At film festivals I generally try to make time in my film watching schedule to do one interview, and although I knew it would be exciting to get a chance to talk with Keanu Reeves, my decision to do interviews for John Wick had more to do with learning who Directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch were. John Wick is their first feature film as directors, but Chad and David have been working in action, fight choreography, stunt work, and second unit directing for decades. I’m always excited when stunt men and women get a shot at directing, and reteaming these guys with Keanu Reeves after they had previously worked together seemed like an incredible fit. And it was! John Wick turned out to be the most fun I had at Fantastic Fest, and I highly recommend the film to action junkies worldwide. You can read my full review for more thoughts on the film.
I sat down to some roundtable discussions, first with Directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, as well as Producer Basil Iwanyk, to talk about the wonderful action of John Wick. Later I spoke with both Keanu Reeves and his co-star Adrianne Palicki, which I’ll post as its own interview piece. I focused all my questions around action filmmaking as that is my favorite genre, so I’ll stick to sharing my questions from the roundtable, although many other questions were asked by attending members of the press.
Ed Travis: My twitter feed seemed to be very positive on John Wick last night after the premiere and I really enjoyed it myself. One of the things that stood out to me was: “Hey, this is a legitimate American action movie” and it feels like it is heralding a return, of sorts, for hard-R American action cinema. But there’s this shaky cam effect in lots of American action movies these days and I wanted to ask how you were able to resist the urge to use that shaky cam and go with smooth, fluid shots. How do you resist that urge and what are the challenges of capturing action the way you guys did it?
Chad Stahelski: For one thing, in our day jobs [as 2nd unit directors and stunt coordinators], this shaky cam thing is a style that we sometimes walk into and we have to do it. Or we’ve been asked to do it or to ape it. And we get it. It is very kinetic. And we are fans of old Jackie Chan and Sergio Leone and Kurosawa. We love all that stuff.
So, there’s shaky cam and there’s handheld. We knew we would do a little hand held. But we are also big fans of Spielberg and Raiders and we wanted to do composition. There’s a lot of dolly and crane work. We wanted to find things and let it live. We came up under the Wachowskis so they are huge influences on us. We also shot in New York City, so talk about a vertical world that you want to see. You don’t want to show off this incredible world, and then close that world off when you are focusing on this one thing you are trying to show [the fight sequences].
Why does shaky cam come about so much? It comes down to the old axiom: “If you aren’t enough without it, are you enough with it?” Meaning if you don’t have the talent, choreography, or prep work, you can end up hiding what you are trying to show. We actually had a guy that could do it, we had a great stunt team, we had a great DP who wanted to show it off. So we said “yeah, lets show it!” But once you get in there you are tempted to say: “Let’s make it faster”, and then have to pull back and say: Nope!
David Leitch: Big props to our cinematographer Jonathan Sela, a beautiful artist. He held us to the fire. We told him we wanted cool composition… to be able to live in our shots. and every time our 2nd unit brains kicked in and we said: “Let’s get in there, lets add more cameras”, he was like: “Did you want to make cinema? Or what are we making?” [Laughter]. But bottom line, the key to pulling off this graphic novel world was performance. Keanu being able to do the stuff meant we could do it.
CS: We went in knowing he could do it because we’d done all three Matrix movies with him. We had doubled him, choreographed for him. We knew he was the guy.
Basil Iwanyk: And weirdly enough, Keanu’s involvement also came from the script [by Derek Kolstad]. When we had our first meeting with him I asked him what he liked. He said there was a formalism to it, he loved how polite everyone was in the world. “Good morning, Mr. Wick”. Keanu said he liked playing formal characters. He felt the film was classical and had an odd rhythm to it that he liked. It is very Keanu-esque in that he himself is very polite and formal. This isn’t a frenetic script. It takes its time. The absurd civility lended it a classical feel that was very spare. The script set the tone for performances and cinematography and everything.
DL: I agree 100%. Normally when reading a script you don’t immediately see the world it takes place in. You build that up with your creative team. Chad and I both saw how that opening 12 minutes looked, the shots were coming alive when you were reading it. We got it.
BI: By the way, that opening 12 minutes in the directors cut was more like 35 minutes. We were like: Okay, we get it, John Wick is depressed… can he please just shoot somebody? [Laughter]
ET: Following up on the script having a very formal element: Is that where all the suits came from? Because I noticed that when John Wick does some killing, he likes to put on a NICE suit. And as a follow up to that, many of the Russian villains were wearing literal red shirts and I was wondering if that was an intentional nod to disposable villains often being referred to as “redshirts”?
DL: It is great that you were aware of that because that is exactly why they are in red shirts.
CS: The bad guys are bad guys, the good guys are good guys. We wanted a subtle hint that there was an army. We take a lot of our stuff from mythology where you know who the good and bad guys are. There’s a lot to see if you look deep.
DL: Or not deep. [Laughter]
There’s another element that was important to us which was showing a character playing a first person shooter video game before he is killed. It is letting the audience off the hook. You guys all go home and play games. John Wick is just another type of wish fulfillment. Heroes can go kill red shirts.
BI: There was one moment where Keanu was wearing that dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, and Keanu was like: “Should I really wear this? It kind of looks like The Matrix”. And I was like… “Oh, weird, I didn’t notice that!” [Laughter].
CS: Our costume designer [Luca Mosca] did an amazing job.
DL: For a while we thought about putting villains in combat gear or something, but then we realized… they’ve got to be in suits. This is a suit movie. It is about men in suits, as Luca would say.
That was all the time I had with the John Wick filmmakers, but I really enjoyed talking with them and hearing what they had to say about the creation of their film. John Wick is something special and I look forward to seeing more films from these filmmakers, and if that includes a John Wick 2 and 3, then all the better!
And I’m Out.
