“Well, John wasn’t exactly ‘the boogeyman.’ He was the one you sent to kill the fuckin’ boogeyman.”
While the script, directors, and star had been locked into place, with financing secured, the filmmakers shifted focus to filling out other key members of the cast and crew, among them director of photography Jonathan Sela, veteran of such films as 20th Century Fox’s remake of The Omen (2006) and later Deadpool 2 (2018) and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) as they careened to the beginning of principal photography.
JONATHAN SELA
(director of photography, John Wick and Atomic Blonde)
John Wick is like falling in love. You were in the right place at the right time, and the universe put all the stars together. I met David Leitch almost ten years before on a horror movie that Clive Barker wrote called The Midnight Meat Train. It was a Japanese-directed, very visual movie and one of Bradley Cooper’s first movie roles; he hadn’t done much. David came aboard as the stunt coordinator for really interesting fight sequences. The director wanted an Asian flavor, but wanted to do it all with the actors. When David showed up, we totally connected. He was just a little different, more filmmaker than stunt coordinator. Most stuntmen come in and go, “This is my sequence, this is what I’m thinking,” but he came saying, “This is your guys’ movie, I’m just here to help.” So we got along really well. There was no ego, just two filmmakers along with the director. Dave and I really took charge of that sequence, because we knew what we were doing.
We stayed in touch, and when he got the opportunity to do the first John Wick, he brought me in with him and Chad. I read the script and saw that there was a lot of action, and I’m not really an action guy. For me, it’s story and a character-driven approach. I had seen A History of Violence a year before and always loved the fact that you knew there was a big story there, but you didn’t know how deep it was. It’s the same thing with John Wick; you watch it and you still don’t know how he became that person. He survives all these moments, but it’s not like you go back to when he was twenty and see his training. You don’t get that part of the movie, yet you go with the mystery. I love that. It’s this man, his story, and what he’s going through. For me, that was what made the project so interesting.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the John Wick universe are the interactions between various diverse characters such as those between John Wick and the manager of the Continental, Winston (Ian McShane, of Deadwood and American Gods). Among the other members of an eclectic ensemble that was assembled for the film were The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s Michael Nyqvist as Viggo Tarasov, Game of Thrones’ Alfie Allen as Viggo’s son Iosef, The Orville’s Adrianne Palicki as the villain within the Continental, Ms. Perkins, and 30 Rock’s Dean Winters as Avi, representing Viggo’s middle management. In a bit of a casting coup, the filmmakers also cast Willem Dafoe as Wick’s fellow assassin Marcus and The Wire’s Lance Reddick in the role of Charon, the Continental’s erstwhile concierge. And in a small but pivotal role, Blue Bloods’ Bridget Moynahan played Helen Wick. But perhaps the most important and memorable casting of all was the hiring of the eight-week-old Andy … as John’s dog.
DEREK KOLSTAD
(screenwriter, John Wick: Chapter 1 through Chapter 3)
Unless you’re an auteur—a Christopher Nolan, Scorsese, or Spielberg—who can get who you want, when you look at the first John Wick, it’s like, “Who’s available in two and a half weeks? And who can we afford?” So we didn’t have the luxury of writing for anybody. And yet what I love about Ian McShane is that he is the classic Hitchcock bad guy, where he talks too much. And you might argue that he isn’t saying anything, but the reality is, he’s saying everything. Now that’s not blowing smoke up my own narrative ass. He’s talking in circles; that’s what he does. And with Charon, you want a guy who is the blue collar within the white-collar world. And yet he’s the kind of guy who, if the head of the High Table walked in, Charon would be the only guy who would intimidate him. That’s where a lot of the playfulness comes into play. There are any number of on-screen bromances or partnerships—like Robert Redford and Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—where there was a warmth there. You’re like, “I think these guys actually do like each other.” Then there are classic examples that worked, but they hated each other. You just don’t know.
I love having the board of actors up on the wall, all the headshots. At the time for Winston, we had all these people that were available and that we could afford. And there were a couple on there where I was like, “Holy shit. That’s awesome.” I’d be like, “Honestly? This guy’d be great.” Then there’d be somebody saying, “Yeah, no.” So you begin to learn.
BASIL IWANYK
(producer, John Wick: Chapter 1 through Chapter 4)
The script had a great tone. That kind of weird loopy tone, like when he fights someone who begins, “Hello, John.” That script always had that formality. That formality is something that Keanu really responded to, because he’s inherently a formal guy. And that was kind of evoked from knights and chivalry.
JONATHAN SELA
At the beginning of John Wick, there was a lot of soft light, but there was also some hard. It’s not always a hard light, but there’s a lot of in and out that sometimes are between color, and sometimes between shadow and a hard source. Even when he goes to the club, he’s in shadow, and he steps into the light. There’s a lot of those things to keep the mystery. There’s always so much mystery between characters, you don’t know who to trust. Even when he goes with Willem Dafoe and opens the window and there’s the shafts of light. Again, you wanted to give them options and choices to who lights who. Who’s in the light and who’s in the dark. Always. So I just went with it. Every scene—and with every character—I tried to tell a story with light.
After one false start pushed production by two weeks, John Wick finally rolled cameras on October 7, 2013, for a nine-week shoot in and around New York City. Every film involves extensive and exhaustive planning, but this one in particular would require a Herculean effort coordinating the biggest details to the smallest if the team was going to be able to pull it off on a compressed and budgetarily compromised schedule.
BASIL IWANYK
We shot in New York for probably forty-one days, and we were trying to pour eight gallons of water into a four-gallon pail, because you’re pushing to the limits and trying to be as extreme as you can. There were a lot of tough night shoots in New York, and it was cold as hell, but all in all, the actors were great. They were fun, they were cool, and they were in good spirits. Chad and Dave worked their asses off. They put everything on the line, and it was fun to be in New York. I don’t want to say it was uneventful, because there was a lot of stress and anxiety, but we ended with a lot of money left in the contingency. We pushed hard. But it was a good shoot. There was none of those crazy kind of production stories at all. None of those, “What are we doing?” Chad and Dave are pros. They’ve been on more sets than I’ll ever be. They know how to, at least back then, be on their days and get their budgets. I don’t know if I could say that now, but back then, it was like, “Oh, shoot, we’ve got to move!”
DEREK KOLSTAD
I’ve always loved New York, but all of my research, honestly, is based on movies and stuff I love. Going back to the Scotts [Ridley and Tony] and Michael Mann and all that kind of stuff. I love those scenes in movies, especially in noir, where the city—Chicago, LA, Philly—is a character. I’m out in Pasadena, which is just outside the bubble of LA, but I love big cities, because you can go anywhere and choose to stand out or disappear. Doesn’t matter who you are. And I love that in New York. I also love the look and feel of the streets, and the lights and the darks and the shadows. It’s a tough city to shoot in, but what city isn’t?
And yet, you just want John Wick there, man. He felt like he was both a part of it and far removed from it.
BASIL IWANYK
The process of the movie was actually pretty fun. Shooting in New York City with a great group of guys was fun. But I will say that the week and a half leading up to the shooting of the movie was—no question—the hardest week and a half of my career. So much so, my wife and my kids came out to see me in New York, because they were really worried about me. I couldn’t eat, and I couldn’t sleep. If it went down, it just would’ve been over for me. I had a lot on the line. At the same time, it was some of the greatest memories of my career—right before the first John Wick, I was having stunt meetings where we just had a bunch of Matchbox cars and were going, “Oh, what if the car went this way and we went that way.” And I’m like, “Holy shit, I used to play army men and Matchbox cars when I was ten. Now here I’m in my forties and we’re still doing it. That is so cool!”
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
(fight coordinator, John Wick and John Wick: Chapter 2; stunt coordinator, John Wick: Chapter 3)
I grew up doing martial arts. Chad and Dave and I went to a martial arts school where I was one of their students. Then they got the stuntman gig, and I followed them into stunt work. Years later, 87eleven formally came into being after the movie 300, and during this time, Chad and Dave wanted to make the move into directing and were trying to find the right vehicle to start. Which they did with John Wick. And the good thing was that during that time, we were always training and kind of making pre-viz. You can actually see our older stuff and the progressions to, say, the John Wick style. So it just took the right amount of pieces to make it work. The funny part is, when we were making the style originally, we were designing them for different actors. Every actor kind of does it differently, and when we taught it to Keanu, he made it look a certain way. The weird thing is, when I was growing up, Keanu was the best, and he looked the best with the gun. When you see Keanu do it, there’s something smooth and elegant about the way he does it, so that style fits him the best. It’s magic. You can see it.
DEREK KOLSTAD
Keanu and Bob Odenkirk, who starred in Nobody, are among the few actors who, when you work with them on a screenplay, they’re more in tune with everything that they’re not saying and doing than what they are. So they don’t want more dialogue, they want less. They want more character and for it to be truly unspoken. When I go through notes with Keanu, it’s equal across the board: he has an opinion on every page. And he’s been doing it so long and so right that you’re kind of like, “That’s better. Fuck, that’s better.”
DAVID LEITCH
(codirector, John Wick; director, Deadpool 2, Bullet Train, and Atomic Blonde)
“How do I make this work for the character? What am I learning about the character in this moment?” They’re now going to use the action to define them in a more compelling way for the audience. Directing action is just in my blood, and I’ll always bring it to whatever project I’m on in some capacity. Even if the action is simple. When I read a script, I’m always thinking about how I can make the set pieces work more efficiently, or work better for the story, or adding spectacle for the purposes of making the character stronger, or putting them in more peril, or defining them better.
JONATHAN SELA
Every scene we went and broke together, we’d say, “Who is this guy? Why is he doing what he’s doing? What’s the point of every scene? How do we start, how do we finish?” It’s not just coverage—we wouldn’t just throw cameras in it, so that really informed the understanding of what this movie was. We formed a visual tone, a visual style. Then I started putting colors on it or lenses on it. Camera moves, colors. I built this palette of “On the Ground New York” and “Aboveground New York,” which characters are connected and which are not. Using colors to connect characters and not connecting characters. When are we moving, when are we not moving? Through that, we created this design of the movie that didn’t necessarily have a “Oh, this is what this movie is going to be,” but by diving in and analyzing the story, we formed a visual language of the story and what this movie is.
A key element to that visual language would come through the editor. Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir’s previous action film credit was for Mark Wahlberg’s 2012 production of Contraband, but otherwise, she had largely been known for small indie dramas out of Europe and her native Iceland. John Wick would change that perception forever.
ELÍSABET RONALDSDÓTTIR
(editor, John Wick and Atomic Blonde)
It’s actually a funny story, because I had been working with a director, Baltasar Kormákur, who is also from Iceland, but who has also been doing good things in Hollywood. He was up to do a movie called 2 Guns, and I thought I would edit it, but as it turns out, he thought somebody else would be a better fit. So I was kind of in the air when my agent sends me a text and says, “There’s these two stunt guys you should meet with.” I remember driving to a meeting thinking, This is where I am going to end. Doing a movie with two stunt guys. I should go back home. I met Chad, because David was somewhere else during the first meeting, and fell in love with his passion for the genre. Those guys are not only beautiful, they are extremely intelligent. And they know the genre so well, they know the history so well, it’s just a pleasure talking to them. You don’t have the possibility to not get fired up, so I was super excited.
But I didn’t get the job until a month later, because I hadn’t met David. I was supposed to Skype with him and Chad, but I had to go to this film festival that brought together filmmakers and musicians. So I went and kept waiting for this Skype, but they kept postponing it, because things kept coming up. I was like, “I’m never going to get that movie.” In the meantime, I’d just read the script when I went to a concert and heard these two girls playing in a castle in Poland, and I connected straightaway with this song “Think.” A week later, I jumped on Skype with David; we got along so well, and I was hired. Then, when I was editing the movie, I contacted the girls, who had never published anything, asked them if they could send me that track, and they did. So that’s how that track showed up in the movie. It’s so funny how things just come together in the universe.
While John Wick was directed by the duo of David Leitch and Chad Stahelski, with both having come from a stunt background, and while they could speak the same language, they differed greatly in terms of directorial style.
ELÍSABET RONALDSDÓTTIR
They’re very different people, they’re like black and white. But they’re both so lovable. Chad is maybe a bit more hyper. Gets more excited. David’s a bit more down to earth. Both have positive and negative sides to them, but I have to say, I’ve only ever seen their positive sides. I adore them both.
DEREK KOLSTAD
This is what I love about Chad: we both reference our favorite movies even if they’re bad. One of the things that Chad will bring up all the time is, “Remember those scenes in Return of the Pink Panther where all the assassins are after Clouseau? What if we did that straight?” That was always in the back of our heads. Common’s character in John Wick: Chapter 2, we always liked the idea of what if he’s just another side of John? John lets him live or die, we don’t know yet, but his character makes sense. You want to make sure your bad guy thinks they’re the good guy. Having that in play at any time makes it more fun and makes the actor want to play them.
JONATHAN SELA
They weren’t inexperienced. What was interesting was, as friends or even as partners, everyone thinks they know each other and then you go there and you’re like, “Oh, let’s do this,” and they’re like, “I don’t want to do that.” So there was a lot of different opinions. A big part of the job was figuring out how to bring those two people together. Sometimes I liked Dave’s ideas, sometimes I liked Chad’s ideas, sometimes I didn’t like either of the ideas. It’s like, how do you help them come together or push it without offending one or the other while navigating to where you think the movie really needs to be? There was a lot of that. But in a good way. Even in that, you have to make the best choice. So that was a really fun, healthy part of making a movie. It’s not always easy, but this sort of collaboration just doesn’t exist so much in movies today. We’re so formulated to American cinema—how to do coverage, where does the camera go?—that very few actual decisions are made. Very few bold choices.
What was cool about Dave and Chad, even though they hadn’t really directed, is that they had a really good history of filmmaking. Chad is an amazing director to work with. We can talk about anything. We can analyze the script, we can really break it down. I remember when we met, for them, it was really a big deal. “It’s our first movie!” Even though they’ve been on sets and been second unit directors, it’s always servicing someone else. It’s never been, “Well, this is your choice. You’re responsible for it.” So there was a great partnership. And it was a time in my career where I just wanted to talk about story. I just wanted to talk about choices. Not just, “Well, let’s show up in front of the camera.” I don’t want to do that anymore, I don’t want to be here with the idea of, “Just make it look great.” It’s not about great-looking. I wanted to have partnerships with people who wanted to dive in and really be fully responsible for the creation we make. We might fail. We might succeed. It’s not about that.
EVAN SCHIFF
(editor, John Wick: Chapter 2 and Chapter 3)
The biggest difference I’ve noticed between Chad and Dave are personality differences. Obviously, they’re both very talented stunt guys, they’re both very talented, story-focused directors. You can have a conversation with both of them, getting into the nitty-gritty of what references they’re making, what movies are important to them, what they’re trying to achieve with the sequence. You can talk to them about editing. Some directors don’t particularly converse in editorial speak very well, but the number of times I would start talking to Dave and say, “Oh, you should be careful about this thing over here, because then, you know, ten scenes over here,” and he’d be like, “Yeah, yeah, then ten scenes over here…” You can’t always have that shorthand with a director when you’re trying to explain to them something that might come to bite them down the road, but is very abstract in that sense because they haven’t shot it yet. So they’re both great at that. You can see where they came up together, and then you can see where their own personalities diverge.
Chad is much more of the dictator on set, I would say. Dave is a little more … friendly. There’s “on-set Chad,” and then there’s “editorial Chad.” Editorial Chad loves to talk all day long—he’ll come in and we’ll talk for an hour about whatever movie he watched last night. He’s very friendly, very loyal, laid-back, he does his jujitsu—he teaches jujitsu in the morning for two hours and then comes in and cuts for the rest of the day. He’s chill.
But on set, he is an entirely different guy. On set, you can look at him from one hundred feet away and say, “I should probably not go near him right now.” On Wick 3, we were on the roof of the Bowery King set, and they were setting up the next shot, and Chad was just in a folding chair literally in the middle of the set, all this action was going on around him. It was unclear to me exactly what was happening besides the general setting up of the shot. And I was like, “What’s happening? What are you doing?” And he says, “Well, if I leave the set, then everybody relaxes. And I don’t want them to relax. I want them to work.” That’s Chad. I didn’t get a chance to go on the Bullet Train set [David Leitch’s 2021 Sony action film starring Brad Pitt] more than once because of COVID restrictions, but I could just hear in the dailies, there’s more laughing on set. Dave’s a little more jovial on set than Chad is.
ELÍSABET RONALDSDÓTTIR
I’ve always been interested in action. I’m not a nerd, I wouldn’t be able to name a hundred action movies, but I’ve seen them. I love choreography. I have a dance background, and for me, this is the alpha male dance, and I think it’s glorious. Plus, they always choose tall people to do their action. And it gives completely different aesthetics. It’s beautiful. Just the hand movements get a bit longer, the kicks get a bit longer. I’m not saying short people aren’t beautiful as well, but it kind of defines what they’re doing. Even in Deadpool 2, Ryan Reynolds is pretty tall.
EVAN SCHIFF
One of the things we talked about in the interview is that Chad doesn’t like mid-motion cuts; he doesn’t like cutting in the middle of a punch. He told me very early on, “The only time we’re going to cut to close coverage is if there’s a mistake we have to cover up.” I’m glad we had those conversations early on, because that set the parameters for me as an editor. My job is to try and figure out what he wants and to give it to him, so him laying it out so clearly early on was great.
ELÍSABET RONALDSDÓTTIR
The first thing Chad asked me was, “What do you not like about action?” And I told him, “It’s when everything is close up and I can’t see shit.” And I always think that’s the thing that got me hired. But again, I don’t make action. I only work with what they give me. Jonathan Eusebio is an amazing stunt coordinator, and those guys—they know where to put the camera. And David and Chad know where to put the camera. They train their actors. Both Keanu Reeves for John Wick and Charlize Theron for Atomic Blonde, they train for months to be able to get those long takes. My dance background kept me away from butchering what they did. This is stunt photography, which is an absolute art form. I’m still so pissed that they didn’t get an Oscar.
EVAN SCHIFF
The footage he shoots is what I would call “very readable.” I can watch it in isolation, in my office, without talking to Chad, and know exactly where I need to be in a fight sequence in terms of an angle I’m showing to an audience. So between shooting with intention, with footage that is easily readable, and having that conversation, it was relatively easy actually for me to come in and cut these scenes in the style that he was looking for. That style was born out of Chad shooting second unit and directing second unit and coming up with all these incredible fights and then seeing them be destroyed when the movie finally came out. I think he was frustrated that he was not getting the chance to see through the scenes that he had conceived.
ELÍSABET RONALDSDÓTTIR
It was so equal. Chad and David were always together on set, discussing everything, and in the editing room, we were discussing everything. They are not directors who sit and say, “Two frames, three frames,” which I actually found very respectful. They wouldn’t do that. All we were discussing were characters. Because I come from Iceland, I like to approach it as a Viking saga, because there you can slap someone and five hundred people die. That’s just a normal, extremely violent day. So we were just talking about that, how the story would go and what would happen. I remember that there was one scene that, oh my God, we spent days on saying, “Should it be here? Should it be here? Maybe if we move it behind here?” We took this one scene and moved it back and forth, and there were discussions and meetings, and we kept moving it backwards and forwards, and then it ended up where it is. It’s the scene where he goes driving with the dog. He’s spinning on the empty airfield. And that’s where the big discussion was about the dog—not necessarily about whether the dog should be killed but that should he have the dog in the car? Is he going to kill the dog?
BASIL IWANYK
When you set up shots with the dog, the stand-in is a stuffed dog. And I’d be walking through, thinking, Oh my God, this movie’s going to take me down professionally and financially, and I’d look over and see ten people trying to light a stuffed dog, and I’m like, “I’m fucked.” It was insane.
DEREK KOLSTAD
There have been other movies where a cowboy’s horse is killed or, you know, a dog is killed, like Red. I didn’t think that’s what it would be all about. I thought it was going to be like, “Hey, holy crap, and holy crap, and holy crap,” and you peel back the layers of the world.
ELÍSABET RONALDSDÓTTIR
There was no way people were going to see that dog getting killed on camera. That was never going to happen. But David especially really pressed for it to be the dog. The thing is, if John Wick’s going to kill a hundred people, there better be a good reason. And it’s kind of square that they killed his wife—that’s been done before. So the dog was a good thing. It’s like a baby. You can’t have a baby killed. I like that it was a dog. I remember at some point going, “Maybe we shouldn’t have him say that for the hundredth time that they killed his dog,” but it was, “No, yes, they have to say it.” And it’s actually glorious that everyone says it: “They killed his dog…”
BASIL IWANYK
The big question we had over and over again in the script, which we really couldn’t answer until we showed the movie to an audience for the first time, is, “Is it worth all these people dying just because of his dog and his car? Are audiences going to go, ‘Okay, what are you doing?’” And are critics going to say, “This is so immoral. This is so nihilistic. And this is bullshit.” That was the big worry going in emotionally.
DEREK KOLSTAD
We always talked about John as almost the past, present, and future. One of the iterations we talked about was, “Do we show the night of the Impossible Task? Do we show the old John?” In reality, you had the John before, the John with Helen, and the John post-Helen. And from here on out, it’s the John post-Helen. And we’re like, “There’s no way he would go back in that capacity, because it would be an affront to her.” To me, that’s the ultimate Western. The best action movies find their roots in Westerns. Of going, “Just fucking shoot me, because if you walk away, I’m going to shoot you in the back.”
RAY MORTON
(senior writer, Script magazine)
One of my favorite scenes in the movie is the one in which Wick smashes his basement floor with the sledgehammer and literally digs up his past. Enhanced by his screams of rage, it’s the moment when the ordinary guy we’ve been following up to now becomes a mythic character.
DEREK KOLSTAD
The idea in the screenplay, and again none of this is new, but the idea that he’s far removed from the life—he’s left it—and yet he’d go to the back porch and he could see the city in the distance. So he left it, but he’s still in its shadow, and they beckon each other. That’s why we love these movies. You look at Nicholson in Chinatown—he ain’t leaving that city. That city is in him and he’s in it. And I love that kind of stuff. Westerns are the same way. When the guy walks into town and then rides off into the sunset, he’s gonna do the same fucking thing in the next town over. That’s cool. And I just wanted to make sure we have that sense of playfulness amidst the bleak, but at the same time going, “Guys, wink, wink, movie.” That’s fun.
BASIL IWANYK
The biggest difference between the movie and the script was we had no idea we were building this world in the script. We had no idea that the world of John and the Continental would be as evocative as it was. We really had no clue. We knew that we were creating an alternate reality, but we had no idea that people would respond to that as much as they did. That was shocking. That was a testament to the production design, to the costume design, the casting—everything. But we looked at the movie and went, “Wow, we created a world here. With its own ecosystem. And it works!” And that was something I was not prepared for as a producer. We did not have those conversations during the script stage. We had it during the production and during the design, but never during the script stage. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe we would have erred on the side of world-building and lost sight of the other shit that’s going on.
The iconic exterior of the Continental has been shot at the Beaver Building on Wall Street Court and Pearl Street. It once housed the New York Cocoa Exchange. The interiors for the hotel, however, have been shot at a variety of locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
JONATHAN SELA
The lobby [of the Continental] was a really cool old bank in the Financial District. We came in and brought some of the marble into it and glued it down to make it look high-end. But it’s all about shafts of light, so it feels like the light is coming in from outside from the windows. Right away, you feel like you’re underground, which is really high-end-looking, but it’s not. We were creating a kind of mystery. It’s all about light and shadow—you’re going in and out of light. Who’s in the shadow, who’s in the light? It’s all these characters. I think a lot of those things came naturally. A lot of thoughts behind it, but it was also the only things that made sense. Felt like the right look, the right tone.
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
We were at a place that was basically an old bank vault. It just felt expansive. When you watch the scene, it looks like we’re going in all these rooms, but the whole lobby area was partitioned off and looks busier than it was.
RAY MORTON
As serious as the movie is, it does contain some very sly, very dry humor. The Jimmy the cop scene is laugh-out-loud funny. As is the bit in which Wick lets the doorman at the Red Circle go just before he begins his infiltration, as well as his interaction with Harry in the Continental’s hallway later in the movie. The entire notion of the Continental and the accompanying notion that there’s an entire parallel society of high-end criminals and hit men that live in and among the regular folks of New York City, and no one notices, is also extremely amusing.
JONATHAN SELA
The visuals always felt right. The choices always felt like the right choices. Things just fell together really organically and felt right to me. Everything had an idea or concept, but as you were doing it, working it out into what I thought it should be, everything just felt right. The challenge was time. In the sense of, when you’re prepared, you can achieve what you want to achieve. When you don’t have the time and there are scenes where you couldn’t sit and talk, “What is this really about?” Obviously, we can’t sit there on set for two hours and go, “What is this shot? Do we start with a close-up? A two-shot?” Sometimes those aren’t even that in depth of a conversation, but it takes a decision when we’re on set and have to go, “Oh yeah, we’ll be back in two hours because we want to go decide what kind of coverage we need and think about it.” You can see the difference in those scenes, where you had to figure it out on the day. The ones where you put a lot of thought into it, they come together and feel so much stronger and powerful because you’ve given the audience every decision you’ve made. And most of the time, they were right. Because you’ve thought about the scene, read the dialogue, and thought, When would I cut to a close-up? When is the wide shot?, instead of just pointing cameras and shooting stuff.
RAY MORTON
I love the production design. The film takes place in New York City, but the design team chose primarily classical structures for the movie’s locations and then lit and photographed in a highly gothic manner that creates a world for the story that isn’t quite American but isn’t quite European either. Instead, the film feels as if it is taking place in its own unique neverland.
ELÍSABET RONALDSDÓTTIR
It’s easy to keep in the wide shots when it’s so well rehearsed. Amazing blocking. They know what they’re doing. So for me, it’s just fun. Our biggest arguments in John Wick were probably between me and Chad, and I love the guy, but I don’t like repetitions, so I would cut down some of the fights. Repetitions can be useful, but they can also just be repetitions, and they can take away from the big experience of something that happens once. It can minimize it if it happens over and over and over, so that was probably our biggest fight. But we just had amazing fun. Sometimes it got really heated, but just in discussing things. And again, this was just so lovely, everyone was just so passionate about that movie. The studio kind of left us alone, which often happens with first movies, because they don’t know what’s going to happen, so they’re not paying much attention.
BASIL IWANYK
Oh my God, that car chase on the docks, how bad is that? It’s soooo bad. I think we were supposed to have three cars, and only two showed up. When we were shooting that ending in the first movie, I’m like, “This is not the way to end the movie.” And we’re like, “Hold on. Keanu Reeves is going to fight Michael Nyqvist? This guy’s like sixty-seven years old. How’s this going to work?” That’s when I’m like, “Hmmm … I wonder if this ending is going to play like a flat noodle.”
RAY MORTON
The script takes an interesting approach to its antagonist. Structurally, Iosef should be the story’s main villain because he’s the guy who kills Wick’s dog and steals his car and so sets Wick’s rampage in motion. According to the traditional rules of dramatic structure, this means Iosef should be the last bad guy standing and the person Wick faces off against at the climax of the story. However, the Wick script does something clever by gradually pushing Iosef into the background and bringing his father, Viggo—Wick’s former boss—to the fore. Viggo becomes the film’s main villain, and Iosef becomes its MacGuffin, the thing everyone is pursuing, but ultimately doesn’t matter so much in the overall scheme of things. Iosef ultimately becomes so insignificant that Wick finally just matter-of-factly shoots him and moves on without breaking a sweat, which I find incredibly amusing.
BASIL IWANYK
The John Wick now, in John Wick 4, would’ve taken out Michael Nyqvist in two moves. Held the knife, pushed it in, there it is.
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
Movie martial arts and real martial arts are a little different. Movie martial arts is where you have the physicality of the martial arts. We have to understand camera and editing and all these things, because there are all these elements that have to be put together before it gets on camera. We have to choreograph it. Choreograph with the camera to make sure all your actors can get the movements down. There are all these elements before you even see it.
JACKSON SPIDELL
(stunt double, Keanu Reeves, John Wick films)
J. J. [Perry], Chad, and Dave growing up in stunts and then moving to directing had a vision of how they wanted their action to look. And with that, whenever we had a project, we would ask to train our actors as much as possible. Sometimes actors are like, “Well, I’ll come in for a little bit, but my double’s going to do it.” Actually, with us, that’s very few and far between now because we’ve gained the reputation of going, “Listen, you’re going to have to train a little bit, because we have a vision, and you’re going to be doing a lot of this. So hopefully, you’re down with that.” And they’ll say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” Like Charlize Theron for Atomic Blonde. So to have all those actors come in and train as much as they do was definitely our staple when we did a project.
ELÍSABET RONALDSDÓTTIR
Making John Wick was never boring, and it worked well. We just had fun. It was one of those movies I wish I could do every year. It was so many people with big hearts coming together, putting everything into this movie. It’s what moviemaking is supposed to be about.