John Wick: Chapter Four became one of the biggest films of 2023 and has remained in many Top Tens throughout the year (including my own). We were lucky enough to speak with the director, Chad Stahelski. From influences such as Bob Fosse and The Exorcist to Rina Sawayama and stunts at the Oscars, the incredible director discussed it all with us.

Chad Stahelski: Hi Kenzie, how are you?
Kenzie Vanunu: I’m great! It’s such an honor to talk to you! John Wick: Chapter Four is still by far my favorite theater experience of the year.

Chad Stahelski: God, you gotta get out more!
Kenzie Vanunu: Haha, I’ve seen everything and it’s still the best! The franchise is so fun to watch for film fans with all of the various references from iconic films, such as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Seven Samurai as well as obviously Buster Keaton. What films were the major influences for the fourth installment? 
Chad Stahelski: Well, funny enough. Depends on from which angle right like there’s a character structure like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, right? You can kind of see the three guys who actually it’s I did it with four but you get the idea. There’s a little bit of, you know, just name a Western with a duel. It’s got a little Zatoichi in it. It’s got a little Yojimbo in it, which is kind of cool. Just little insane things. But you know, the reason I chose Paris was I’m a big Amélie fan. Like I love that movie. It just gets me every time I watch it. I think it’s just so well done. So we literally watched Amélie like half a dozen times before we went on location scout and that’s why you see us at Sacré-Cœur with the merry-go-round. The Opera House and all these great spots in Paris, obviously. You know there’s a Walter Hill reference to The Warriors in there, which is kind of fun.

Or like you can just pretty much pick a Chambara film… Harakiri or like Seven Samurai or Zatoichi or you know The Hidden Fortress. Any Kurosawa film is kind of the beginning. Keanu, myself and Hiroyuki [Sanada] have been friends for a while, so it’s nice to get his take on what his favorite samurai movies were obviously he’s been in so many. So there’s a couple in there that we like to reference.

Kenzie Vanunu: I was actually wondering if you had any dance centric films as influences. The choreography is so stunning in all of the John Wick films, but especially in this installment.
Chad Stahelski: I love all the dance stuff, so like anything Bob Fosse, you know? If you watch enough Wuxia films like all the kung-fu it kind of seeps into you. Like I’ve watched thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of Japanese animation and stuff. So like the framing the it kind of sinks in. I spent so much time with the Wachowskis, it sinks in. Every Sunday, not every but pretty close to every Sunday, I’ll start the day off with some musical from the 40s or 50s or something like that just on the TV in the background. Just last weekend, we watched Singin’ In the Rain again because that it is interview about it. Gene Kelly or, or Fred Astaire, or you know, one of the greats, Danny Kaye, or anything like that, there’s a rhythm to those and there’s a quirky funness but like they were big students of vaudeville and silent films as well. So you can kind of see the evolution as it goes and then we kind of lost the visual storytelling because now we realize so much in exposition. I think it’s always kind of fun, like, sometimes just a look up and look down like Buster [Keaton] he sets up the gag by making you look where he looks. You see the hill, you look down and you see the edge. ‘Uh oh,’ you know, it’s all said in that one thing you don’t say well, “if we fall out, we will be all over.” So nonverbal storytelling has always been fascinating to me. I’m a big fan of silent film. So I think that’s where we get a lot of our, I guess comedy with an action sequence, but the dance thing definitely helps with the rhythm and the camera movement.

Kenzie Vanunu: For sure. I’m a huge pop music fan, so I was really excited to see Rina Sawayama have such an amazing action sequence and she really got to showcase her dance skills.
Chad Stahelski: I didn’t know who she was, I stumbled across a music video of hers. Then I stumbled across a whole page and for a week I was going back and forth watching all her videos as I was casting, just watching her dance and she changed looks so good. To me, at first, right off the bat, I was looking for somebody that could have literally jumped off the page of an anime or manga and I was like, ‘okay, this is the girl’ and the part was a non action part to start with. You know, just a tiny little bit of something and then I gave Rina to the stunt teams. The stunt teams came back after like the first day or so and went, ‘hmmm..she’s pretty good!’ So then it was let’s get in the gym so we went and we watched Rina rehearse and she kept picking stuff up. So we were like, ‘Hey, how’d you like you to do an action sequence with Keanu Reeves?’

Kenzie Vanunu: Oh my gosh, that’s so amazing. She’s incredible in it, everybody walked away talking about her. This installment has such incredible locations used as major plot points. What was it like conceptualizing shooting at such landmarks and then actually pulling it off?
Chad Stahelski: Yeah, pretty cool. I love traveling, I’ve always been a travel guy. I’m kind of a real tourist, you know, there’s too many museums on the planet I haven’t visited. You know, that’s just the way I was brought up. And they’re like, a safe space. For me, it’s a place to sit and relax and be in your own thoughts. So I love museums, I love big spaces. My dad was a plumber and a contractor. So I grew up with architecture and constantly work in building houses. So you have that appreciation for space and form. So like, if you don’t know, we started shooting at the very end of COVID when some of the places still have a lot of restrictions, but we’re just opening up so I think, in a somewhat positive way, because all these very tourist, very famous places that had no income for three years, they were happy to get a movie and you know, so we kind of rode the wave and got access to what in regular season we never like they never would have shut the Louvre down for us they never would have given us the the Eiffel Tower or or you know, even Sacré-Cœur for that matter, at in the hours we did. So, you know, to shut down all those places and have the city really behind you like, ‘hey, thank you for coming to us, thank you for putting up with our restrictions.’ You know, sometimes we make movies in a place where they really don’t want you there because we make such a mess. But the city of Paris, the city of Berlin, you know, Aqaba in Jordan, the royal family in Jordan was out of their way helpful to us. So I got to shoot where they actually shot Lawrence of Arabia, in actual Aqaba outside of the Wadi Rum, you know, close to Petra. And so, so we gotten these amazing spots. When you’re standing in the actual desert, where, you know, Peter O’Toole rode his camel into battle like this is right in the same overlooks, the same cliff and then, you know, from there, you’re actually shooting in the Red Room of the Louvre and then I’m in the opera house where so many great things have been shot in and created and then you know, the next day you’re over in Sacré-Cœur and you’re the Louis Vuitton Museum. It was pretty surreal. I mean, I think my crew has a lot of great photographs.

Kenzie Vanunu: That’s so amazing! We need the coffee table book of all the behind the scenes.
Chad Stahelski: Keanu is very cool. Here’s an old tidbit for you. For wrap gifts, he’ll always give like a really cool jacket or sweatshirt. He’ll always come up with something cool like he’ll buy all the crew champagne like he treats the crew very well. But then for the department heads he’ll always make a coffee table book. It’s pretty cool, it’ll have moments in it for everybody from the set.

Kenzie Vanunu: That’s amazing! That’s so sweet. I really love the stair sequence in the film. The way it’s lit looks so similar to The Exorcist.
Chad Stahelski: That’s done purposely, good eye. I love William Friedkin and I love The Exorcist. So right when I saw the stairs and we saw the vapor lamps, we’re like, ‘nope The Exorcist, Friedkin, Friedkin set it up. We’re gonna have a little bit more green go.’

Kenzie Vanunu: I love that so much. The stairs sequence is so fun with an audience. I saw the sequence almost as a metaphor for the whole film for John. 
Chad Stahelski: That’s very interesting. I like that.

Kenzie Vanunu: The club sequence is just breathtaking, especially in IMAX! Honestly, I just think ‘how did he pull this off’ every time I see it. What was it like filming that with the moving parts like the waterfalls, all the extras and keeping us with our characters still? 
Chad Stahelski: Gerd Nefzer, German special effects coordinator. He is awesome. I told him in the very beginning that we wanted about 40 waterfalls. And I wanted it to hit the floor in this big warehouse that we found. And he’s like, ‘you realize how much water that is every minute’ and I’m like ‘no, my dad was a plumber, I kinda get it.’ But he kept drawing the zeros. I’m like, ‘sounds right.’ So in one shot you can actually see the pump device, which is the size of a small house on a corner of the set. And the tubes are like three foot wide tubes that are pumping the water in from the city or big water containers. So you know it’s like, ‘Okay, turn on the waterfall,’ and like I think 47 of them come up with the sprinklers and all the dancers. We have our, you know, several 100 dancers going on. And you know, everybody’s getting wet. It’s sometime in the middle of the night. And then we have our dogs running through it with our guys in a gunfight. It took a while to put together. But you can rehearse the parts, but until you get there, you never know how it’s gonna look. So you have to keep changing. It took a couple Saturday nights to find the right colors and to get everything going. But once it goes, you know, we played music for the first couple beats to get everybody into it and we killed the music and they got to stay in rhythm. And our composer Tyler Bates, Dylan Eiland, and Joel Richard are three main composers had already done the beat track, we kind of had the song that you hear in it, we actually wrote for the movie. And, you know, we got the dance choreographers, there’s like, ‘Hey, can you dance to this?’ And they’re like, ‘oh, yeah, watch this’. And it was cool. Like, I love music. I love club sequences. I love all that. So to put that together with all the right people we had, you know, I’m not gonna lie to you standing on set for the first time and like, I forget to roll, I just want to sit there and listen, and it was a cool set to be and you can just feel all that water hitting with the music pumping. You’re like, ‘Yeah, I’d go to this club. This is cool.’

Kenzie Vanunu: That’s so awesome. I definitely have the soundtrack playing all the time. One of my favorite scenes in the film is the dragon’s breath overhead scene. I love the production design in the scene with all the details on the floor. The lighting in this scene is just beautiful, including the gun shots. How did you plan and execute this scene?
Chad Stahelski: That’s very intuitive of you. We usually do overhead shots for you know, sometimes for an aesthetic or a moment. But in an action sometimes you do it to the hide all the stunt doubles, and you hide the things you use. Yeah, the reason you don’t really do a top shot sometimes is because you look down and all you see is floor. It’s a dirty carpet, or it’s just that. So when I talk to my production designer, Kevin Cavanaugh, he was very good about every room has holes in it, it has carpet as a checkered floorboard. It has books in it, like he’s very good at looking at the world from down from top down. So hopefully that kept it interesting.

Kenzie Vanunu: It was definitely so interesting! Especially rewatching it trying to see any of the details I might have missed before.
Chad Stahelski: There’s a lot in there. We have a lot of graffiti in our movies. If you look at the graffiti, it’s all in different languages. There’s still some that people haven’t found all the graffiti and all the Latin we put everywhere.

Kenzie Vanunu: That’s so awesome. I need to rewatch to see! For the Arc de Triomphe sequence, it has so many layers to it with the traffic, the dog, the shooting… it’s crazy. I kept thinking of how the dog had to be comfortable with the camera operator every time the camera was in the middle of the dog and the stuntman. It’s so thrilling to see a moving set piece like this. What were rehearsals like for this sequence?
Chad Stahelski: Yeah, that was the most complicated one because it’s very hard to rehearse those things. You get as close as you can in the pieces. And you really don’t know how it’s going to work. So you spend millions and millions of dollars and hundreds and hundreds of hours. And until the first night, you don’t know if it’s gonna work. So you keep layering things in, you know, first it’s kind of rehearsing by itself, then it’s the background drivers. And then it’s the background drivers with the hero drivers and the hero driver with the backdrop. Then Keanu comes in, they have to be safe. And then I work in the dogs then I work in the stuntman and the fights, just the fights and the fights and the cars and we bring in the buses. It just takes a while to layer stuff. So everybody has not just a plan and a mark to hit. But everyone has the safety out. So if at any time anything goes wrong, they know what to do. So they’re not going to hit the camera crews and you know, the cast that’s in the middle of the show. So for the week that we shot, it was like seven days, I think we shot that sequence. That’s when you get a little tense like the behind the monitors and your lead actor is driving, you know, this car with no doors on it at 60 miles an hour trying to spin it amongst 40 other people. You’re just like, ‘Oh, please don’t miss please. Oh, Miss.’ Makes you a little nervous. But you know, I think I think our teams are pretty good.

Kenzie Vanunu: Every time I watch it, I just have no idea how you guys pulled it off. It’s so incredible.
Chad Stahelski: Just people doing good things!

Kenzie Vanunu: Before we wrap up, I just wanted to ask one last thing. We are really passionate about crafts here at Oscars Central and really want to see stunts recognized with its own category at the Oscars. I know you’ve been talking with Academy members on that. What do you think the best structure for something like that is? Because I know it’s so many people on a stunt team.
Chad Stahelski: Yeah, it used to be much simpler. Now, you can have many stunt coordinators, fight coordinators, fight choreographers, rigging people like there’s all kinds of ways to do it. Again, I I’d have to sit down with many more members of the Academy and really work out the details. My gut reaction or things that I’ve suggested is a stunt ensemble, based on either a sequence or the effect of a stunt sequence on the film. You know, I mean, like it should have, what all good like any, like a wardrobe, you know, for costume, like the costumes helped make the character that’s helped me the film, if, like, I don’t think you could have a John Wick movie without our flavor of action, because it wouldn’t have the same impact. So, you know, we’re like, okay, well, just like they do with producers say you have three representatives from the stunt department, the stunt department, we do stunts wins for x for this sequence, and then hopefully, you’d have an effect on the film. And then you you do it like they do with the producers, you know, three or five, whatever, whatever the Academy decided was the max award, would go to the stunt department, the supervisors would decide, you know, who would stand on stage? I mean, that’d be my initial thing.

Now, whether that was, say you get nominated for, you know, this amazing high fall that went into a cool fight sequence? Well, you know, you could, the choreographer could get it in, the coordinator could get in. And the guy that did the high fall, it’d be up to them to decide who did what, because part of the the the issue with giving an Oscar is deciding who gets it, meaning the judge, like, unless you’re really versed in, in stunt work, and visual effects and editing like you for all you know, you’re giving an award to a digital dummy, like you don’t know. I wish it was more obvious. But like, our whole gig is to not be seen is to make it look more than it is like it could be part real person, part digital guy, part cameras sharing or editing, you think it’s the greatest in the world where it was really quite easy. So you’d have to go in and like you’re saying all the layers and all the stuff we do with that, but that there was like five different coordinators all putting in their best work. So if we were to get, you know, an award for you know, the Arc de triumph roundabout sequence, okay, who would get we’d have to sit down and we’d explain what was done and see who who were the real, you know, I guess, chiefs and engineers, that would be so still little things to work out. But like everyone’s on the right road.

Kenzie Vanunu: Awesome. That’s so great to hear, especially like this year, I feel like we’ve gotten so many great stunt films. And John Wick is still the top of that list. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I just am such a huge fan of your work and this film is so special. You can really feel the love for cinema as an art form in the movie and I’m just so happy to see that in such a big film. I really hope that it gets back in IMAX before the end of the year to finish the year out with one more IMAX run.
Chad Stahelski: Thank you, Kenzie. That’s very nice of you. Thank you for your time.

You can read our review of John Wick: Chapter 4 here.
The film is currently available to purchase or rent at home.