In John Wick: Chapter 4, the titular former assassin has found a new path to his target, the High Table. Following the events of Parabellum, John has healed from being shot by Winston with the help of the Bowery King and has decided to take the fight to his powerful former employers in order to secure his freedom. But a new dangerous player, Marquis Vincent de Gramont, has ed the fight and is willing to do whatever it takes to take out Baba Yaga. With former friends now turned into enemies, John's fight has become even more personal.
Chad Stahelski directs John Wick: Chapter 4, with Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, Lance Reddick, and Laurence Fishburne returning. Newcomers to the John Wick universe include Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Hiroyuki Sanada, Shamier Anderson, Rina Sawayama, Scott Adkins, and Clancy Brown. John Wick: Chapter 4 continues to expand the storytelling possibilities by exploring new corners of the world, including the Osaka Continental, which will soon tie into the spin-off prequel series The Continental and the spin-off movie Ballerina.
Screen Rant spoke with screenwriters Shay Hatten and Michael Fitch about working on John Wick: Chapter 4. Fitch and Hatten gave new insight into the collaborative writing process with Stahelski, both in of world-building and action sequences. Hatten also explained how Ballerina will reveal new details about John Wick's origins.
Shay Hatten & Michael Finch on John Wick: Chapter 4
Screen Rant: I feel like John Wick is one of the only franchises that gets better and better with each installment of the franchise. It is incredible how much that franchise has blown up, and the action is next level. Can you guys walk me through the John Wick writing process, and how detailed the action scenes are in the script?
Shay Hatten: Yeah, I think it goes both ways. Sometimes when you're writing, you're just a writer who has an idea for a sequence, and you try to put it in there, and then maybe Chad reads that and takes inspiration from it and builds it out. But then sometimes it works backwards where Chad has taken inspiration from some movie he saw, or somewhere he went, and then he comes to you, and he's like, "This is the idea. We're going to do it."
On the third one, I one day he was just like, "Sit down, write exactly this. John's taking knives off the walls. He's throwing them like their baseballs." So that's where I'm like, "Okay, I'll just write exactly what Chad's saying and then take the credit for it later." So it can be collaborative and then sometimes it's Chad. These ideas come from all over the place, and at least for me, none of these sequences emerge the same way. They all have their different processes.
Michael Finch: Chad is at the top. He is undeniably the greatest action director living, possibly ever. He understands actions; fundamentally understands it from multiple levels from the camera, and more importantly understands it from inside out. He understands what it's like to fight, and he does something very interesting. Yes, the scenes are written in incredibly detailed fashion. That said, once he takes them, he gives them to some guys. He then starts to repurpose them and sort of time shift them, throw things away, add things. He uses them as a template.
Largely, and this is probably horrible to say, they're designed to expand the budget. What he wants to do, he has the money to do it. Everything Shay said is absolutely on point. This is an incredibly collaborative process, but it is Chad and Keanu's world. They will often come up with the location. One set has moving waterfalls and fire behind it, it's going to be multiple stories. And then we write this, and we rewrite it. Then we go on set, and we look at the actual physical environment and wander through it and realize that we've got to throw it out and redo it to match it. And then he comes to the day of stunt guy's been training for three weeks on this. And he changes it all around because one of the reasons the action works so well in John Wick is it is not actually as choreographed as you think it is.
What he does is he knows that in a real fight, strikes don't always land. People aren't always perfect. It's messy, it's sloppy. You slip, you slide, you take impacts, sort of like the plan doesn't survive the first bullet fired. So what he does is he'll throw wrenches into well choreographed sequences in order to make them imperfect and thus challenge the stunt guys and challenge Keanu, who is phenomenal at this to pivot and shift. And that's why it gives this sort of, while it's heightened on the one hand, it also feels very real on the other.
Part of what sets John Wick apart is the immersive world-building. Can you talk about how you decide which pieces are revealed?
Shay Hatten: The exciting thing about writing a John Wick movie is that it's not based on 10 novels of IP. It's not based on comic book series. It's just based on these movies and what exists within these movies. And to me, that's so thrilling because as a writer, it means you have, to some extent, free rein. You're not boxed into a pre-ordained story or pre-ordained parts of the world we're going to visit. You start, turn the blank page, and you're like, "Where does it make sense for John to go?"
And if that answer is Japan, then you get to then create a whole new culture around the Osaka Continental that he's found himself in and build it out from there. It's a John focused franchise, we're following John where he goes, and the world builds out really naturally around him. Which I think is why it's cited as such a great example of world building because it happens naturally, and we're not upfront about overloading exposition. You're just building it out as it happens.
Michael Finch: That's key. Again, Chad is very big on, what's not said is more important than what is said. We don't go to Osaka and then have someone sit there with an exposition tell us that this is Osaka Continental, this is what it does. Less experienced junior studio executives will ask that question and Chad will say, "No, no, no." It's the redacting quality. It's the questions that people ask about it that are what brings them back to the table.
It also is a much more respectful way to treat your audience. When we're dropping into the world, we don't get the benefit of someone telling us all the backstory of everything we're interacting with. You enter in and you have to catch up. And so somewhere in there that gives you a lot of latitude to show the world, but not have to stop to talk about the world. And again, this is a motion picture, not a talking picture. That's what Chad's embraced.
I know that you're working on Ballerina, but can you talk to me about what other areas of the John Wick universe you'd like to explore more?
Shay Hatten: It's just the benefit of having so many different great characters throughout the history of this franchise. Just as a fan of this franchise, there are so many people that I'd love to see on their own adventure. I'd love to see a Halle Berry movie. I'd love to see an Akira movie or a Donnie Yen movie. And this is a credit to the actors and to Chad with the characters that he creates that I would follow any of those guys anywhere.
I really think it has an endless potential, but also its different parts of the world. That was what's cool about 4, we get to see Osaka Continental. I want to continue to see Continentals in different corners of the world, what those look like, and just continue to explore and peel back the curtain. I really do think it's kind of endless, as long as you can keep finding a strong emotional reason to keep telling these stories.
Absolutely. Shamir was telling me that he'd like to see a Tracker spinoff, where it's him going through the John Wick movies, almost observing from the background.
Shay Hatten: That's awesome.
Michael, Chad told me that Donnie had a lot of influence on his character Caine. How do you approach those changes?
Michael Finch: You should have faith. Donnie is not only an international superstar, he's also a really talented filmmaker who understands the entire process and a very skilled actor. As well as being physically almost freakishly capable; the speed at which he moves is disturbing. So, you sit down with a guy like Donnie, you discuss the character. He wants to understand where he comes from. He also wants to understand where he's going. And then you listen to him, and you take what he has to give you, take the very best of it. If you're not going to use it, you explain why. And he's very much on board.
This was the most collaborative project I have ever worked on. One of the reasons was you have so many big personalities. If Ian McShane says he wants to change the word in a scene, you kind of just say, "Thank you, sir." Same with Fishburn. Clancy Brown says, "I want to do this." It's like, "Yes." And we wanted everyone on that set to own that movie. Keanu believes he's John Wick, not in a creepy way, but while he's making the movie, he believes he's John Wick.
We wanted Shamir, Donnie, Rena, to believe that they were these characters. And once they believe that they sort of flip, and it becomes very natural, and any hesitation, any sort of self-doubt, or queasiness about will this work? It goes away because shit is happening in the moment for them. And so that was the relationship with Donnie, who by the way was like I said, wonderful guy and really clever.
Shay, can you talk to me a little bit about Ballerina, how it explores a new side of the John Wick verse, and why you wanted to set it between Chapter 3 and Chapter 4?
Shay Hatten: Ballerina has just been a completely fascinating journey for me overall because it started as a spec that was not related to the John Wick movies six years ago. And then got brought in and then Chad was kind enough to let us set it up in 3 by showing the ballet theater. And by nature of that, it kind of teed up this story really well. But it's really cool because that story was originally, again, because it wasn't attached to the John Wick universe, it was set in a different part of the world. The original script was set in the Swiss Alps, which is territory that the John Wick movies have not touched.
I think in a great way, it meant that we could kind of stick to the original story of that script from Ballerina without stepping on the toes of John Wick, but also it's a character who we know went to the same ballet academy as John. So I think in Ballerina you'll get to see some of the hints of what John experienced during his origins in that place, but through the eyes of different characters. So it's still solves some of the answers of Wick just through the eyes of a new character.
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.
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