JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 — PARABELLUM
John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum director CHAD STAHELSKI explains how he keeps rewriting the action rulebook
Director Chad Stahelski on the ultimate hit, man.
CHAD STAHELSKI IS a man of action. Literally. This is a guy who started off as a stuntman, became one of the best in the business, and is the sort of person who can nonchalantly drop a sentence like, ‘“I’ve been in a lot of environments where you see actual violence, and it’s brutal,” into casual conversation. He’s walked the walk, talked the talk, jumped the jump, exploded the explosion.
And now he’s channelling all those years of experience into becoming one of the best action directors around. He’s directed just three movies so far, but those movies just happen to be the John Wick trilogy, in which Stahelski and his creative partner, one Keanu Reeves, seek to elevate the modern American action movie into a hybrid of influences and styles with the aim of being much, much more than the sum of its parts. “You’ve all seen a knife fight. How do I make it different?” he muses. “You’ve all seen a gunfight. How do I make that different? You’ve all seen a John Wick movie. How do I make a John Wick movie better?”
As John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum, with its knife fights, dog fights, death by book and much more, hits home, he tells us how.
REALISM RULES
The standout sequence of John Wick: Chapter 3, and perhaps the action scene of the year, is a sloppy, chaotic, desperate battle between Reeves’ embattled hitman and a group of assassins that just happens to take place in an antique store filled with knives and axes. In the sort of twist that almost never happens on Bargain Hunt, John and his attackers hurl knives at each other. And not always with the effect we’re conditioned to expect. “What happens in every knife fight?” asks Stahelski. “Your hero, who you’ve never seen with a knife before, picks up a knife, throws it 200 feet, it sticks in the guy’s forehead.” So far, so every Arnold Schwarzenegger film of the 1980s. “Now, I guarantee you’ve picked up one of Mom’s steak knives and thrown it at a tree,” continues Stahelski, getting weirdly specific. “It’s bounced back and hit you in the fucking head, right? That happens nine out of ten fucking times.” The noble sacrifice of Mrs Stahelski’s
silverware wasn’t for naught. It directly inspired this sequence, where knives very rarely find their target… until John finds his range, at which point the bad guys become human pin cushions. “Everybody fucking misses,” says Stahelski. “That’s a real fight. We take a little bit of reality and mix it in. If you watch Keanu, he slips and fucks up almost as much as he wins.”
EMBRACE YOUR INFLUENCES
At one point, as hordes of High Table hired hands storm the lobby of the Continental in an ultimately futile attempt to kill John Wick, the lighting colour scheme changes to neon green. Or, as Stahelski calls it, “Matrix green”. As if Keanu Reeves saying “guns… lots of guns” wasn’t already a fairly sizeable doff of the cap to the Wachowskis’ 1999 action classic which saw Stahelski perform as Reeves’ stunt double. “It’s the Matrix’s 20th anniversary, so that’s my little thank you to the Wachowskis,” he laughs. “And rather than just say ‘thank you’ to each of them, I thought, ‘I’m going to turn a whole set-piece Matrix green.’ It’s a big lovefest.”
Which also describes much of Parabellum, which is a love letter to a myriad other movies. Whether it’s Game Of Death or Blade Runner or even Monty Python And The Holy Grail, it’s jampacked with references and in-jokes. Or ‘thank yous’, as Stahelski might put it. “Take away all the acting and thematics and all the Hollywood talk, and John Wick is a tribute to every movie I love,” says Stahelski. “You can see the Leone. You can see the Kurosawa. You can see Steve Mcqueen in Bullitt. We’re looking back to Bruce Lee, way back to Jackie Chan, way back to the Shaw Brothers.”
The film’s main villain, Zero, is played by martial arts legend Mark Dacascos, while The Raid 2’s Cecep Arif Rahman and Yayan Ruhian play his unfailingly polite henchmen. “You look at our guys, they are the best of the best in the business for martial arts stuntmen.”
BE AWARE OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS
A self-professed student of architecture, Stahelski recognises the importance of setting action scenes against interesting and unusual backdrops. So, in Parabellum, there are fight scenes on a bridge, or in the courtyard of a Casablanca hotel, or in stables. The final showdown between John Wick and Team Zero takes place in, essentially, a glass box, where ninjas use shadows and light to hide themselves. “You can tell I have a boner for reflections and glass,” laughs Stahelski. “Could we hide an army of ninjas behind seethrough glass? We did that with reflections. I though that was clever.”
The first fight sequence in the movie is a brutal showdown in the New York Public Library between John and Ernest, a humungous hitman played by basketball player Boban Marjanovic, “who has the biggest hands in the NBA”. As the two pound seven shades out of each other in the Russian Literature section, the contrast in sizes between the two men speaks to one of Stahelski’s biggest thematic preoccupations. “I wanted to create a super big world that makes John Wick feel very small,” he says. “He’s just a little guy in a big world. That’s the visual thematic of all our set-pieces.” The library fight came to Stahelski when he was visiting the iconic building — perhaps used to greatest effect previously in Ghostbusters. “It hit me,” he says. “I couldn’t have him just shoot somebody or stab somebody with a pencil. I had to do something different. I wanted a giant.”
Thematic concerns are also uppermost in Stahelski’s mind. John Wick: Chapter 3 is a movie dense with references to art, culture, philosophy (Nietzsche is quoted) and poetry (as is Dante). It’s a movie in which a man is beaten to death with a book, but Stahelski wants that book — in this case a collection of Russian folk tales by Aleksandr Afanasyev from 1864, in which John stores the last picture he has of his late wife — to be significant. “It doesn’t take much to draw parallels from Dante to a Russian book about the Baba Yaga, which is also the book that encloses
his wife’s memory,” says Stahelski. “Our symbolism kinda beats you over the head. It literally beats you over the head.”
DON’T DO THE SAME THING TWICE
“I talk a lot about my love of dance, ballet, theatre,” says Stahelski, who goes on to namedrop Hamilton and Porgy And Bess in the space of a few seconds. “If you have to sit through a ballet for two hours, and just saw the same eight dancers do the same dance, with the same outfits, you’d be bored off your fucking rocker, right?” It’s hard to quibble. “So they change costumes, they change rhythm, they change songs. We call it a lot of a little.”
The same maxim applied to John Wick: Chapter 3. “How do we change?” he asks. “I’ll change the visuals, I’ll change the set-pieces, I’ll change the opponents, I’ll change martial art styles, I’ll change the choreography. I’ll make it funny, I’ll make it violent. I’ll do a little of both in a fight scene.” Nowhere is that greater illustrated within Parabellum than in the showdown in Casablanca, where John Wick and his reluctant partner, Sofia (Halle Berry), take on a small army. For the first time in the trilogy, Stahelski actually takes the focus away from John for an extended spell, choosing to follow Sofia and her killer Belgian Malinois as they make a whole mound of mercenary mincemeat. “We always had this idea of a secondary character who had suffered like John, losing a family or giving up something to protect their world,” explains Stahelski. “Male, female, it didn’t matter to me. If I was going to come off the character of Wick and focus on another character, it had to be someone who was a lot more than just physically good.”
NEVER STOP SUBVERTING
Subversion is a big thing for Stahelski. He mentions it a lot. “We have a fucked-up kind of chivalry in John Wick,” he says. “I call it the Subversive Code; chivalry turned on its head. ‘You can fuck people over, but not in this hotel’.” The library fight is about subversion for him. The key is finding what audiences expect, and doing the opposite, or as close to the opposite as you can. “John Wick is supposed to be the best shot in the world,” he says. “But he misses too, and when people shoot at him, they hit him. Which is why we put him in the bulletproof suit. You can’t make the bad guys look idiotic, or our hero looks idiotic. So we subvert what you think the image is, and make every fight scene feel different thematically and visually.”
INCREASE THE INTENSITY
“I’m not into gore or violence,” says Stahelski. “I’m really not. I don’t think you should exploit violence, nor do I think you should hide from it. When people fight with edged weapons, it’s brutal.” He’s not kidding. Parabellum features some of the most eye-wateringly violent fight scenes since the Raid movies, including a moment where John slowly slides a knife into an unwilling eye (take that, Un Chien Andalou), and more head shots than a casting director’s wall. “When people fight, you get stabbed. Shit happens when you get a shotgun to the face. But I’m not trying to push violence.” Instead, Stahelski reveals that he’s actually playing a little game with the ultraviolence. “If you look at the blood splatters on the wall, there’ll be happy faces, there’ll be unicorns, there’ll be things we put in to make light of the situation. If you go back through the movie frame by frame, you’ll see all sorts of shit.” Challenge accepted.
John Wick: chapter 3 — parabellum IS out now on DVD, blu-ray, 4K and Download