John Wick finds a new path to defeating the High Table in John Wick: Chapter 4. However, his goal is threatened when the High Table sends the Marquis Vincent de Gramont after the Baba Yaga. Old allies will become enemies in this globe-trotting, action-packed adventure as John strives to destroy the High Table once and for all.
Acclaimed action director Chad Stahelski returns for John Wick: Chapter 4. The star-studded returning cast is led by Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, Lance Reddick, and Laurence Fishburne. ing the franchise in John Wick: Chapter 4 are powerhouse actors Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Hiroyuki Sanada, Shamier Anderson, Rina Sawayama, Scott Adkins, and Clancy Brown.
Stunt coordinators Scott Rogers and Stephen Dunlevy break down the action sequences in John Wick: Chapter 4 in an exclusive interview with Screen Rant. Rogers also explained how they choreograph the fighting style to fit the performer and character, specifically with Reeves and Yen, while Dunlevy teased how the action in Ballerina will differ from the John Wick movies.
Scott Rogers & Stephen Dunlevy on John Wick: Chapter 4
Screen Rant: Amazing job on John Wick: Chapter 4! You guys have both worked on previous John Wick installments. How do the action sequences from John Wick 4 stand out?
Scott Rogers: Chad doesn't want to repeat himself. Everything's led by him, and he creates these opportunities to take it to the next level. And obviously John Wick famously didn't have a car sequence in 3. At one point it did, and you can only put so much in a movie. He wanted to do this thing, and then he says, "Oh, I want to do it at the Arc de Triomphe." And you're like, "Do what?" But he has a vision for why it wants to be.
Because if you look at John Wick 2, that car sequence, which I think is amazing, was put together by Darren Prescott. It's very contained, it's in a warehouse. Chad goes, "All right, well that was in a warehouse. Let's go do this at the Arc de Triomphe and open this thing up and make it very different." And the lighting and everything. It makes it a very different sequence, even though you're still dealing with cars
Can you talk to me about the car chase and fight, as well as the fight on the stairs? How do you guys pull this stuff off?
Scott Rogers: Well, I'll talk about the car chase, and I'll let Steve talk about the stairs. We wanted it to stay in the Wick world. And in a typical car chase, you cut to the actor, and then you have stunt doubles, and you cut to the actor. And we didn't want to do that, because John Wick doesn't do that. And Keanu already comes with a certain skill set. We're like, "All right, well let's just adapt that and increase that." So we started, I don't know, 9 months ahead of shooting. It was December of, I forgot what year it was even. 2021? 2020? I don't know. Lost track now.
And we brought in Tanner Foust, who is a well known car guy, race driver. Drives for McLaren. Who's a good friend of mine. And he started training Keanu and he goes, "Whoa, maybe we can do this, and maybe we can do that." And we spent three different days training him. And then that was the basis of the sequence, what he could do. Once we got to Berlin, we found a space, and then we started training different, little smaller pieces, where he drifts the car, and he picks up the gun, and does some things that we weren't even sure he could do.
And Tanner figures out how to do it. And then we figure out how to train Keanu. And Keanu just shows up whenever you need him, it's like, "Hey, on your day off, can you come drive this 500 horsepower, specially built car to drift?" And he was like, "All right." And he does it. And he gets it. And he's relentless. If he wants to learn a skill, he will just keep going. So that's ultimately how that all comes together.
And then Stephen, can you talk about the stair fight scene?
Stephen Dunlevy: Yeah. Have you been to Paris at all? Have you ever stood at the bottom of the stairs? It was three in the morning. They didn't know what was going on.
You stand at the bottom of those stairs for the first time, and Chad's like, we're going to go up, and we're going to fall all the way down and go back up again. It's like, "I don't have the stamina to do that." So, obviously, we can't rehearse there, all the time. So a production team found an amazing theater, like an old theater space in Paris, and we recreated a section of those stairs that allowed us to come up with the action. If you look at the as a whole, it becomes like, "What do we do?" So you break it down, section by section, and you find out what we want to do. We're going to hit a tree here. We're going to chip this guy over a rail. And this guy goes down here, and he takes out this guy's legs. And then there's a guy behind.
We're constantly changing focus of cause and effect. There's not only the guys that are coming at him, there's the guys that have fallen that are getting up at the same time. It's marrying all that in together. And of course the story, as Chad has said, is taking inspiration from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. With this one, all these key people need to get there, so we get Keanu nearly getting to the top, and bang, Marco kicks him all the way down. And our stunt double Vincent, he was the guy that fell down every single one of those stairs, multiple times, over a two-day span.
He was like, "Hey, what are we doing today?" "Well, you know how we did the first section yesterday? Well, today we're doing the bottom half, we're going all the way down again. I'm sorry, man." You got to do that in a way that allows him to get up every time. Obviously safety was paramount. So he did every one of those and kept fighting through it. And then you have Donnie, his character has to get to the top of the stairs. So you get this amazing scene with Donnie Yen and Keanu Reeves fighting up the stairs, as a team, together.
Something I find interesting about the fight choreography is how each character's fighting style is tied to their background. Can you break down how you build a fighting style around each character in John Wick 4? How do you guys build Caine's fighting style around him, or is that more just based on what Donnie can do?
Stephen Dunlevy: The great thing about 87 is you're building stunts around what the performers can do. So obviously Keanu has three films. He's done John Wick 1, 2, 3, and now 4. So he has a base style. And obviously Keanu's style we built that around him with Judo, Brazilian Jujitsu and everything like that. Donnie comes in with a skill set, which is amazing. It's a gift to any stunt coordinator that comes in and our fight team, like Jeremy Moranes, our amazing fight coordinator on that.
You're not going to change Donnie Yen's style, because he's better than 99% of stunt performers out there, and martial artists out there. He's Donnie Yen. So Donnie came in with very specific ideas about what his character, and then you just build on those. Obviously, there's an element to him being blind. So you adapt his skill set, and you adapt the use of the gun and the cane, and everything like that to give you some really cool moments and choreography.
That's incredible. You guys have worked with Keanu in some of the previous installments of John Wick. Can you talk about how his skill set has evolved over the course of the John Wick franchise?
Scott Rogers: You're talking about Keanu Reeves. You're talking about a guy that has done fight scenes from Matrix. He's altered cinematic fighting multiple times. Went from Matrix, that was a shift in fighting in cinema and was a different type of fighting. I don't know if Keanu would even it that he can fight, but what he can do is he can learn choreography. As he's gotten older, because he is not a young man, you just know, "Okay, stay away from that." So the fight team, the choreographer he mentioned earlier, Jeremy Morenas, they know what to avoid and where to hone in on.
And then Chad knows Keanu for 25 years. And so, he develops the nunchuck thing. He goes, "All right, now you're going to learn nunchucks." And Keanu's like, "Ah..." But he is going to learn it. So you just add to that. The beauty of John Wick is you really don't know what John Wick knows. It's like Jason Bourne. The training happened. You just assume it happened, and he can do it. So you can add whatever flavor you want. It's like adding a new spice. And we're just going to add a little horse. We're going to have him ride a horse.
Stephen, you're also working on Ballerina. Will the fighting style be different, maybe inspired by ballet and Eastern European combat styles?
Stephen Dunlevy: You're dealing with John Wick, with Keanu. That character is an older grizzled combat veteran. He's seen it all, done at all. So he has a more refined style. Everything he does, he's survived it. With Ana [de Armas]' character, in Ballerina, what you're seeing is a younger, more rookie-ish assassin that's coming through. She's going to make mistakes her. She's going to learn.
Part of the amazing thing with those characters is the ability to adapt to the surroundings, and to use weapons that are everyday objects and things like that. What you're going to see in that more is you're going to see her learning to adapt to her surroundings, and her environments. And seeing, basically, where that training came from. Why John Wick has survived so long is because of the foundation of training they've got. So you're going to see her make mistakes and adapt and survive.
Scott, I know you worked on Batgirl as a stunt coordinator, and we're not going to see that movie. Could you share, from a stunt perspective, what we were expecting from Batgirl? How did that stand apart from other comic book films?
Scott Rogers: The thing that drew me to that movie in the first place was that there's no superheroes. It's a superhero movie with nobody with superpowers. So it was very grounded. It fit the John Wick world, which is the world that I really like, which is real grounded, real live, not CG stunts. And the bad guy was, Brendan Fraser's character, Firefly, and we had these amazing flamethrowers. And we did this really great fight with flamethrowers.
And then we had this huge sequence on a firetruck with motorcycles, and 40 foot flamethrowers, and girls doing a wheelie with the flames. And it was just like doing a John Wick. "Okay, we're going to do what? 40 foot flame throwers? Yes. Okay, how are we going to do that?" It was great. And it's unfortunate, but the beauty is I've learned a bunch, and now I can go steal all of those stunts and go put them in another movie.
About John Wick Chapter 4
Following the events of Parabellum, John Wick has found a new path to defeating the High Table and is taking the fight to them. But before he can try to earn his freedom, a powerful new enemy will turn even more people against Wick, including one of his oldest and most dangerous friends.
Check out our other John Wick: Chapter 4 interviews here:
- Keanu Reeves
- Laurence Fishburne
- Chad Stahelski
- Scott Adkins
- Ian McShane & Lance Reddick
- Hiroyuki Sanada & Shamier Anderson
- Costume Designer Paco Delgado
- Writers Shay Hatten and Michael Finch
