'm like, "John Wick on a horse sounds pretty fucking cool."
[horse whinnies]
[Stahelski] But a lot of other people that read the script went,
"Yeah, that's not... How is that gonna be cool?"
-Because he ran out of Central Park. -And we're like,
"We're not really sure, but we're gonna try and figure it out."
There's horses by Central Park.
[Stahelski] If you're willing to endure that little bit of fear of the unknown
and that little bit of pain of figuring it out...
[Reeves] Who doesn't want to see John Wick on a horse?
-[Stahelski] Yeah. -In a suit.
I mean, how we...
And I think most people get weirded out by it
because they don't know how it fits in the story
or they don't know how to make it work with the character,
and that's the beauty of what we have with John Wick.
It's our IP. Yeah.
So, there's no... [chuckles] There's no real rules.
Like, we've had people come up to us and actually say to Keanu and I,
"Well, that's not very John Wick."
And we're like, "I don't know,
that's John Wick, and he says he'll be on a horse."
You want to ride a horse? Yeah, man.
All right, then it's pretty John Wick, isn't it?
[tires screech]
[horn blaring]
Getting to know Jackie Chan and Donnie Yen and Jet Li,
and having worked with all those people.
I was talking to Jackie one time...
This is after spending a lot of time watching how he works.
And, you know, I was giving him a little shit.
You know, like, if Keanu and I were just sitting here and I was telling Jackie,
"You know, if you have two people sitting there and there's a desk between us,"
we're like, "Well, you know, he'd say something, I'd say something.
I'd jump over the desk, we'd start fighting,
and then we'd punch and punch and punch,
and then the other guy would walk out and say a cool line."
Jackie would do literally the exact opposite of any other choreographer.
He'd go, "Okay, you don't say anything. I'll say a joke.
I'm gonna try to walk out, but you stop me from walking out.
Then the room catches on fire, the door is locked,
we get handcuffed together and... What, are you right-handed?
Okay, so you can't use your right hand.
And you got to protect this vase here from breaking
because that's really what you wanted.
And you can't kill anybody, although everybody has a gun."
And you'd look at Jackie and go, "Well, how am I supposed to do that?"
And he had the best answer ever.
He looked right back and said, "I have no idea how you're gonna do it,
but if you figure it out, it'll be the best fight in the movie."
One of the sequences that I think will always go down
as one of the greatest moments in all four John Wick movies is the knife fight.
It's using all the things that would normally be a problem.
John is in a straight, narrow room, and he doesn't have a gun.
And all these assassins who have guns are coming to get him, and he can't hide.
So now he has to neutralize the guns that could shoot him and kill him, right?
That's number one.
Number two, he gets thrown against glass.
And what feels like it's gonna be a problem turns out to be an asset.
It's brilliant.
-[Reeves] That's so good. -We always called it the snowball fight.
You and your brothers get the snowball and you just chuck them at each other.
We were saying in every action movie,
no matter who it is, he always picks up a knife,
and they throw it, and it sticks in, and the guy dies.
And we're like, "That never really happens."
So let's do one where everybody misses all the time.
We kept rehearsing it and rehearsing it.
We kept changing all the different pieces.
But it still didn't fit right.
I was like, "Okay, it's gonna be a decent fight."
You know, I was looking forward to the horse stuff more and all that shit.
-Yeah. -It was about the third day of doing this.
It was when you come at him, just going one, two, three.
My opinion totally changed in this fight, right on that. Right here.
-[man grunts] -[Reeves exclaims]
What do I do? Duck.
Duck? Duck? [Stahelski] You better.
[laughter]
Duck?
This is real speed.
[Stahelski] This is... Yeah, this is Shane and Chen here.
[Reeves] Whoa! That's legit.
We were literally putting this stuff together on the day.
[Stahelski] Action!
[grunting]
Remember, like, when we had that, like, fucking take that's in the movie?
Yep.
Take forever. [all laugh]
Not that... I know.
Shane is, like, amazing as well, but I'm so slow.
But there was something about that one take that was like--
Yeah, that take, you know, it's great. It's great.
[grunting]
[Reeves] I was like, "Guys, I don't think I could do that any faster."
And Shane was like, "Me neither."
We reached, like, a high hand. It is.
It was so good but so very tired. Right?
[all laughing]
[crew member] That was fast. A lot.
Jesus.
What I learned in John Wick 1,
which you carried on through all of them,
was fight film with who you trained with. Yeah.
[Reeves] Everyone gets to know your timing, you know?
They know how slow I am, so they can do stuff in between.
"Come on, Reeves!" They compensate.
You figure everyone else does that.
I don't know why movies don't. They don't.
[grunting]
[crew member 1] Cut! [crew member 2] Cut.
[Schultz] Keanu, you know, he's a perfectionist.
[Reeves] I sucked.
[Schultz] And he is very hard on himself.
Obviously, his biggest action movies other than John Wick
were the Matrix movies. And the Wachowskis,
you know, there was no good enough.
And even if it is perfect, we'll shoot it ten more times
and make sure it's perfect-perfect, you know, super-perfect.
Super-perfect.
That's a Reevesian word, super-perfect. Yeah, that's--
That's where we get the fuckity fucks. Yeah.
All directed at yourself, which is very admirable.
-[upbeat music playing] -[grunting]
Fuck! Fuck!
[crew member] Cut. We'll go again. Fuck!
I can't do the fucking lock.
Fucking lock, fucking, fucking lock, fucking lock, fuck.
Fuck! Fuck!
Fucker. Fucking, fucking, fucking fuck.
Fuck. That is my bad. Fuck!
Okay, now let's just do that.
Fuck!
[grunting]
Fuck.
[laughing]
Fuck!
Fuck. Fuck.
Fuck it. I fucked that up. Fuck!
[crew member 1] Cut.
[crew member 2] Got it? Fuck!
[crew member 3] Yes. Fuck!
[crew member 1] Let's go again.
So, the fucks come from,
number one, you wanna do it well. You wanna do it right.
And also, when I've been thinking about it, it's like...
[sighs]
...when you have to do a wire, or you go into an action sequence,
you basically have like a spring.
You know, you have a tension that's waiting to release.
And I feel like the fucks are a way to like... [grunts]
It's like a kiai. Yeah. It's like a kiai. Like, "Fuck!"
[exclaims] Like, "Fuck."
And then, you get to ratchet it back up and go, "Okay, let's try again."
[crew member] Three, two, one, action.
Yeah.
[grunting]
[Perry] Reeves has consistently been one of the kindest, hardest-working,
gentle, generous people that I've ever met inside or outside of this business.
But when he plugs in and he goes all in on something,
he's going all in, and you gotta be ready for that.
[Dacascos] He knows what he's doing,
and when he grabs you to do a throw or flip,
it's like a vice.
And if you look on my Instagram, I posted a small picture.
My arms are just like, what?
But I was proud of those. I earned those, you know?
John Wick, Chad and Keanu right here, all over.
[Iwanyk] I cannot tell you how many times on a John Wick set I have taken my phone
and have videoed stunts and fight scenes that were happening.
Not for any other reason but to say, "Look, this actually was done."
You know, I've seen Keanu and his stunt double
go through some incredibly physical trauma on these movies.
[grunting]
[people cheering, applauding]
[Spidell] Getting the chance to double Keanu was pretty surreal.
His relationship with Chad being his double through The Matrix,
which changed my life...
So, having Chad pass me the torch was just a huge honor.
And just getting to meet Reeves and make that relationship.
Well, they're playing the character too, you know?
[grunting]
And they're doing things where they can get hurt.
Like, really hurt.
I don't know how many car hits Jackson took.
I mean, if someone counted those, there's at least 20.
And that's, like, in an edited version.
And then all of the falls that he did...
[crew member] ...one, go!
[groaning]
[Reeves] Crashing, hitting...
collisions that are like, "Oh, no. What?"
And then all of the choreography that he could do that I couldn't do,
you know, just physically.
Also the skill, the movement,
the way he moved, the way that he, you know, paid attention to the character,
to me in the role.
And there's a talent to that.
It's not just, like, put the pads on and get hit by a car.
You know, he's playing John Wick.
And he's gotta move... You want to sell it a little bit.
So, I think you're bonded and connected in art,
and you're connected in the physicality of it.
We're all very masochistic in a way.
It's just like, "It hurts." It's a "Thank you, sir. May I have another?"
My greatest physical pain was from the high fall on Wick 3.
So, I fall I think it was 12 feet to this little awning,
which is Lexan, which is like a plastic.
Slide down, I'm supposed to catch my feet on the ledge
and, like, pencil over, like dead body,
turn until I land on my back half on, half off the fire escape.
It's supposed to collapse and I'm supposed to fall.
You're going to... Yep. Yes, sir.
All right.
Well, we tested the gag,
but we never tested the suit on the Lexan that I slide down.
I just had, like, workout clothes on or something like that.
And so, the static electricity from a suit creates less friction...
so I think when I fell, I slid so fast
that by the time I figured out where I was,
my feet were going past where they were supposed to catch.
So my hip ended up chipping off the ledge.
And I'm going sideways, so I'm about to Million Dollar Baby myself.
Luckily, I caught myself and landed basically on the back of my head.
The fire escape didn't break away,
which would have let me fall and continue the shot
to where I would fall into a box catcher.
The first thing that I thought of was just like, "Move your foot."
My foot moved, and I was like, "Oh, thank God."
"We're gonna try the other one." The other went... I was like, "Okay, great."
[applause]
[Spidell] This is how I knew it looked bad in the video village.
Someone said Chad went, "Fuck!" [laughs]
[Stahelski] I can bring a Condor or you can come down your way.
I'll just drop. [Stahelski] Okay.
Three, two, one, jump!
[Spidell] I just looked down and Chad's just hands in his pockets.
"How you doing?" I'm like, "That sucked."
That was... Fuck.
[Stahelski] You all right? Yeah.
I'm like, "Do we need to go again?" He's like, "I'd like to."
He's like, "Can you?" I was like, "Yeah, but if we go again,
we need to go, like, now
because I have a feeling in about ten minutes,
I'm going to be like Batman 'cause I landed on my head."
He's like, "All right. Well, let's figure out what we need to do to fix it,
and let's go. All right. I'm glad you're okay."
Why was it so slick? That was slick as shit.
[Spidell] So I went and did it again. [chuckles]
This is another testament to our, like, bullshit.
See Chad looking at the monitor and I was like,
"All right, how was that?" He's like,
"Well, we're not going to beat the first one."
He's like, "It looks like you just fucking die."
And I was like, "Well, yeah." [chuckles]
So, you know, you're watching another person put their health at risk.
You know? But you also know that they love it.
[crew member] Nice jump.
[Reeves] And you also know that
when it turns out well and everybody's okay,
it's like, "Fuck yeah!"
And so, for me, it's just like you're admiring what they do.
We're all wearing the suit.
[Stahelski] When you come up as a stuntperson,
if you're looking for credit and notoriety,
you're in the wrong end of the business.
You get to do this little part. You get to...
You have the anonymity that I've always enjoyed.
And then, you know, you get to work with some of Hollywood's best,
and you get to be a ninja.
No one knew who you were, but you still got to sit in the movie theater
and go, "Yeah, that's me."
And you pull off some of the greatest moments in Hollywood.
I'm pretty sure that I have died more than anyone else in the Wick series.
Wick 2, in the tunnels, I was taking just shotgun hits.
Wick 3, Halle killed me as well.
I played guards inside the Continental.
I die twice in the club scene...
once inside the house,
two times in the house of mirrors,
a bunch of times inside the tunnel,
probably like four times in there.
I also doubled Michael Nyqvist, so I guess I died there as well.
-[screams] -[laughs]
There's a fight scene in John Wick 1 that Keanu strangles me.
Then in 2, we shot a big scene in Lincoln Square, I think,
but it never made it in the movie.
Then in John Wick 3, I'm the guy who kicks him underwater,
super slow motion,
then Keanu comes up, blows my brains out.
At Trader Joe's, there was some young guy who kind of was like,
"You've been in a movie. I've seen it. I've seen it."
I was like, "Yeah, I've been in a couple movies like John Wick."
He's like, "You were in John Wick?" I go, "Yeah." He's like, "Cool."
And then the next day I come in, and he yells from across the way,
"Hey, hey, that's the Speedo guy."
[crew member] Check, recheck.
[Stahelski] Cut!
[Lee] 3 was hard because we shot everything
but not Morocco because of weather,
and Halle had broken her ribs and needed time to heal.
And so we had this moment in time where we were editing the movie,
but the middle of the movie wasn't there.
We still couldn't figure it out.
We didn't have enough money to do that piece.
And then got to Morocco, and Morocco was awful.
[laughing] I mean, just like everything about it.
We were supposed to shoot in one place. We ended up in Essaouira.
We couldn't permit anything.
And then, we had the dogs, which also we had to ferry from the US.
There's five dogs. We get there, and one of the dogs wouldn't perform
because they just didn't like Morocco.
-[barks] -[Lee] It was also this fishing village,
and so there was dead fish everywhere,
which meant there was stray cats everywhere.
So there was fucking cats everywhere.
[dog handler] Santana, over here. [cat yowls]
Santana, over here. Hey.
[Lee] In trying to get the dogs to focus and not kill the cats,
we built a cat hotel on the side of the set.
I mean, it was just like pure mayhem.
Fuck!
When we wrap, everyone always has the same emotion, which is "Never again."
Like, "Fuck this. Never again." Especially Keanu.
At the end of every John Wick, we're like, "There's just never gonna be another one,"
because we are so dead and we hate each other,
and Keanu is literally half dead.
Halfway through, Keanu's like, "At the end of this movie..."
I'm not exaggerating. He goes, "I want to be beheaded.
I want to see the guy holding up my head."
And I'm just like, "One, no, and two, nice try,
'cause you will never be able to come back again."
After 3, we were like, "Okay.
That's it. That's enough." That's good.
"We've done it. We're good."
And it just kept eating at me, eating at me.
Like, we didn't get to do our Japanese portion.
We didn't get to do our samurai version. There was so much left.
I remember sitting with you going, "Okay, I got a pretty good why this time."
You just felt like there was more to do.
Yeah. [laughs]
Do you think you're ready to do the forward 180 one-handed?
Yes. And with your right hand?
Let's try it. Let's try it.
Do you want the gun now or on the next one?
Let's do it on the next one. Okay, I got it.
[upbeat music playing]
[Stahelski] We were told that there was too much action in John Wick 3,
-so we had to cut it down. -No.
[Stahelski] Boy, did we show them in number four, huh?
[upbeat music continues] [car engine revving]
[Lee] What was hard about 4 was we weren't in New York,
so the DNA of the movie had changed.
So all of a sudden, we were making kinda like the international Wick version,
which was like a little bit hard for us to get our sea legs.
And we had Donnie Yen...
which, amazing, but also another movie star on set.
And we started sort of behind. We were spending a lot of money.
[Iwanyk] It was coming off the pandemic, all of the masks and all that bullshit.
And it was a gigantic movie.
And it was also almost 100 days.
You know, when you think about the first movie, it was like 40.
Oh, my hips.
[Iwanyk] You could push someone well past the limit
when you're shooting 40 or 50 days.
When you're on day 92, you got to be careful.
[crew member] Cut! Goddamn it.
Why can't I fucking do that fucking throw?
[Schultz] They never got easier, and even as John Wick 4,
you know, now we got a hundred plus million dollars,
because now we're-- we're trying to make $120 million
look like $200 million.
[Lee] We also didn't have our, like, core,
that crew that we had for the three other movies,
and it felt different.
All of a sudden, we're like based in Berlin.
We had a lot of different teams.
And so, it was just like getting into a rhythm was hard.
Is that another car?
No. It would be... So, he would hit--
He hits the car, doesn't know he hits the car, then he gets floored?
Yeah. And behind that car, Bruce comes out of the abyss.
Chad said, "I need you to come do Wick 4."
I was like, "Awesome. We're gonna have the team together."
Nope. No Jackson because he's becoming a fight coordinator, stunt coordinator.
JoJo's working on his own shows.
So, I was under the microscope of Chad with no older brothers to watch my back.
[Marinas] Nice.
Chad just was like, "You're up. Don't fuck up." [laughs]
Instead of blocking, you shoot. And I shoot. And he's like, I shoot.
It sounds very... It looks very childish.
Donnie was a whole nother entity to deal with.
Being the perfectionist that he is,
he takes regular fight choreography and puts his Donnie factor on it,
and he throws a bunch of curveballs that we just had to be ready for.
This is... There's no technique.
We got to put some Filipino, like, a Kali in there.
Pop, pop, pop, pop. You know, the pop... You know, use that technique.
So, the pressure was high, but he just wanted the best.
[crew member] Cut! That's fucking awesome.
[Marinas] And that's how I would equate Chad.
Chad wants the best.
In Chad's words, "Don't do your best. Do my best." [chuckles]
I'll tell you one thing, because Chad changes things so much.
The nunchuck fight is almost shot for shot the previs. [laughs]
So, there's one thing I'm proud about.
[grunting]
[crew member] Good, cut. Cut.
[Marinas] Keanu was extra stressed out during the nunchuck fight
because the first thing you think about when you see nunchucks is Bruce Lee.
[Stahelski] Nunchucks are always one of those things that sounds great
until you realize how much work has to go into them, as we found out.
And back in his day, they didn't make all soft...
[Stahelski] Didn't have the soft side. ...rubbery.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all wood. No. Wood.
When Tiger and I were trying them, they were... there was a penalty.
Consequences.
So many times.
There was a lot of penalties on John Wick 4.
I'd pick up the real pair and go like, "Oh, no."
No, no.
Literally, anybody that picked up the real pair, ten seconds later,
yeah, put them back down going, "Fuck."
[crew member] And action!
[grunting]
[Schultz] Probably we should have bee able to shoot that fight in half a day.
[Reeves] Wrong fucking hand, Reeves.
But Keanu had a horrible ear infection. Could not hear anything.
I know he had to feel awful.
Goddamn it.
[Schultz] It took us, I think,
at least a whole day, maybe a day and a half.
But, you know, he never quit.
Why do I keep doing that, man?
Keanu, throughout the whole movie of Wick 4, he kind of had the flu.
And the work ethic to work through it was intense
because we had already started shooting.
He was doing a couple other fights.
But on his off time, when he wasn't on camera,
he was training nunchucks.
We would say, "You're sick. Take a day off."
He's like, "No days off. I shoot nunchucks in a couple days."
Does he have a wall? We've never found it.
[crew member] Ready and action!
[Stahelski] A lot of the Wicks are like love letters to things that we love.
Like the low-budget action movies we grew up loving.
So we had Mark Dacascos in John Wick 3.
I mean, we had Gary Daniels in number two, Daniel Bernhardt,
you know, Yayan and Cecep from The Raid.
I mean, look who we got on number four.
That was one of the things. We don't know the script,
but I know Scott Adkins is going to be in a fat suit.
Chad, I want to be in John Wick 4.
Yeah. That phone call--
Thanks for this opportunity. I really appreciate it.
I remember that phone call--
But I don't wanna do another movie with you.
I've had enough, to be quite frank.
Nothing's better for me when I get to call up Marko Zaror,
who I didn't know before we worked together, saying,
"Hey, man, I really love all your films." He's like, "You're kidding, right?"
I was like, "No, really. We watch them all the time. They're awesome."
I killed Mark Dacascos.
I killed Scott Adkins. Now I'm going to kill Marko Zaror.
[chuckles]
Who's left, man? Cynthia Rothrock? [chuckles]
[Stahelski] Shamier, when you come in, give it a one one-thousand,
then he can build in his look. Cool.
Beat, one one-thousand, go.
That's your first one. Cool.
Should I wait to see him before I dodge?
I think you could do it at the same time. Shamier counts to 1,000.
If you go to peek as soon as you hit... [Reeves] Okay.
...you'll run into him and that can be the, "Oh, shit."
[Reeves] Okay. Someone say action.
Ready, and action.
[Anderson imitates gunfire] Boom. Go back. Boom.
[Anderson] Bang.
Bang.
Bang. Drop gun. Draw. Bang, bang.
[Stahelski] Nice. Action hero.
[upbeat music playing]
We came up with this idea for top shot and what you see here...
Why do you keep saying "we"? Well, I mean the crew. Everybody.
'Cause like, okay, I came up with the idea, this is my thought...
What do you mean? This is like one of the first things,
this was one of the ideas, the concepts that followed us,
the duel, the top shot... Exactly.
More horses, that was on the plate.
So, we came up with all this stuff. Why? Where's the "we"?
Well... [chuckles] ...can you lie?
You! You! No. No.
-You! -They don't see it 'cause top shots--
No. There was no we who said, "I see a top shot in John Wick 4."
We wanted to do a top shot--
It was like, "I'm Chad and, yeah, that's what I see in my head."
All right, so kooky director guy comes up with this idea.
Thank you. And I used to play with Etch A Sketch as a kid.
So, I'm like seeing things in Etch A Sketch world.
And one of the things I've always hated about action movies is editing to hide,
camerawork to hide.
Because most times, you don't have Keanu Reeves,
you don't have six months of rehearsals,
you don't have the best stunt teams in the world.
So, you're hiding wires, you're hiding green screen,
you're hiding stunt doubles, you're hiding, hiding, hiding, hiding.
So what would happen if you didn't have to hide anything?
We wanted to say, "Hey, watch this, guys.
We're gonna see Keanu Reeves do all this, come up to a top shot
and then show all the bad guys behind the wall,"
so the audience is in on the gags, even before our lead actor is,
because they can see the bad guys coming in.
Kind of like Etch A Sketch.
But I don't think there's been a time
where we haven't had pushback, because people don't see it.
So, without maybe telling anybody, we started to build the set.
So we're already spending the money.
So by the time the actual "no" came back,
we had kind of already built three-quarters of the set.
So, the rationale was, "Well, we might as well shoot it,
but you guys got to do it in two days."
You don't take dictation from the studio by any stretch,
but you try to figure out a middle ground.
As someone who has to live between the creative
and the financial and, you know, the studio and Chad, it's hard.
I mean, he never accepts no as the answer. And beauty and magic come out of that.
But man, you go fully gray.
[electronic music playing] [gunfire]
[Stahelski] I think that the proof's kind of in the pudding, right?
Number one is pretty good.
Hopefully number two is better, three is better,
4 is... I'm most proud of, because I think
it's the most anime with framing, composition, depth of field.
[Harris] Chad has always been very cognizant
that John Wick is a franchise that's dripping with tone.
And it's that Sergio Leone, like, take your time, move through the scene,
be with the character.
Chad was very much into not cutting into a lot of details.
He wants to play it as wide as possible,
have dolly shots and crane shots and Steadicam.
So we would try to move the camera as much as we can
to make it more epic, more classic.
[Harris] And so, even in the earliest discussions,
we always make sure that, like,
does this feel important and does it feel special?
Does it feel like we're presenting an image worth resting on?
[crew chattering]
Pretty cool.
Sacré-Coeur.
John Wick's final scene.
[cameraperson] This is where it happens?
The duel.
Should be pretty cool.
If we can only figure out how to light it and how to shoot it
and how to perform it and how to edit it
and how to put score to it, make it look really cool, we'd be set.
Especially because we start shooting in... 34 minutes.
And so we begin.
[Western music playing]
[Reeves] After Chapter 3, it was like, why?
And I was saying, like, "The why is he has to die."
And I think as soon as I said that,
you-- you were like-- No, it's like, "I'm in."
Once you say that, that's the period, right?
And then you got to figure out how. Yeah. How?
If he's got to die, like, we got to make this count.
And I think that was the hardest part, right?
Because we knew, one of the first things we wanted to do, like, we wanted to do a duel.
[Harbinger] Positions, gentlemen.
[Stahelski] Then, you're like, "Okay, but it's got to mean something, like..."
[Reeves] Yeah. [Stahelski] My duel was like, "Well, he'll win."
And you're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. He's got to lose.
[chuckles] But he wins and he gets what he wants."
So, how do we get him out of this whole life?
How do we get out of everything? Mmm.
And that's when we set up the whole Donnie's character's backstory
of saving a daughter. [Reeves] Yeah.
[Stahelski] And Hiroyuki's character
of the daughter survives him.
So you lose a friend and a friend has to fight you in the duel.
Because originally we had Marquis duels you--
Right, yeah. It took a little while.
It was like a clock trying to figure out the right mechanism.
How do we tell John Wick time? [chuckles] Yeah, exactly.
[Lee] Chad always talks about how he loves the idea of frenemies.
It's in all of the movies, but especially in John Wick 4, right?
Like the Caine and Wick relationship
and the idea that you can love your brother,
but then also want to kill your brother.
I missed you, John.
It's so good to sit with a friend.
I love the Japanese concept of secrets and hidden whispers,
meaning only a warrior knows a warrior, only a soldier...
Like you have to be in the trenches with someone to really know them.
And just, I mean, that shot alone, two guys sitting there
both knowing they have to face each other the next day, I thought that was--
In a church. In a church.
We're damned...
you and I.
On that we agree.
What we've all tried to do in John Wick
is link John Wick to everybody in the movie,
so he's always got a relationship, so no one's a throwaway.
And I think that's why John's so beloved, even though he's an assassin.
I mean, even the tracker who's literally just met him.
Because we don't have the stereotypes of good guy, bad guy,
we can fuck with relationships like that.
Like Donnie and him were probably best friends at a point.
See you in the next life, brother.
Like, Hiroyuki's a best friend, but John puts him in danger,
and Hiroyuki stands up for him.
Friendship means little when it's convenient.
To play with friendship and bonding and loyalty like that is a real luxury.
Fire!
[Reeves] You started John Wick 1 with John Wick falling to his side.
[Stahelski] Yep.
[Reeves] And then, there he is.
He gets his grace.
We're doing this little focal thing. Mm-hmm.
So I'll have you guys look at the gravestone.
When I say "Laurence," they'll rack over to you. You turn--
And then make my turn. Exactly.
Very good.
[cameraperson] Is this the last-- not last shot.
You're making the last shot in the movie.
I think. Although, I could change my mind.
Probably tomorrow.
Or now. I've just changed my mind.
[cameraperson] So it's not the last one?
Why? Who wants to know?
How much does one more cost?
[chuckles softly]
We're still talking about John Wick and John Wick universe a lot.
But whether or not there's a specifically John Wick 5, I don't know.
Where do you think he is, heaven or hell?
Who knows?
[Lee] I think the movies are so, you know, hyperreal.
And we've proven that, you know,
people can survive all sorts of crazy things.
So, it's whatever we want it to be.
We still have ideas left... I know. We still have--
...that we haven't done, man!
[Iwanyk] It is a bit surreal that after a decade of nonstop John Wick,
that we'll have a break and that Chad's going off and do another movie.
I'm hoping, selfishly, he's gonna go,
"This is what it's like to direct a regular movie.
I want to go back to John Wick, where I could do whatever the hell I want
and Keanu will do anything I ask."
Creatively, like, even if--
I mean, if you and I just spend, like, seven minutes
and we could figure out, like, what haven't we done,
and we could come up with ideas for 5
and it would be like... You know, it wouldn't suck.
Wick is pain. It'd just be a different pain on a different day.
Yeah. But maybe we can find another story to tell
and cook another meal.
[crowd clamoring, cheering]
[Stahelski] I can't wait to see what happens next in action.
It's like fashion. It changes. There's generations. It evolves.
To be part of that movement is really exciting.
People always send me clips of different movies.
"Hey, look, they're copying John Wick" or "They're trying to do gun fu."
I dig that.
You know, when you read a script and it just says,
"John Wick action happens."
I kinda... You smile.
You're like, okay, that's pretty...
I kind of play it off. But I'm pretty like, "That's pretty cool."
That's inspiring because being competitive is what drives us.
And that's being competitive with what's been done, including ourselves.
I don't have any competition with Chad in my head.
[chuckles]
I don't think I have any competition.
I mean, he does his own thing.
He's doing... Well, he's in his own world.
He does Wick. Like, he loves Wick.
Wick is fucking Chad. Chad and Keanu, they're Wick.
They bleed Wick. They die Wick. They're like Wick, you know?
And that's why it's so good, you know?
'Cause Wick is pain.
Um... Maybe Wick is pain.
Maybe it's a great name for the documentary.
I think if there's one thing that the Wick process has taught me,
just from watching Keanu and everything,
is pain's not necessarily a bad thing, you know what I mean?
Pain's just the end result, often, of just brave choices
or putting yourself out there or trying to win.
Yeah, we all have to suffer. We all have to train hard.
But to me, no, honestly, I love that.
That's what I do every day anyway.
You have to suffer a little bit to be better, you know?
I mean, our bodies suffer. Our minds suffer.
And I love that.
We want to make it the best.
And in order to make it the best, you got to do whatever it takes.
And sometimes it hurts. It hurts.
And it hurts you, and it hurts the people around you,
maybe the people that are close to you.
But Wick isn't pain. I mean, Wick's a blessing.
I mean, it's like movie magic.
It's, you know... We all hit a creative and financial jackpot.
And, you know, there isn't a day that goes by where I'm not like,
"Thank fucking god Wick's a part of my life."
Is the pain worth it? Yeah.
It's just a lot of pain. [chuckles]
[Reeves] Congratulations.
Awesome.
[applause]
[crew member] Good job. Thank you, guys.
[Reeves] It's like one of the greatest gifts I've had in my life.
[chuckling]
Well done.
I had a John Wick decade, my 50s.
Fuck yeah.
I don't know if I could have another decade like that.
Um...
Yeah, I'd be very, very lucky.
But, uh, yeah.
Wick is pain. Wick is celebration.
Wick is surviving. Wick is trying to be free.
Wick is grieving.
Against the odds, surviving.
Wick is friendship. Wick is love.
You know?
It's all those kind of big ideas
in this... action movie.
And Wick is funny. And John Wick is funny.
[rock music playing]