“Why don’t you take the night off?”
A key element to the first film’s success came from the adrenaline thrill ride of John Wick’s assault on the Red Circle nightclub consisting of sixty armed thugs, numerous civilians, and just one Wick. In a combination of brilliant, candy-coated, neo-noir-infused, mise-en-scène, kinetic, imaginative fight scenes, Tyler Bates’s pulsating score, and balletic gunfights, it’s one of the most memorable action scenes ever committed to celluloid. Taking place in a nightclub, even the Red Circle embraces Wick’s hyperreal aesthetic in the sense that there’s an elaborate, sybaritic spa on the lower levels of the club in which barely bikini-clad waitresses wait on the hoi polloi of New York in large Jacuzzi tubs with drinks and what is presumably a gaggle of hookers.
The exterior of The Red Circle was filmed downtown in front of Surrogate’s Court on Chambers Street near the Manhattan Municipal Building, City Hall, and Wall Street, transformed into a trendy nightclub with some strategically placed lighting, scaffolding, and limousines. The memorable interior for the shootout was filmed at the Edison Ballroom at 240 West 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan and the faux Roman tubs for the spa below was shot at Aire Ancient Baths on 88 Franklin Street.
DEREK KOLSTAD
(screenwriter, John Wick: Chapter 1 through Chapter 3)
I came out here when I was twenty-six to try and do “this,” and I paid the bills through various means. Then I wrote this thing called Acolyte, which was a cool little screenplay—I’m really happy with it, and maybe someday something will happen with it—and they were asking me what I wanted to do next. We had watched a couple of movies, and I realized I love revenge thrillers. I always write with old actors in mind—they’re all usually long dead. In my mind, John Wick was Paul Newman. And in that script, the dog was sixteen years old. Same kind of iteration of the wife dying and the puppy and all that kind of stuff. The format, the structure, is all pretty much the same to what you see on-screen. I’d say the body count was half as much, a third as much. What’s so funny is Chad, Dave, and Keanu were at a certain point going, “More, more, more.” And we were like, “Fuck yeah, dude.”
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
(fight coordinator, John Wick and John Wick: Chapter 2; stunt coordinator, John Wick: Chapter 3)
For us, it’s like a sport. You train and you train and you train. You prepare for the stunt as best you can so that by the time you do it, you get all the kinks out. At that point, we execute it. The scariest part is the experimentation. The testing phase is sometimes more dangerous than the actual stunt. Anytime you do something like that, you always get nervous. It’s like I used to do kickboxing and corner for people, and I used to get more nervous watching the guy fight, because I saw everything. The same thing when I see these guys about to do something, as their supervisor, I always get a little nervous for them. At the same time, fear or that kind of nervousness is the stuff that keeps us sharp. You have to have a little bit of it.
DEREK KOLSTAD
When it comes to the action, everyone writes differently. I like the operatic, the ballet of the action. The coolest thing in the world is to see the Red Circle scene in John Wick. On the one hand, I had written it in the script that he shoots that guy in the foot, and he leans forward and shoots him in the face. But I did not write where John grabs the guy’s head and slams it down on the glass and unloads half a clip into his head. So when I saw it, I was like, “Holy shit!” Just chuckling all the way. The thing about action movies is that you have to convince the audience you are much deeper than you are. Bond movies are very simple, and yet there’s enough going on, enough that’s interesting, and the pacing is on par, and you have the humor, levity, and soul, and you’re in. So when you go to look at a rewrite to John Wick, it just goes to making sure that the pacing is on par and key.
RAY MORTON
(senior writer, Script magazine)
The filmmakers of John Wick combined both the more physical, grounded action movies and the heightened, larger-than-life eighties and nineties approaches in an interesting way. The core elements of John Wick are absolutely absurd. Wick is another one-man army who no matter how much abuse he takes, never dies and can’t be stopped; the film’s body count is ludicrously high, the villains are outrageously decadent, and the entire notion of the Continental—the full-service, tightly regulated luxury hotel for assassins—is beyond ridiculous. It’s all as over-the-top as anything from the eighties and nineties. However, the film treats all of this nonsense with absolute conviction and with dead seriousness. To them, all of this is absolutely real—as real as anything seen in the gritty action films of the sixties and seventies. And because they believe this, so do we. What would have been dismissed as direct-to-video claptrap in lesser hands becomes captivating in theirs. And this approach has proven to be very influential, as witnessed by some of the film’s most significant follow-ups, such as Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow. The narrative content of these films is the stuff of airplane novels and the cheesiest pulp fiction, but both are treated with the same seriousness as a great Russian novel, and as a result, both are extremely effective.
The second of John Wick’s innovations was its emphasis on highly choreographed, hand-to-hand combat. There have obviously been fistfights and knife fights and gunfights in movies before, but not with the intense precision, complexity, and balletic qualities of the fights in John Wick. The choreography between the performers and between the performers and the camera, and the editing, are as intricate, complex, and geometric as a Busby Berkeley musical number. The filmmakers took this classic form of choreography and combined it with the aesthetics and perspectives of a first-person shooter video game to create a unique style of cinematic action that really refreshed and enlivened the genre.
The third significant innovation John Wick brought to the action genre was its extraordinary brutality. The sixties and seventies action films were gritty and realistic, but the violence usually wasn’t overly explicit (interestingly, there were some dramatic films of the era—such as Taxi Driver and The Godfather—that were much more explicit than the action pics). The violence and the body counts increased in the eighties and nineties, but most of the violence in these pictures was relatively cartoonish and over-the-top, which took the edge off of the intensity.
In contrast, the violence in John Wick is extremely explicit, evidenced nowhere more than in the dozens and dozens of head shots Wick delivers to his opponents; shots in which heads are blown open and blood, brains, and gore spray out in veritable geysers from blasted craniums. The level of gore is much worse than the most bloody horror movie to the point where at times the movie almost resembles a snuff film. It doesn’t help that there is so much killing in the movie—Wick kills so many people in the movie that you literally lose count. The only other time I’ve seen this much brutal killing in a movie was in Rambo, a film that I’m sure would have been rated X for its onscreen carnage if the X rating was still a thing in 2008. The level of violence in John Wick is so brutal and so extreme that I will confess that when I first watched the film, I was really put off by how nasty it was. I am not at all a squeamish person, but I do have an aversion to cruelty, especially cruelty as entertainment. I can tolerate cruelty in a “serious” movie if it serves the narrative, but John Wick is not a “serious” film—it’s an entertainment, and I don’t find cruelty entertaining, I find it sadistic. And the first time I saw John Wick, I thought it was sadistic. After a while, I became numb to all the graphic killing, which made it hard for me to appreciate the film’s considerable assets. It was less of an issue for me on subsequent viewings, but I still think it was unnecessary and perhaps even damaging to the movie to be that brutal.
BASIL IWANYK
(producer, John Wick: Chapter 1 through Chapter 4)
A big part of the design of the John Wick action is not just the gun fu but not to cut away. The main reason why we did that is we didn’t have the money. And if we had more money, if we had $10 million or even $5 million more, I wonder if we still would’ve had those follow Keanu in a oner through stuff with no cutting. I think we would’ve had a B, C camera, second unit, all that stuff. We would’ve covered the shit out of it. More days. I’m telling you, we’d shoot things—I’d see the schedule, and I’d be like, “Hold on … We’re doing all that before lunch? There’s no chance!” And Keanu would show up, and he would do it! And we would figure it out. Because we’d have one camera, and we would maybe cover it from another point of view. Keanu trained his ass off, it was so well rehearsed. The stuntmen were incredible. We pulled off things that, on a normal movie, would take three days, we did in half a day. That was out of necessity. We didn’t have the money, and because we shot in New York, money was time. If you go overtime in New York, you’re paying out the ass. It was always a sense of expediency. Economic expediency. Ultimately, it turned out to be an action aesthetic that people loved. And I love as well. We realized we could make that incredibly cool, but we also realized we couldn’t find any other way to do it.
JONATHAN SELA
(director of photography, John Wick and Atomic Blonde)
That was the one thing I would say makes a big difference with Chad and David. It’s both them and, obviously, Keanu, but even Atomic Blonde is a good example with someone like Charlize Theron—someone who just really wants to do a good job. Essentially, it’s like being a dancer. You’re not really hurting anyone, so it’s learning a choreography. It’s a ballet of motion—it’s a fight between two people, lifting them up, rotating; it’s the same thing where you’re just moving your body differently. Most people are like, “Ugh,” to do fights. Well, no, if you’re a good dancer, you’re going to know how to do fights. That was the fun part. They could have gone the easy route and just gone, “Cut, cut, cut, cut,” but they really didn’t want to. They went, “This is what we’ve done all the time,” which is the faking part, because two people are not going to really punch each other, hurt, and break their necks. That’s the cheating of movies. This punch is going to look good this way, and this kick is going to look good that way. They wanted to choreograph things in a way that the audience would think, Wow, this guy is really there, it’s really him, he’s really going through it. You really feel it, especially with Atomic Blonde, and there’s that big fighting sequence, and when it’s done, you almost want to take a breath of fresh air. “Whoosh, that was a lot.” You feel it as an audience. That was really important, to figure out ways to do stuff like that.
CHAD STAHELSKI
(codirector, John Wick; director, John Wick: Chapter 2 through Chapter 4)
Most modern action films are cut or edited in a very specific way, or a very fast or choppy way. Again, there are some directors and some editors out there that do it as an aesthetic. It’s a style. And then there’s others that do it because they’re trying to hide something or they didn’t prepare properly. We found that with a lot of action directors, it’s mostly you’re trying to hide the stunt double, you’re trying to hide the light, you’re trying to hide the set, you’re trying to hide the wires, you’re trying to hide the imperfections of performance, you’re trying to hide that you didn’t have enough prep time or the cameraman’s inability to capture the action. We decided we’re just going to prep. We have a big imagination, but it does come down to John Wick. So rather than have a scene where you have two guys in suits sitting in a room going, “John Wick was a badass; he did this,” we just decided we’re not going to do that, we’re just going to show you. And in order to show you that we have Keanu Reeves as John Wick, that means longer takes, bigger moves, driving a car, falling down stairs, and so on.
EVAN SCHIFF
(editor, John Wick: Chapter 2 and Chapter 3)
Fighting is dancing. It’s dancing that looks like fighting. And that is 100 percent how we approach it. It’s stunt choreography for a reason, and that informs the way that I cut it. Trying to make these sequences seem elegant, and part of that is by not overcutting them, not inserting an edit at the wrong spot, or inserting too many and drawing attention. We’re not trying to make people go, “Oh, I’m getting hit by all these fast cuts!” We want you to see that it’s fast and brutal, but it is a dance.
JONATHAN SELA
For me, it had nothing to do with camera moves or what was done in other action movies at all. I looked at composition and color. For every one of us, it’s a different element of the movie. For me, it was John Wick’s loneliness, his character, the mystery, the underground part of the city. How do you see a part of New York that doesn’t exist? As a storyteller, there is another part of the city, but we always see New York as New York. So I went towards these places. Is this the right location? How do we create this or that? That’s what kind of drew me to it.
CHAD STAHELSKI
We wanted the audience to be transported into the world of John Wick, and that starts with your crew. You go, “Okay, this is the shot, this is what we’re going to do,” and your cinematographer is at the rehearsals, the wardrobe guys are at the rehearsals, the prop masters are at the rehearsals. So by the time we actually get to set, we’re not wasting our time going, “How are we going to do this?” We’re more about, “Let’s do more takes. Let’s find a more creative way to do it.” The time is spent creatively and not logistically. And that starts as soon as we begin prep and location scouting. What that means is the stunt teams have to take Keanu and the other cast members and work not only on the physical skills but their performance skills, their memory skills, and rehearse not just with each other but the stunt teams, the cameraman, lighting guys—just work it as a really big live performance, which is fun. But it’s a lot of work.
KEANU REEVES
(actor, “John Wick”)
It’s work, and it’s fun, but it is work. I’m doing fake fights, and that takes a lot of commitment. And the longer takes are a little more demanding. It’s a longer dance, and you just try not to suck.
J. J. PERRY
(stunts, John Wick; supervising stunt coordinator, John Wick: Chapter 2)
I was in Bulgaria doing Expendables 3 when I got the call. I didn’t go out with the initial John Wick 1 crew; they had shot the fight in the house. I got a call from Chad when I was finishing Expendables 3. “Can you fly straight to New York? I have this shoot-out I need to do in a nightclub”—the Red Circle shoot-out. “I need your help with it, because we’re stretched so thin right now. I’ve got all my team doing something, and I need somebody to help me put together this gunfight.” Because being a soldier, I am well versed in triangulating cross fire, ambushing cover versus concealment, linear ambushes, as opposed to L-shaped ambush or U-shaped ambush. And I understand the correcting malfunctions and counting your shots. So it’s not like a John Woo movie anymore, where you got a hundred rounds in a pistol. You’ve got fifteen rounds and one in the chamber. On your sixteenth shot, after your sixteenth shot, you have to reload. So we stayed true to form on that.
I make it out to New York. Chad’s shooting the final fight out in the rain with Dave and the boys, when John Wick is killing the old guy with the knife. I literally come from the airport, he gives me an address and says, “It starts at this nightclub. It’s up in the VIP room. You’ve got to find a door. He’s going to come through that door and work his way all the way across the top level. And then we want to have a fight at the end of the glass, and he gets thrown over the balcony.” So I go to that nightclub, I give the bouncer a hundred-dollar bill, and he lets me in. I take my iPhone and I start walking through their building in what I think would be great gunfighting opportunities. Now this is a packed fucking nightclub. I’m walking through with my iPhone and my fingers, my gun fingers, in the foreground, like a first-person shooter, but knowing that it’s going to be a reversed first-person shooter, because that’s the John Wick style. It’s a reverse first-person shooter, so you see Keanu Reeves doing it. It’s a reverse first-person shooter; it wraps into a push, and then we let him out. So that began my involvement in the John Wick movies, because I went just to do that gunfight, and I was killed in that gunfight three or four times; I was a stunt guy in there as well. I started with Chad back in 1990, when I got out of the army; we started together as stuntmen. I knew what he was looking for, and I knew it was very, very similar to the style they were using, because I watched some of the house fight cut on Jon Eusebio’s phone.
EVAN SCHIFF
Just as part of my research for a job, I’ll find interviews with directors where they talk about their own influences and try to make sure I’m caught up on all of that. One of the things about editing is it doesn’t really matter what’s in the script or what they planned, the only thing that really matters is what footage I have in front of me. I’m always a little bit wary of going in with too much of a plan for how something should be cut or what references should be made. For me, if we can assemble a good scene that happens to be an homage to Hong Kong films of the nineties or Sergio Leone films or something like that, then that’s icing on the cake for me. My first instinct is always, “What can I do with this first?” And then maybe later, if there’s an opportunity to add another layer of detail to it, I’ll do that.
J. J. PERRY
When I got to the club, I knew exactly where to go, what to do. When the team came, we started embellishing on those ideas and creating some moments. But they had the wrong gear. They had a bad U-shaped leather holster that stuck, so it was hard for Keanu to get the pistol in and out of the holster. They were also using a silencer or a suppressor, which is technically something you wouldn’t use. I mean, it sounds like it’s a great idea as a hit man to be quiet, but you take a lot of velocity off of your round, and if you’re in a crowded, noisy place, who gives a fuck if you’re shooting a gun? So at the end of that, we ended up doing some stuff down on the floor that leads him into that. And we added some stuff on the dance floor when he first comes in.
EVAN SCHIFF
The novelty in those action sequences really comes from the stunts that Chad dreams up. One of the reasons that it doesn’t feel like a movie you’ve seen before is that we’re combining novel stunts, but also being merciless about the things that don’t work. And there are certainly things, like in the green flashing light sequence in the Continental attack, that didn’t work. There were a few moments where I felt Keanu doesn’t look as spry as John Wick is supposed to. Because we’re not starving for stunts, we’re not starving for action, we’re not under any obligation to include or exclude anything in particular, just the overall sequence needs to work. That gives us a lot of freedom to make sure that everything we’re showing you is good and is new. With the Ghost Recon guys in John Wick 3, Chad was not interested in having these guys go down in a single shot. We’ve seen that in other movies, we’ve seen that in John Wick movies. For him, that was a novel thing. There’s a very particular way to take these guys down, but it’s very labor intensive, and John’s going to have to go through literally all the ammunition that he stocked up on. He goes through it all to take down just one wave of these guys—setting that up, that these guys are not easily killed by standard ammunition, even by John Wick. Then, getting into part 2, where it’s the shotguns, and that’s the great reloading scene with Lance [Reddick] and Keanu, and that very first guy where you realize that, “Oh, these shotguns are a whole other level. And that thing we’ve gotten you accustomed to seeing in round one doesn’t apply anymore, because now in round two they’re much better armed.” It’s that evolution of showing you something new and cool, but as soon as it’s no longer new and cool, we’re moving on to the next thing that’s new and cool.
JACKSON SPIDELL
(stunt double, Keanu Reeves, John Wick films)
The Red Circle was amazing, because that sequence, from start to finish, just kept growing and growing and growing. We rehearsed those sequences at 87eleven in the rehearsal space in New York and so on. We really dialed them in, but when we got [to the location], we find other new spots that we want to add stuff. So we’ll end up adding a couple seconds here, a couple seconds there. We constantly choreograph on the fly as well, which is a really cool skill that I’ve developed with 87.
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
In the first film, the first time you see him in full John Wick mode, for me, was the house invasion and then I guess the club scene.
JONATHAN SELA
It was a little spa downtown, I think in SoHo. It does not look like that. No misty windows, doesn’t have blue, doesn’t have ripples. You wanted this to feel like it could exist underneath this place. Again, it’s an underground part of New York, so you have to look at these places and go, “How far can you push it and still believe it?” That was super fun. It’s fun to go into the typical places and re-create them based on pictures we’ve seen, things we’ve read, movies we’ve seen. Then there was an opportunity to go, “Okay, we want to create that kind of idea, what exists in reality, and if we put this kind of stamp on it, is it going to work?” A lot of it is our budget constraints. Our line producer was a nice guy, but it all was very difficult. A lot of it was an internal battle. “We can’t do that.” “Yes, we can! We’re going to find a way!” Then he’d come back and go, “No, no, you can’t do that.” So I think part of it was we were boxed in with some places, and when you get boxed in, most of the time, you have to become more creative or look for more solutions, and that leads to the right solution.
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
We kind of had a blueprint for it, but we didn’t have it totally mapped out. The good thing is Keanu trained so well that we were able to do a lot of improvising. A lot of the stunts we see, Chad and David would just say, “Okay, we’re going to do that here.” And we had to somehow follow what they were doing, and then take all the action we were doing and make it fit in those little areas. Almost on the fly sometimes. And I think the chaotic-ness of that mixed with the club scene works.
JONATHAN SELA
We’re making a movie. We’re having a blast. There’s a million different ways to tell a story. There’s always an option. There’s enough tools. All of that is the fun part of my job, the fact that there’s not only one way. And sometimes the compromise is not that big. The more you stay open and go to creative places, you’ll find even better answers.
DEREK KOLSTAD
It’s all will, man. I’m forty-six. If you threw me on your shoulder and landed me on a mat, I’m just going to lie there and question choices I’ve made in my life for a while. But you watch Keanu work out, and he’s doing judo—he’s in phenomenal shape. Age gets us all, but he has a will. He’s just believing his way through the pain that he’s putting himself through.
ELÍSABET RONALDSDÓTTIR
(editor, John Wick and Atomic Blonde)
It was such a joy doing that sequence. Playing with sound to give you a sense of space and giving each chapter a signature sound and feel. Downstairs in the bathroom when John drowns a guy in the sink, that’s almost like a thriller thing. He’s looking, but he doesn’t know, so you’re playing with the thriller mode of it. When he gets into the bathhouse, he’s almost like an animal getting closer to his prey. Just working with that element. It’s almost like a love scene, if you think about it. There’s a couple of guys in the way, but it’s a predator/love kind of thing. He’s so obsessed with getting to this guy, so playing it a little bit like a love sequence. And that’s where the song “Think” by Kaleida really helped; that music took it to another level in my mind.
EVAN SCHIFF
I noticed criticism in a few places when John Wick 2 came out that the playlist wasn’t as good as it was in John Wick 1. Now working with the two directors, I do wonder, maybe that was a difference between Dave [Leitch] being around and then not being around. Between the two of them, Dave is a little bit more musically oriented. Chad loves all forms of culture, he loves dance music and everything, but I think his tastes tend to skew more classical—he likes classical music, he likes symphonic, he likes ballet. Dave is much more of a modern pop music kind of guy.
JONATHAN SELA
Every fight or every moment had a little story behind it. Even in the beginning in the house, it’s all about tactics and silencers and how can he be as low as you can be, so you can have the sense of, “Where is this coming from?” Every time, there were moments where you wanted to be brutal and tactical. You wanted to feel that. But even though he’s succeeding, he’s still just a human being. Sometimes he’s being fragile or being hurt—which were moments we were looking for. We were coming at it from wanting to hit different concepts of action, from the different settings. All was informed by what we found. Like, “Oh, look at this spa.” But then it was, “How do you turn this spa into a club?” You look for places and think of how they can be different. You go to that place today and it doesn’t have all the blue or the red light. You wouldn’t even recognize it. So every place we went to, we looked at it with a whole different eye. That’s what it looks like now, but what if we remake it into something else?
JACKSON SPIDELL
We really wanted to connect to this whole snake of the path that you’re on, so we would go, “We have to get from here to there. All right, so there’s this room in between, so why don’t we add three guys? Well, if we do that, he’s going to run out of bullets, so we’re going to have to reload somewhere before we get to the next room. That will also change the bullet count in the next room.” When we change all these things, we’re keeping track of all the little things—where you’d have to reload, how many mags does he have left, will he have to steal a gun now?—in the choreography. It was cool, because then we would add little different reloads, and we’d try to come up with fancy ways of doing it that you wouldn’t see ordinarily, but they’re still practical. Like going in a crouch and putting the gun behind your knee, because you have two guns, so you reload both of them so you have a free hand. Things like that. We’d try to spice those up every once in a while, but when you’d change one thing, it would really be like a domino effect that other things would have to change throughout the choreography. It ended up just making it that much more unique in certain times.
BASIL IWANYK
The sequence in the club, the first area is well lit and he’s hiding behind poles and shooting people, and then he goes into the actual club itself and is twisting around, shooting this way and that. It’s a dance. It really is. We talked about that all the time. I think that kind of beauty appealed to people who weren’t just fans of karate or martial arts or people shooting at each other. Even the move of shooting people in the face, and how they did it, it was a choreography that was just beautiful to watch. Watching the dailies, I was like, “This is incredible.” Just the speed and the beauty of it—that’s our DP and Keanu and, clearly, Chad and Dave and the stuntmen. It was just beautiful to watch.
ELÍSABET RONALDSDÓTTIR
Keanu was really sick on the day where they shot that, and other things went wrong. It always does in filmmaking. And it’s also part of the fun to figure it out and fix it. But there were certain things that went wrong when they shot that top level; they couldn’t cover it completely and had to change the choreography. We also had some timing issues, both in the swimming area and the sauna, and had to deal with the geography of where people are. So there were some problems because they couldn’t cover it completely, but I don’t think the film suffers for it. It’s a beautiful sequence, and I think they solved it in some real innovative ways. It wasn’t a nightmare. It was just some things we needed to figure out. And we did.
J. J. PERRY
I only did the Red Circle nightclub shoot-out, but when I left there, I was like, “Wow, that was really fucking cool.” And then when I went to the editing room and watched it, I said, “This is next level.” That’s when Chad said, “If I do Chapter 2, what can we do to make it better?” You build John Wick a better outfit for a gunfight, because they had the wrong tools on, they had a bad holster. Like when you have a sports jacket on, you have to sweep the sports jacket to pull the pistol, and you can’t struggle for it. Where do you keep the mags that you’re going to reload? They have to be in a Kydex holster, not a leather holster in your pocket so you’re digging for it. You have to give them a chance to succeed like the way that a real gunfighter would be set up.
DEREK KOLSTAD
The Red Circle. When I saw the first cut, I stood up laughing. Just cackling, going, “Ooooh!” I entered the arena with the fucking scenes I loved as a kid. That scene just made me ecstatic. I’ve loved all the action these guys have done, but there was something about the Red Circle. It wasn’t a matter of “I’ve arrived,” but it was like, “We did it!” It was just such a great, honest, innocent response. By the way, that little song he sings, that was Chad and Dave, man. That was their idea to come up with this little ditty. When they pitched it to me the first time, I was like, “I get it.” But I didn’t get it until I actually saw it, and I was like, “Oh.” The subtext and juxtaposition of it all. But, man, it played so well.
BASIL IWANYK
There was one good move I made as a producer. When you don’t have a lot of money to make a movie, everybody told me, “Shoot it in Cape Town, or Baton Rouge.” And they’re right, you’d have five or six million more dollars. But I wanted this movie to feel big, and I wanted it to feel gothic. I look at it differently: if I don’t have a lot of money, and I shoot you and an actor talking, it’s small, but if I shoot it with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background, it feels like a big movie. Even though I’m just shooting two guys talking. If I shoot it in Toronto, it’s against some fucking building, and it just feels small. I made the choice to shoot in New York. At the time, people were just like, “What are you doing? That’s just not smart. It’s so expensive to shoot there, you can’t move locations.” There’s so many things you can’t do in New York. But it has great actors that show up for a day. A lot of those actors were New York–based actors. Ian McShane we got because I said, “We’re going to have you work two to three days, the last two days before Thanksgiving, and the first day after Thanksgiving, so you can spend Thanksgiving holiday in New York with your wife.” And it was at least the veneer of “We’re a classy joint.” That was a big part of it, really shooting the shit out of New York and making it feel like a great gangster movie.
JONATHAN SELA
I’ve shot New York many times, mainly commercials and videos. John Wick was my first movie there. We spent a lot of weekends just walking downtown. “What if this would be the hotel? What if this?” Our production designer was from New York, so I think he took his approach of just what he knows naturally and then we came in with, “I don’t know what’s what. Let’s look at this from a clean, fresh eye. Let’s just try to keep making the best movie we can.” So we kind of did a lot of that. Just kept looking at places on our own. “What about that place? What about this place?” Some of it was presented, and the other half we just kind of found ourselves. I remember walking along Broadway and just looking. “Oh, what’s behind this theater? What’s behind that one?” I did not expect this to be a cult project. We really wanted to make a great story, and we let it take what shape it needed to take.
BASIL IWANYK
Part of our thing was, we didn’t understand why in the action genre, people didn’t pay more attention to the aesthetic of it. The beauty of the shot. Why not pay attention to that? Why not pay attention to texture? Why not have a classy cast? I don’t mean one of these, “Oh, look, there’s Robert De Niro and Danny Huston and somebody else, and they must’ve paid him a fortune.” We didn’t pay any of these people! I mean, we paid a little bit. But make it feel different. Give it a different texture. Those are all really conscious decisions to make it more elegant.