now that you've seen JohnWick4, watch or read our spoiler interview with director chadstahelski. He talks about crafting the incredible stunts, the end-credit scene, that ending, and everything in between.
Stuntman-turned-director, Chad Stahelski, was always the right person to partner with Keanu Reeves on a larger-than-life franchise like John Wick. Between his time spent understanding the mechanics and limits a human body can be put through, and his passion for all things martial arts and cinema, it’s no wonder John Wick: Chapter 4 was a mash-up of everything that makes action films so epic.
CHAD STAHELSKI: Yeah, I wish it was a little bit more systematic, but it does happen like that. You know, the movie comes out, it does a certain degree of success. You get the call, you have the congratulatory Zoom call, “Yeah, good job! We're awesome. It's great.
I had also just watched David Lean's, you know, Lawrence of Arabia. I'm like, “We gotta go back to the desert. We love Morocco. We gotta go to Aqaba, Aqaba by land.” We just started drinking and laughing like, “Aqaba by land! No, blind swordsman. No, fuck you, we’re gonna do it in Osaka. A samurai! Yeah, that'd be great. Have you ever shot a bow and arrow? Let's do bows and arrows.” And then we were like, “John Wick with nunchucks.
So, we knew we wanted that theme and we knew we wanted nunchucks and dogs and cars. And it's funny, I've always been a fan of some of Joe Rogan's podcasts, but I ended up bumping into him at the gun range once, and I was like, “Hey, how are you doing? I'm the guy that does John Wick.” He's like, “I'm Joe Rogan,” and, you know, he didn't even miss a beat.
It was supposed to be off Maltos Coast and stuff because we had this nice Templar idea, and then we're like, “Snowmobiles in the city, snow, blood looks cool in snow. So do a lot of snowmobile stuff.” And we're like, “We’ll have a snowmobile chase in it.” Then you're like, “Arc de Triomphe, a gunfight in traffic. Boom.” And we started reverse-engineering that out.
STAHELSKI: Got a lot of faces. I mean, I have a very good relationship with Lionsgate. They're great, they've been very supportive, but I don't think any exec or any producer in the world would smile when you say you're gonna kill off their successful franchise character. And everyone was very understanding of that, and it was good to come to that conclusion together without having to fight it or force it. And, as you can see, obviously, they're supportive of the ending that, but it wasn't an easy sell. It had to be proved, and even, like, we felt it was the right direction to go, but you don't know until you sit in that room with 3, 400 people and you really feel it.
STAHELSKI: Again, not to be evasive, this has always been a campfire tale, right? It's meant to be a myth. It's not meant to be a movie. It's not meant to be a plot.
So we put it at the end and it's like, “OK, we want to be a little, you know, hard-boiled in our filmmaking with John Wick, but at the same time, I don't know, let's leave it open.” And it had that little bit of, “Alright. That was cool.
I need that. Just throwing that out there. The four John Wick movies have spectacular action, and each movie has a set piece that looks impossible to pull off. I'm just curious, how would you rank, in the four movies, what do you consider the five hardest sequences that you had to pull off? So, choreography should always be this inclusion of obstacle, or hardship, and how you solve it. That's what makes it memorable, right? It's always like that. So you take that with the scenes, and it's not hard to put car stunts and fights together, but it is hard to execute. There's a reason people haven't done that before because it's hard. So we're like, all right, well, if that's our model, let's see how bad we can screw ourselves.
So that one was definitely in the top five, for sure. I would put the top shot in there just logistically trying to figure out, “OK, how are we gonna do this?” There's so much math going into where you have to put the camera, the camera to subject, how to get one lens to do it all without cutting, and all that stuff.
So what do we got? Arc de Triomphe, top shot, the Halle Berry sequence with that, and what's the other one? Oh, our mirror room was pretty tricky. So, fifth, what would that be? STAHELSKI: The stunt guys. My stunt team, we did a great job putting together a multinational stunt team on this great martial art stuntmen, great fight guys, and great physical gag guys, fall guys, basically. And you know, from the 80 7-11 team, to our Japanese team, to our Bulgarian team, just really great guys, and technology advanced so much. They use gel packs over hard elbow packs.
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