John Wick celebrates its 10th anniversary this week, a decade after it changed modern cinema. With a spin-off feature film arriving in theaters in 2025 titled Ballerina, another in development starring Donnie Yen, and a TV series set after the ending of John Wick: Chapter 4, it may seem a leap to consider that this masterful action franchise almost didn’t exist at all. In fact, the original John Wick production was so troubled, from a lack of experience to problems with financing, that it can be aptly compared to the hell Keanu Reeves’ titular character fought through.
It’s a testament to the creativity and resilience of the pairing of Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, two stunt veterans who had never directed a main unit on a feature before John Wick, that the film came together. There was also the benefit of helping hands from many others, most especially Keanu himself, who helped John Wick see the light of day in 2014. John Wick returns to theaters for its 10th anniversary on November 3 & 6 with Fathom Events.
To discuss the iconic action film’s development and the growing franchise it spawned, I arranged interviews with director Chad Stahelski, executive producer David Leitch, and executive producer Erica Lee. I also connected Saiful Creation for this beautiful exclusive John Wick 10th anniversary poster cover art:
Cover art by Saiful Creation
There Was Almost No Hope For A John Wick Franchise At First
John Wick Needed Money, And Then It Needed Buyers
When John Wick was shooting in New York in late 2013 it was just about getting it done for its crew, any way they could. Executive Producer Basil Iwanyk was helping pay for wardrobe on credit cards, Keanu Reeves and David Leitch were investing personally, and a last-minute $6 million save from star Eva Longoria thanks to talent agency CAA helping organize financing kept the production alive. At the time, the idea of a John Wick 2 wasn’t a consideration, especially for a pair of first-time headlining directors.
“I don’t think we saw it as a franchise when we first got it. I think we were really just excited to get a chance to sit in the director’s chair. We had been journeymen, stunt performers, stunt coordinators, fight choreographers, and then action second unit directors for years. And it was just great to now finally have a movie that we call our own. And so we laid it all on the line,”David Leitch tell us.
Chad Stahelski, Keanu Reeves, and David Leitch on the set of the first John Wick movie.
Leitch was an uncredited co-director on the first John Wick with longtime collaborator and friend Chad Stahelski, which launched his own feature directing career. Leitch went on to direct Deadpool 2, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, Bullet Train, and The Fall Guy. Things were a lot tighter on John Wick, as Leitch explained.
“It was a small budget and a short schedule, and we used our 20-plus years of knowledge of making movies and put it all in there. And now we luckily resonated with people and we’ve built a world that people want to continue to come see.”
There was no looking far ahead during production on John Wick. It was about surviving while learning on the job. When asked how much thought went into John Wick’s story and ideas for a sequel beyond the first movie, Chad Stahelski says, “Zero. No, man. We wrapped, Dave and I went running for the hills. We each took another second-unit gig as soon as we could, to try and pay for our lives, really. We thought we were done.”
We were very proud of our guys and what we did for the work, and our stunt team and our crew. We were very impressed with that, but we were just in this massive state of depression. We’re kind of like, “Oh, well, we learned a lot. What are you going to do? We were too weird, but at least we made what we wanted to make.” There’s a little bit of pride in that. At the same time, there’s a little bit of like, “We’re never going to work again.”
It was the same for everyone involved. “None” is the word Executive Producer Erica Lee tells us in echoing Chad’s sentiment. “When we were making the first movie, we did it independently. The movie fell apart 10 times financially,” Lee adds.
The check did not clear, and Chad and David never directed main unit before. They never directed together, so there were so many factors. We had no distribution. So, just sort of making it to the finish line of John Wick was a feat in itself. And then to be honest, we didn’t really know what we had. I remember screening it for buyers and almost all the distributors walked out. We certainly had no idea until later in the process. Lionsgate ended up buying the movie for domestic distribution. We showed it to them in July. They were like, “Oh, we have no Saw coming out this year. Let’s put it out in October.” Kind of arbitrary decisions.
“Every studio in town saw it and they passed,” Leitch tells us separately. “And we showed it at Fantastic Fest. Lionsgate, on a lark said, “Okay, let’s just see what we got here.” And it blew the roof off and they’re like, “Holy shit. We have this movie we didn’t realize that everyone would love.” And then immediately they bought domestic and they moved it to October release and it was all happening. It happened in six weeks.”
Title | Total Box Office | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
John Wick | $86,013,056 | October 24, 2014 |
John Wick: Chapter 2 | $171,539,887 | February 10, 2017 |
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum | $327,777,335 | May 17, 2019 |
John Wick: Chapter 4 | $440,180,275 | March 24, 2023 |
The short window meant minimal marketing for John Wick (you should check out our interview with Keanu Reeves from 10 years ago) and its worldwide box office gross was under USD $90 million. “The funny thing is the first movie did well, but not so well, right?,” explains Lee. “It was really in its afterlife, like VOD and everything that it made a ton of money, all of a sudden we were like, oh my gosh, we have the luxury of making a sequel. And we sort of had no idea. We never saw that coming. We had no plan. So it was a while.” Every John Wick movie has made more at the box office than its predecessor.
“Less is More” With John Wick
David Leitch & Chad Stahelski Wouldn’t Change A Thing When Reflecting Back On The First John Wick.
With a decade of directorial experience each under their belts, and a multitude of projects on the way from Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, if they could go back in time and give themselves a piece of advice in making John Wick, what would it be?
David Leitch: Hindsight’s 20/20. I don’t know. I am not saying we were perfect, but I think that our imperfections made it the movie that it is. I think there’s a lot to learn. There’s a good story. When you’re an action director, you don’t get to post the movie. You deliver all your action scenes to the main director, and so you’re working with them to shoot the things that they want and then you give it to them. So this was really the first time we had to be in the edit room and be in post for so long. And you watch a movie over and over and over, and it’s a skill to learn how to watch something over and over and detach and look at it critically.
One thing I might say is that I’m a maximalist, obviously, when you look at Fall Guy and you look at Bullet Train. But sometimes less is more and I think we learned that in the editorial suite in Wick. Our editor, Elisabet Ronaldsdottir, was amazing. She kept distilling the movie. “You need less, just a little bit less. This movie’s visual. You’re going to do some nice elegant visual storytelling. You don’t need that line of dialogue. You don’t need this. This can work with a look.” And all of that was a great learning process for the future.
I am not saying we were perfect, but I think that our imperfections made it the movie that it is.
“There’s about a million things I woulda, coulda, shoulda. I’m also a bit of a realist in a really pragmatic sense,” adds Chad Stahelski. “If I could go back and change anything, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here. Dave and I survived through the arrogance of ignorance. We just thought we knew what we were fuckin’ doing, and we didn’t, and we stumbled our way to here. If we had known more, we probably would’ve made different decisions. I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have done too many.”
Stahelski says the biggest learning he’d share with his younger self revolves around “how to deal with people” and being “open-minded” to “see things from every angle,” emphasizing that the crew is on the same team.
Chad Stahelski: The other thing is it happens a lot in our business because it’s so massively collaborative, meaning studio, crew, cast. No one’s trying to make something not good, but everyone has their opinion on how to do it. As a director, it’s very important. Me and my other directing friends, we call it chasing the dragon. You can chase reviews, you can chase what an audience says, you can chase notes, you can do all this stuff, but then if you do succeed, which one of them was right? How do you know how to do it the next time?
I just go with my gut, literally 100%. I’ll hear, I’ll go, “Hey, man, that’s a great idea. That’s a great idea.” In my heart, even though I may love what you said, I know it’s not going to work in this particular way, so I can just say fuck off, or I can say, “Hey man, that’s a great idea, but it’s just not going to work.” You may believe me, you may not, but at least all the decisions in the Wicks come from my gut. At the time I doubted a lot of them, but at least I know now where my true north is.
I think that’s one of the most important things you can learn, is regardless of what somebody may say or reviews or if the whole crowd is against me, if I go with my gut, at least I’m the only one to blame, and I’m the only one to gauge where I’m at or steer the ship. Yeah, that’d be the main thing I’d push if I could give a little advice.
John Wick’s Dog And House Set the Stage
The First Days Of Shooting John Wick In His House With His Puppy Became Everyone’s Defining Moment
I asked Chad, David, and Erica what their favorite moment was when looking back on making John Wick and for everyone involved it’s all about those first days shooting with Keanu Reeves in John Wick’s house. It was different, challenging, and risky, and it was in those moments that John Wick was really born.
David Leitch: The movie was a challenge, I’m not going to lie. I think we were coming off shooting big second units where we had budgets three times the size of the entire Wick movie. We were shooting Marvel movies and had longer schedules in our second unit than we did in our first unit on John Wick. There’s so many fond memories, but I think one of them is shooting that fight scene in the house, the first home invasion scene. I just felt like that was going to be a special moment. It was a time when we got to do some choreography that we’ve been baking for years, and we had presented it to other directors, and they weren’t really interested. And so it was really the first time we got to play with that stuff. And I was watching it be preserved on digital media as we were shooting it, and we got really excited, and we were like, “Here we go. This is it. This is the essence of the action style.”
Chad Stahelski: Oh, the first John Wick. I think it hits you the first day. You step on set. You’re the director. It’s not about the stress or anything. It’s about that moment and you’re trying to be super fuckin’ cool. We were big second-unit directors and action stunt guys, so we’re supposed to be the cool ones, nothing gets to us.
Then even the first day, we’re shooting Keanu around the house, just moping about after his wife had died, and we’re like, “Oh, we’re directing Keanu. We’re using this thing,” and it does hit you. “Ooh, I better not screw this up,” because one, Keanu is a really good friend, and he’s really doing us a solid by giving us a shot. You feel the little bit of pressure, and you realize on day one there’s another 50 days to go, and each time, you better not miss. That’s a little daunting.
Then it wasn’t until … there was two big things. The very first fight scene in his house, the first time you see the Gun Fu stuff. You’d have to ask Dave or Keanu, but we did that in some ridiculous short time, like two or three days. I remember thinking at the end. I was already chopping it or cutting it in my head. I’m like, “We got it. This is cool. If I think it’s cool, it’s going to be cool. Trust me, it’s going to be cool.”
I remember at the time it was all about punching and kicking, fast editing, shaky cam, and we were like one long dolly. It naturally looks slower and it doesn’t have the panache or the pop of three cameras, and there was a little bit of doubt, but I was like I knew that there was something cool there because I thought it was cool. I saw Keanu doing the cool jump-spin move, and I was like, “Eh, it’s cool.”
Then I think other people have different thoughts on this, but the night where we shot Keanu, he had been beaten up by Josef and he had the little stuffed puppy and there was a bloody trail to the puppy. There’s a lot of people watching, being very concerned about how this is going to work. One of those, “It’ll either be the best or the worst scene in the movie,” because it could go south very quickly.
You got a picture: It’s Keanu Reeves in his pajamas with a stuffed beagle dog with blood everywhere, crying, and that can be incredibly emotional or really weird. Dave and I looked at each other thinking, “Oh, this is the hardest shot of the day. This is the one that the movie hinges on. Did we nail it or make it too goofy?” I thought the way we shot it and hit it and did it a little artsy, we were like, “No, we nailed it. We’re good.” There was, I think, a lot of other opinions about, “Oh, these guys are done.”
Erica Lee: I remember the day that we shot the dead dog and we used this stuffy, stuffed animal, of the dog, and we’re rolling, and you just see Keanu holding this stuffed dog and crying, and you are sort of like, I don’t know if this is the worst thing we’ve ever shot or the best thing we’ve ever shot. I had lost the plot. So I think there’s a lot of moments like that along the way.
Where The Name “John Wick” Came From
The origin of John Wick’s name and why the movie dropped its “Scorn” title.
I wanted to know where the name “John Wick” came from and how it ended up becoming the title of the film, replacing the original title “Scorn” which was on the spec script. David Leitch wasn’t sure on why or how the title came to be but Chad Stahelski reveals it’s based on the name of screenwriter Derek Kolstad’s grandfather. Exec producer Erica Lee later explained to us that there wasn’t too much thought put on titling the movie as no one had other suggestions.
Chad Stahelski: It’s Derek Kolstad’s grandfather’s name. Derek wrote it. He wrote in his grandpa, who we really respect. You’d have to ask Derek the actual story. Derek just told me a little bit about his grandpa. We had very similar Polish grandfathers, so we would talk about their etiquette and their type. Very proper gentleman-type people, but Derek told me his name was John Wick, and he wanted to give tribute to his grandfather. We thought that was super cool.
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“There’s nothing wrong with the name Scorn. I just think Scorn could get lost, and it wasn’t what we’d call an identifier,” continues Stahelski. He explained that the title mostly came down to what Keanu and Executive Producer Basil Iwanyk were thinking, acknowledging that Keanu “had done a lot of Johns in his career.” Stahelski explains that as “the action guys” trying to be more than that, he and David Leitch thought “Scorn” sounded too action-focused and too neutral.
For whatever reason, John Wick sounded cooler to us.
Erica Lee: The funny story is yes, it was a spec script that Derek Kolstad wrote, I read and loved, but the script at the time was written for a much older man. Scorn felt sort of like a bad horror movie. And so the story is that we collected all the interns and said, we can’t call this movie Scorn. We’re going to do an internal Thunder Road pool. Whoever comes with the best title wins lunch. No one came up with anything. Basil was like, “Why don’t we just call it John Wick? That’s the name of the lead character.” And the meaning behind John Wick is that Derek Kolstad’s, I believe grandfather’s name in real life is John Wick. So arbitrary decisions that are now cemented in pop culture.
Which John Wick Characters Are Really Dead?
Some John Wick supporting characters are dead, but some may not be…
Are there characters that the John Wick creative team would like to bring back?
Chad Stahelski: Oh, my God, so many. John Leguizamo I love and we brought back in the second one. Jimmy, I know we brought back in the second one. I fuckin’ love Jimmy, the cop. He’s such a good actor, such a great guy too. Oh, David Patrick Kelly is Charlie. We did bring him back in the second one, but I cut his scene. It just didn’t fit. We were stuck with a really serious runtime problem with No. 2, and it’s just me being a goofy director. I love that character.
“If I was going to bring someone, I tried in No. 4 to bring back Addy,” adds Stahelski speaking about Bridget Regan’s character who has only appeared in the first movie as an employee of The Continental in New York. “We just ran out of time and money in Paris, but really I love all my cast, but those are three characters I’d bring back in. I’d bring back Common, and I’d bring back Halle Berry in a second.
I’d bring back Common, and I’d bring back Halle Berry in a second.
David Leitch, who only has a direct connection to the cast of the first John Wick, sees characters for a more practical purpose, as elements serving the larger story.
David Leitch: I like them all so much, but they’ve all sort of served their purpose in the story. And I think when you’re telling a story, you have to pull at the heartstrings or you need emotional catharsis. And I don’t have any regrets. It’s like that first movie is so elegant in its execution and everyone came and delivered what they needed to deliver that it is what it is. I mean, of course I’d love to work with Willem any day of the week, but it was beautiful what he did, and so we needed it. The story needed it.
For Erica Lee, who exec produces all the John Wick installments, she sees more value in returning characters and, like me, misses Willem Dafoe. “Willem is just the best guy ever and such a great actor that I would’ve loved to bring him back,” she says before adding:
That’s a good question. We killed Common in a way that I feel like we’ve debated if we could bring him back or not. And look how we left John Wick 4, I think we could bring John Wick back.
Lee continues, telling us that she really would love to bring back Halle Berry as well. “I mean, now we sort of get incoming calls a little bit because people are like, I want to be in the John Wick movies, which is super fun too,” she adds.
John Wick’s Groundbreaking Choreography and Gun-Fu
John Wick not only delivers the best action but it does so in tough environments, sometimes with vehicles, and sometimes with animals.
John Wick has become a modern masterclass in weapons handling and realistic shootouts with regards to utilizing the exact number of bullets in a magazine. How difficult was it to get right for the first film, and how much did it mean for you guys to get these sorts of details right?
David Leitch: It was important to us, maybe more important to Chad. I think, and this is no dig, it’s like we all had different sensibilities. We’d been directing action together for a long time, but I think he was really specific about some of the gun choreography that he loved and wanted this authenticity with sort of the gun fetish stuff. And that was cool. And I think that’s amazing because it added sort of another layer to the choreography. Great choreography comes from giving yourself problems. You want to create a fight scene that’s compelling? Now put them on ice or put them in the rain or put them … Again, count the bullets. Give your choreography team the problems to solve, and you’ll find such great, interesting moments. And that was just another dimension to put into the choreography.
Chad Stahelski: Oh, look, we did a lot of talk about how we’re going to stand out. We didn’t want to be 100% realistic, but we didn’t want to be fantasy. We just made a little chart, like we’re counting bullets. We’re going to do close-quarters. Bullets go through car doors, they go through walls. You can’t hide behind silly shit, but you gotta run out of bullets, and if you get shot, we’ll shoot like professionals, like the Mossad. Not to get too crazy, but two to the heart, one to the head. We’re going to do some tactical stuff. On the other hand, we wanted to come up with weird stuff like bulletproof suits and stuff that may not be as efficient as the movie version is. We know we’re having a little bit of fun there. That’s all.
“When you have Keanu it’s incredibly easy,” Stahelski continues, adding that their stunt teams and the 87eleven Action Design crew are some of the best. “I can’t tell you how many rounds he must have gone through just training for the John Wicks. Between all four movies, it’s in the high six figures, the number of times he shot. Where we shot was very specific. We’d shoot up at Taran Butler’s place, which is a three-gun champion guy. You get very attuned to how many rounds you’re pumping, because in tournaments and competition you have to know. You have to be very self-aware of it.”
Chad Stahelski: I think Keanu was literally counting most of the time. If he wasn’t, between our armor team and our stunt team, it wasn’t as hard as you think. Especially if we were cutting all over the place, it would’ve been much harder. Because we go in long takes and I shoot very sequential, it was way easier than you think to keep count.
Taran Butler, the first ever USPSA Multigun National Tactical Champion, runs Taran Tactical Innovations which works with Hollywood stars including Keanu Reeves and producers to train them on firearm use and tactics.
John Wick movies raised the bar again for the action genre and have been influential. How do you feel about the franchise’s impact on the genre and industry as a whole?
Chad Stahelski: I’ve just put it together, but it’s nothing that I hadn’t seen before. We just put it together. Like Gun Fu. Okay, well, they did it in Equilibrium and then John Woo, and then I did it slightly different. I baked the same cookie everybody was doing, I just used a little bit more sugar, a little bit more chocolate chip. It’s still the same fuckin’ cookie, though, isn’t it? I like lighting, so I stress more on, with Dan Laustsen, lighting. I like studio composition, so I’m using the dolly and crane more than handheld. Is that anything groundbreaking? No.
I just think people, it’s like fashion. They didn’t invent the straight leg or the bell bottom, just they brought it back. I brought back a certain look to action that people gravitated to because of the trend. Would you ask the same thing of Paul Greengrass with Bourne? Did he invent the shaky cam? No. Did he invent close-quarter combat or kali, arnis, or sikaran? No. Did he invent the snap zoom into a phone call? No, he just put it together in this nice order that was aesthetically appealing, and gave a kind of energy that people gravitate to and they kind of dug it.
We look at ourselves like, look, we do jiu-jitsu, aikido, close-quarter gun work. Anybody that’s military police or a competitive shooter, they count bullets too. It just wasn’t done in the movies because it was kind of a pain in the ass. We didn’t really invent or come up with anything. We just took samples of what we were already experiencing in our lives and put it in a way … and whether we got lucky or it was good timing … that people just liked it, that’s all.
David Leitch: Oh, I feel so proud. I think finally we got to do something that was really provocative and we got to explore some ideas in the action design space that we hadn’t been able to explore with other directors. And then to watch where Chad has taken it. Chad is a brilliant choreographer and action designer and he has such a brilliant mind for action. It’s really beautiful to see what he’s done with the sequences in the sequels. And as much as we’ve worked together in the past as co-directors or co-stunt coordinators or co-choreographers, it’s beautiful to see him just step it up and bring his A game to these things and raise the bar every time. They’re really incredible films.
John Wick’s Director Doesn’t Want Your Credit for Changing Action Movies
Director Chad Stahelski is inspired by so much else, from Samurai films to Anime.
Franchise director Chad Stahaleski pays all the credit and respect to the medium and other filmmakers before John Wick, and in his eyes, he’s just piecing together things he loves. Producer Erica Lee shares a different perspective, comparing Wick to other action movies of the time a decade ago.
Chad Stahelski: I get asked that a lot. Look, if we were back in 1902 and this was the first action movie of all time, maybe I could take credit and go, “Ah, genius.” It is 2024, and I didn’t start making the John Wicks till 2014, and I was a second-unit guy way back in the early 2000s. Then there’s about a hundred years of action movies before me, and there’s these guys like Spielberg, James Cameron, John Woo, Tarantino, Kurosawa. God, so many others, all from the ’70s. It was like, okay. From The Wild Bunch to Bullitt to Scorsese to what Pacino was doing. There’s so many. It’s all the way back to John Ford in Stagecoach, right? Whether it’s Wong Kar-wai or Zhang Yimou or Yuen Woo-ping or John Woo or Ang Lee, I’m a little influenced.
When you see a John Wick movie, you’re just seeing me filtering every Samurai, Zatoichi, Kurosawa, Chinese Wu Zhao film, from Crouching Tiger way back to Jackie Chan and Jet Li, all the way through the Shaw Brothers. You’re looking at Westerns, you’re looking at French cinema from Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge. You’re looking at, you know, insert name of any … Street Fighter, Kung Fu. I pick Korean films all the time. I’ve got probably 10,000 action movies in my head, but on top of another 5,000 anime manga. If you look in my office, it’s nothing but books and DVDs. Then I have a 38-year martial arts background from all over the world in like 10 different disciplines under Dan Inosanto. If I just would list the martial arts people I’ve studied under, and you wonder why we do action. It’s like I don’t know if I can take any credit.
Erica Lee: It’s completely changed the action game, but right before John Wick came out, I don’t know, everything was kind of the same. And I think that we came out and we had Keanu who you could tell was doing the stunts and we didn’t cut. And these long takes and gun fu and car fu, and killing people with small objects and really using the environment to create sequences, I think we were a lot of the first people to do that. The question I get most asked in this business from other buyers or studios or producers, is “we want our John Wick, we want our John Wick.” And I think we tapped into magic in a bottle, no doubt. And Keanu was the perfect casting. He sort of embodies John Wick, and it just hit this moment where I think audiences were excited for something new.
Crafting The Modern Mythology and Rules of the John Wick Universe
Planning out sequels took a lot of creativity and the help of screenwriter Derek Kolstad but how much is a gold coin actually worth?
David Leitch co-directed the first movie but wasn’t too directly involved in the sequels, with Chad Stalhelski helming those as Leitch worked on other projects. For Chad, his favorite John Wick is the original where he worked with David, but the one he’s most proud of is Chapter 2.
Watching the lore expand with the sequel movies has been fascinating. What were some of the original ground rules for the Assassin’s Guild and The Continental?
David Leitch: Well, I think we kept it vague. And what was great about Derek’s script, there was an elegant minimalism to it that … And all these great genre sort of sprinklings. And I don’t even know if Derek knew what we were inspired by. And so we started to create a mythology in our minds because we’re such anime fans and graphic novel fans. And so we kept seeing it as a myth, a modern myth, and almost like a fairy tale, right? John Wick, this underworld.
I think it might’ve been more literal in Derek’s mind, maybe not. But we tried to keep it gray so we could go somewhere. And we also felt like it was fun that you didn’t know all of it. You knew hints of this underworld, but you didn’t all of it. And unknowingly, that obviously set up the sequels in a really great way. It’s like, no, we loved that part of John Wick. They’re like, “Oh, you did?” They really loved this sort of underworld hiding in plain sight that we wanted to create. And Chad has just done such an incredible job of shepherding all of that in such an expansive way moving forward and giving fans what they want in that world building.
When it came to John Wick: Chapter 2 the mission changed. Now, John Wick’s world needed to be explored, and this underground was to become more than just a background. When Keanu Reeves and Chad Stahelski agreed to work on a sequel with Lionsgate they’d only do so if they had full creative control.
“They just figured, ‘Well, how weird can they go and we’ll just do what we can, and it’s probably only good for one more.’ They gave us a pretty long leash,” Stahelski explains. “And then it was like Keanu and I got back together and went, ‘Ooh. Well, we really don’t know what to do.’ We got together with Derek Kolstad, and No. 2 is when we figured things out.”
We came up with the idea that there’s a Continental in every city. Derek had come up with the idea of markers. Then I was like, “Well, fuck it. If we’re going to go that deep, let’s go full Lord of the Rings, and we’re going to make a fantasy world here and that’s how we’ll start modeling it.”
I don’t know about Keanu, but for me, I’m the most proud of No. 2 because that’s where we cracked the code. After that, it became not easier, but it became much more interesting. We knew we didn’t have to put ourselves in a box. We could do anything. Bulletproof suits, dogs, ninjas, it didn’t matter. Anywhere in the world, deserts, elders, high tables, cars, motorcycles, boats, it didn’t matter. We could do anything. We were trying to steal from the best of Bond or Mission or anything else like that. We had free reign and no original IP to adhere to. That’s when we just felt incredibly free. That’s why I think Keanu and I stayed with the franchise so long. It’s 100% ours, and it was 100% unlimited.
As for the rules for assassins and the value of a gold coin?
Chad Stahelski: I think in most of them, you can’t do business on Continental grounds, and I think the big oversight rule of everything is everything in the John Wick world is transactional. Nothing’s for free and there’s always a cost, no matter what the price is. Might not be a price, but there is a cost. That’s all you have to know. There’s always something.
As far as a gold coin, we never looked at it. As far as a monetary value, a gold coin is worth what it is in gold, which is around 1,200 bucks, but that wasn’t the point. A gold coin is a membership card. It doesn’t matter. Some people were giving us shit about that after the first one. It was like, “Well, is it worth a drink? Is it worth this?” No. If you’re in the Continental and you have gold coins, the actual worth of the coin is irrelevant. It is you are showing it as, “I’m part of the club. I’m above monetary value.” This is the new monetary payment.
A coin can be worth a drink to somebody important. It can be worth a firearm, rounds of ammunition, it can be worth a haircut or it could be worth a new suit, or it can be worth one life. As you saw in the first one, I think it was 13 bodies and he had 13 coins. That’s the price. It’s an understated I guess rule of the world that a coin is for the act of service or the act of entry. It’s more about I guess it’s like an IOU. It could be an act of faith, an act of membership, an act of service or something.
Related John Wick: What’s The Actual Value Of A Gold Coin?
The mercenaries of the John Wick universe use their old gold coin currency, but how much is each piece worth in the Keanu Reeves movie franchise?
Erica Lee: That’s a great question. The gold coin, I don’t think we ever put a monetary allotment to it. I think it was more just like if you know, you know. If you had one, it was like the golden ticket in. And it is funny because it does buy you different things within different movies, but it’s more like, yeah, we never assigned it. We should do that though. If we make John Wick 5, we should definitely do. We always love the idea that the gold coins were made in Switzerland or gold melted, and these vaults. We’ve created a lot of lore. But what’s fun about the continentals, we always get asked, we leave so much untold. And so the gold coins, everyone loves the lore of that. So it was fun with the continentals to kind of come up with the idea of the coin press as answering sort of one of the questions.
The Keanu Reeves Factor
Keanu Reeves gave David and Chad this shot to direct with John Wick and then made sure they controlled the sequels.
After the cult success of John Wick, Lionsgate had called Keanu Reeves to ask about turning John Wick into a franchise beginning with Chapter 2. Since then, he’s had direct creative involvement with the IP, but original John Wick team’s history together goes back so much further. Keanu worked with Chad and David on The Matrix movies and Constantine, and it was Keanu who trusted the first-time main unit directors with John Wick, so much so that he helped pay for it as well.
Chad Stahelski: In the true story of things, John Wick 1 was great. It’s my fave, of course, but it wasn’t until John Wick 2 that we got asked. Keanu had called up and said, “Hey, Lionsgate just called me. They want to do another one.” I was like, “Really, like that?” He’s like, “Yeah.” We finally found out how well it had done, and Keanu and I went back in and we’re like, “Okay, we’ll do it, but we’ll do it our way. Just tell us what the number is and we’ll figure it out, but you can’t, because we’re going to go weird and we don’t want any oversight.”
Since the franchise has exploded with success, how has Reeves’ approach to the John Wick character evolved over the 10 years?
David Leitch: I think Keanu always approaches the character with discipline. And I can’t speak from being on set for those sequels because I’ve been really in the background. But knowing Keanu and from my experience, I’m sure the approach is the same. It’s like this sort of brutal discipline of training and finding the character physically and examining the script and finding these important moments to amplify and being a collaborator from soup to nuts.
Erica Lee: That’s a good question. I mean, he still consistently trained and takes the role so seriously and is the most committed actor and the best partner we could have ever asked for. He’s deeply involved from script level. Whereas the first one, we gave him a script and he certainly put his DNA on it, but now he is much more involved from idea from day one, page one, and so many of his ideas become part of the movie and part of the world. He came up with the idea of the markers. And so I think he’s the most invested actor I’ve ever worked with. It’s impressive. But he’s consistent. Over all the movies, he is an amazing partner, a great actor who’s so prepared. He is up for anything and he gives it his all. So that’s consistent.
Chad Stahelski: I don’t know if the approach has changed, but he’s definitely been very self-aware about how to evolve the character. I mean, look. In retrospect, it’s very easy, and I get asked these a lot. It’s a natural assumption that there was a master plan. I don’t know how the really great creatives at Marvel or DC or Disney or some of the other big franchise places do it. Maybe they have the big crossboard with the 20-year vision. We had the six-month vision, how to survive and get through the movie at hand.
I shit you not, there wasn’t one John Wick movie where we had a plan to go to another one. It was, “Survive this, make it through. We’re almost out of money, end it.” There wasn’t a day after we wrapped that we’re like, “We’re done. Love you all.” It’s always like a year later we decided to do another one, and there was no plan. There was no far-reaching expectations. We were done, done. Now when we go back into it, it’s like, “Oh, oh.”
It’s weird to look back, you know what I mean? Now I look back and it’s like, “Okay,” my point being if you had looked at the board knowing that, “Hey, Keanu, we’re starting in 2014, we got to track the character where it’s going to be in 2024, do your character arcs and plotting,” we’d probably have developed the scripts way differently, but every time it’s been, “Well, see you later, man. Going on vacation. See you in a year.” Then when we get together, we go, “Okay, what are we going to do now?” Scratch our heads. You have to develop the new script with the intent that, “Okay, he was here when we ended the movie. What would be fun to see?”
That’s how we approached it. It’s like, “What would the audience enjoy seeing Keanu do?” Well, they want to see him own it. They want to see him be responsible for his actions. They want to know that, hey, man, if Keanu just took his own life, his friends would still be alive. You want to see him own that, but you also see him want to kick a little ass. He approaches it from a very internal point of view, I guess. Also, we all get it. We want to make movies that are fun for people to come and watch.
The Most Challenging John Wick Action Scenes
Some of John Wick’s action sequences were more complex than you’d expect.
The John Wick series frequently adds layers to its action set pieces, from animals to vehicles, and they always seem to present unexpected challenges for the filmmakers who continually attempt to raise the bar with each movie. So, what was the toughest John Wick action scene?
Erica Lee: Oh, man, that’s a hard question. I think it’s preference probably, I mean, shooting in France was very challenging. And also shooting the Halle Berry dog sequence in Morocco was one of the more challenging ones. I mean, there’s always logistics; horses in New York and the permits. And so every movie has its own really specific thing. But when we shot in Morocco, it was super challenging because when we got there, a lot of the locations we had wanted to use were unavailable. And one funny anecdote is where we shot that shootout, that sequence with the dogs, was at a tiny fishing village. So there were fish everywhere, and then there were cats everywhere. And the dogs who had been shipped in from the U.S. and Canada, there’s four dogs. Two by the time they made it to Morocco, just didn’t like Morocco and didn’t want to perform.
And then there were cats everywhere and dead fish everywhere, and the dogs were getting very distracted. So we had to build this cat hotel on the side of the set, and we were constantly wrangling the cats. And I just remember our call time that day was like 2:30 in the morning. Halle was a true champion. We had pushed the shoot because she had broken her ribs. It was just sort of mayhem in general. I say that was one of the more challenging kind of sections. But I mean, there’s honestly so many. I mean, the Arc de Triomphe was challenging, the resets and the permitting in New York, and specifically in France at Sacre-Cœur, and some of the locations we were trying to get were just really hard.
Related Why John Wick 4’s Arc de Triomphe Scene Was The Most Dangerous To Film
John Wick: Chapter 4 director Chad Stahelski explains why the Arc de Triomphe scene was by far the most dangerous scene to pull off.
“I have to give it all to Chad because those are all his things and his creations,” said David Leitch on the sequel’s increasingly wild set pieces. “And I can sit as an admirer of stunts and a stunt designer myself and a former stunt performer. And I can say that the stairfall in Wick 4 is a work of art. It is just one of the most impressive feats of physical stunt performance that I’ve seen.
Sometimes it doesn’t always work as intended, even within schedules and budgets. In the first John Wick the car scene for instance cost the production a day or two. And in Chapter 3, there’s another vehicle moment which didn’t end up feeling like it fit the realistic look the series is known for.
David Leitch: We had a piece of car action in there where we were a little bit of car action at the docks and we created some cool camera mounts for Keanu to actually be driving. And then we had the moment of dumping the SUVs off into the dry dock and all of that stuff was things that they said you can’t afford, you’re not going to be able to afford it. We had to really count our pennies and sacrifice a day or two of budget to get those things in the movie, knowing what an action fans would want. We had to fight for that stuff. And normally that size movie, you wouldn’t have been able to do it. And if we didn’t have the experience of being stunt coordinators our own self, we probably wouldn’t have got it.
Erica Lee: Some things didn’t come out as good as we wanted them to be. What’s interesting is the motorcycle sequence in 3 with the swords. It’s not that it didn’t come out the way that we wanted, I think it’s a very visually effect-heavy sequence, which is not typically what we do. And I think that we struggled sort of fitting that into the movie and having it work the way that some of the other sequences did.
The Future of John Wick
Five movies and one television series in, what will the next 10 years of John Wick bring?
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, the first spinoff feature film, is scheduled to release in theaters June 6, 2025 and may help define what the future of the John Wick franchise looks like. Starring Ana de Armas, Ballerina takes place between the events of John Wick: Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, allowing Keanu Reeves to return in a supporting role.
Also in development is a spinoff feature for Donnie Yen’s Caine character who was introduced in Chapter 4, and we know there are discussions for others as well. It was no coincidence that Chapter 4, which was by far the most successful, introduced so many new characters and locations ripe for exploration.
“I just think that there’s a world rich of stories, and I think it can go a lot of different ways,” David Leitch tells us on his thoughts about the next 10 years of John Wick. “And I hope to see more of Keanu.”
Related This Bizarre John Wick 5 Theory Somehow Perfectly Explains How Keanu Reeves’ Character Returns
Although John Wick: Chapter 4 had a definitive ending, this bizarre John Wick 5 theory somehow perfectly explain how Keanu Reeves’ character returns.
We asked David what he thought of the outlandish fan theory involving Keanu Reeve’s John Wick return in a more supernatural-leaning Chapter 5 that could see him fighting his way out of hell. To David, this is “a little far-fetched,” but adds, “I would never say never with Chad and Basil and Keanu are making those decisions now.”
David Leitch: But look, I am so game to see him back, and I’m sure there’s a beautiful Unforgiven version of this movie too, where he’s put the guns back on one last time or whatever. As an audience member on Four, I loved it. And as my friend ,who one of my best friends,directed the movie, Chad, I’m such a huge fan of it. I think they made the right choice. And yeah, it’s movies and if people want to go back and tell more stories in that, we’ll find a way to make the story happen.
Leitch also says “I say never say never” to whether he’d return himself to direct another John Wick.
David Leitch: I’m such a fan of that character and I love John so much, and I love working with Keanu and it would be awesome. But again, I don’t think about it often, but if I did, of course, yes. If it was the right story and I’m the right person to tell it, sure.
“That’s a great question,” ponders Erica Lee when asked the same question. “I mean, obviously I’d love more spinoffs and TV shows and exploring all different arenas.”
Erica Lee: First and foremost, I’d love John Wick 5 and figuring out what that movie looks like and what the story is and how we take the franchise to the next level. I think we set this bar so high in 4 and we left it all on the table. I say we burn the house down when we make the movie. So I think to pull it all together, it has to be a great idea and the stars have to align, and there’s a lot of pressure to get that right. So that’s what I’m most hopeful and excited and anxious about.
Is he dead? I think that that’s subjective. Maybe there’s nothing in that grave. I’m a producer, so we’re hopeful for more.
John Wick is the first entry in the action-thriller franchise directed by Chad Stahelski and starring Keanu Reeves. Retired hitman John is brought back into the field when the dog his recently deceased life left him is murdered. Full of rage and equipped with unparalleled combat skills, John begins to track down the ones responsible for the act of violence and lays waste to any who dare to cross his path, sending panic throughout the criminal underworld.
Director David Leitch , Chad Stahelski
Release Date October 24, 2014
Studio(s) Thunder Road Pictures , 87Eleven Productions
Distributor(s) Summit Entertainment
Writers Derek Kolstad
Runtime 101 Minutes
Budget $20-30 Million
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Images provided by Lionsgate. Custom art design by Saiful Creation (Instagram, Facebook, Behance).