By Derek Kolstads own admission, he had written something like 50 or 60 screenplays before John Wick, which began life as a script called Scorn. Originally from Madison, Wisconsin, Kolstad had gone to business school and worked as a sales consultant before making the journey out to Los Angeles to try his hand at screenwriting. He got representation, a few credits, and eventually, after watching a bunch of recent revenge films that left him cold, the germ of the idea that would eventually become John Wick, which he drew from one of his favorite movies, the John FrankenheimerRobert de Niro spy thriller Ronin.
At that point, his agent started shopping the script. According to Kolstad, there were a handful of offers on the table, but they ended up opting for the lowest bid, from Basil Iwanyks Thunder Road, the only buyer interested in making the film quickly. The companys films include Ben Afflecks The Town, Denis Villeneuves Sicario, and Taylor Sheridans Wind River, which recently screened at Sundance. Like John Wick, all of these movies take genres that might seem run-of-the-mill bank-heist movie, drug-war movie, murder-investigation movie and infuse them with a sense of style and spectacle.
Iwanyk says he acquired John Wick for pennies, relative to what people buy scripts for, on the strength of two aspects. The first was Kolstads tone, which brought a sparse, absurdist bent to the form of the revenge thriller. And second, of course, he responded to the dog.
As Iwanyk was figuring out what to do with his new acquisition, he heard that Keanu Reeves was looking for an action role. Reeves had been on something of a cold streak prior to 2014; while his directorial debut, Man of Tai Chi, had come out to solid reviews in 2013, it didnt make any money at the box office, and 47 Ronin, a $175 million samurai epic, had only pulled in $38 million domestically that same year (though it managed more than $100 million overseas, a testament to Reevess international stature). While Reeves will forever be Neo in the minds of most fans, the Matrix trilogy was a decade behind him, and he had yet to find a role since that could take advantage of his unique blend of soft and hard, quiet and loud.
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The next step was to find a director. Thunder Road brought in a number of candidates, but most of them had the same idea: The bad guys couldnt just kill the dog, they needed to murder Wicks entire family. For Iwanyk and Kolstad, that was completely missing the point. Meanwhile, Iwanyk and Reeves already had a couple of guys in mind to handle the second-unit direction and action design. Chad Stahelski and David Leitch had a career in action and stunts dating back to the 1990s, and both men had worked on the Matrix franchise, Stahelski as Reevess stunt double; Stahelski describes working for the Wachowskis on the trilogy as the Harvard of film schools.
As we were coming up, Dave and I always wanted to direct. You kind of zone out you start doing all your action directing, you really love doing what youre doing, and then it gets to that point in your career where youre like, Id like to move on, but how do I evolve? Stahelski says.
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Stahelski told Reeves that he and Leitch were interested but they wanted to direct it. They pitched a version infused with the framework of myth, likening the characters to Greek gods. They showed him a mock-up, using their companys stunt team, of what they intended the film to look like, and they proposed upping the body count considerably. And where the other directors had wanted to do away with the dog as catalyst, Stahelski and Leitch had a different idea. They wanted to make the old dog a puppy.
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Most striking of all, though, was the way they decided to shoot it. Instead of the shaky handheld-camera style that had come to dominate contemporary action filmmaking, Stahelski and Leitch wanted to use long takes that would keep the full scope of the fighting right in front of the camera. Its a variation on the Hong Kongoriginated style of gun fu, in which guns are treated more or less as a martial art; the progenitors of the form, which include the martial-arts movies of Jackie Chan, the ultraviolent shoot-em-ups of John Woo, and anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell all stated influences of Stahelskis prioritize clarity of vision and elegance of execution above all else.
Most of modern-day action, the camera guys have never seen the action before and theyre wiggling around trying to find it and youve got five cameramen and youre going to put all that footage together thats not creatively showing something, thats creatively hiding things, Stahelski says. You spend your whole time hiding imperfections: hiding the lights, hiding the set, hiding the bad performances, hiding the stunt guys, hiding the wires, hiding the visual effects.
To pull off their intended action design, Stahelski and Leitch had to do most of the work in pre-production, bringing their cameramen into rehearsals and heavily choreographing each scene. They drew on a competitive firearm-based martial art called 3-gun to help create Wicks style, in which he wields the gun like a sword and finishes most of his opponents off in close quarters. And most of all, they needed Reeves to be able to do everything himself.
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But while Stahelski and Leitchs extensive experience on set, and Reevess comfort as a performer, made much of the production easier, all was not well as John Wick set into motion. Because the film was made without a studio attached, it was reliant on multiple sources of funding. Four days before we started shooting, a chunk of financing just fell out. It just didnt show up, Iwanyk says. I called my lawyer and said, Whats going to happen to me if we pull the plug on the movie? And hes like, The following people are going to sue you, and just started listing off names. It was a catastrophe.
Stahelski says they had to shut down at least twice during pre-production, with Iwanyk essentially holding the ship together with masking tape. And despite their extensive preparation, shooting itself was a race against the clock due to the wide array of locations in the film, as well as the choice to shoot in New York City, a priority of the filmmakers.
You cant just say, Oh, well come back here, or well stay a little longer, cinematographer Jonathan Sela recalls. And it took a while to get shots right, because if we didnt like that turn or that kick or that hit, youre holding for that long shot, so there were no other angles, no other coverage. We had to capture it the right way, because we had no other way out.
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We always knew that if the tone was slightly off, the movie couldve been laughable and, frankly, until we got the right running time for the movie, the movie did feel laughable is the wrong word, but it felt like, what the fuck is this? Iwanyk says. Then one day, we got the tone right. We got the running time right, all of sudden, and its weird it informed the tone and informed everything. Everything fell into place, and we were like, Hey, this is a pretty cool movie. Iwanyk identified as a major turning point a moment during Stahelski and Leitchs first preview of the film for audiences. Michael Nyqvists big-bad Viggo Tarasov has just called John Leguizamos Aurelio to ask why Aurelio had hit Tarasovs son Iosef (Alfie Allen). Aurelio says, He stole John Wicks car and killed his dog. When Tarasov responded with a simple Oh, indicating that he knew exactly why Aurelio had hit Iosef, everybody laughed, and Iwanyk knew theyd nailed it. And, despite their fears, no one walked out when the dog died.
Stahelski attributes the breakthrough to Reeves, always John Wicks patron saint. Keanu looked right at us and said, You guys wanted to make a hard-core action movie, right? You wanted to do something genre, outside the box, right? So whats wrong? Good advice. So we went back and adjusted our attitude to being unapologetic, and we just went, John Wick kills 80 guys because of a puppy. Fuck you, were done. And anything that didnt have to do with that drive or that character beat, we took out of the movie.
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Im still a little unclear about what everybody latched on to, other than we give all the credit to Keanu: They must really love Keanu Reeves, Stahelski says. And Iwanyk takes it one step further: Thats Hollywood isnt it? The irony is that all these acquisitions people saw it, and they all passed. These are the same executives now who are desperately trying to do another John Wick. I dont get it.
This wait is fucking killing me, roll on next weekend.
