John wick pencil spoof7/8/2023 Yet months before then comes the second part of Stahelski’s philosophy: that action movies are better when actors do their own stunts, therefore actors need to be just as good as stuntmen. My team is 24-7, and whether you’re doing a superhero movie, a spy movie, or whatever, we’re constantly choreographing.”Īfter 87Eleven is hired, Stahelski and Leitch traditionally take on the roles of stunt co-ordinator and fight choreographer, while their long-term crew serve as stunt doubles and henchmen. You could come in and say, ‘Insert car-chase here,’ and we’ll help develop that from ground-up. “It’s funny, people think we made gun-fu for John Wick, but we had this stuff for at least three years. My team is 24-7, and whether you’re doing a superhero movie, a spy movie, or whatever, we’re constantly choreographing We’ll say, ‘Let’s try this judo throw tied in with gun-fu,’ and we’ll basically develop our own martial art. Our martial arts team work five days a week creating moves no one’s seen before. “That’s fine, but that’s why action scenes are starting to look repetitive. “Most movies will hire a stunt co-ordinator and they’ll have six weeks to get a team together, train an actor and come up with moves,” he explains. But John Wick is the company’s first original film – and its greatest ad. 300, The Bourne Legacy and The Hunger Games are all former clients. So strong is Stahelski’s belief that, alongside Leitch, he set up 87Eleven Action Design, a production company whose in-house stunt team specialise in workshopping original action sequences – which they then pitch to films in pre-production. Look at all the great action movies – Die Hard, Raiders of the Lost Ark – there’s story in the action, and action in the story.” Action directors are always asked, ‘But can you do dialogue?’ and it’s never looked at the other way around. “As a stunt guy, I’ve worked on many big movies where the action was a secondary thought. “Action has never been so popular because of the superhero genre, but it’s also never been so fragmented,” says Stahelski. Chad Stahelski (right) and David Leitch on the set of ‘John Wick: Chapter 2’ with Keanu Reeves It’s a dizzyingly high standard for fight choreography – one achieved by Stahelski’s stuntman philosophy that action is as important as story. Or an early scene in John Wick: Chapter 2, in which the same rhythm is applied to cars to a Warriors-style montage of New York assassins to a knife fight on the subway to a brawl in a hall of mirrors, a homage to Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. Take the scene in which Wick must fight his way through a nightclub: a sequence with an almost frantic, thrilling rhythm, with henchman after henchman falling in time to the beat, with each ruthless headshot landing like notes. Action directors are always asked, ‘But can you do dialogue?’ and it’s never looked at the other way aroundīut, just like music, it’s been composed in a fresh new way. I’ve worked on many big movies where the action was a secondary thought. It then found itself popularised in the West with Keanu Reeves’ break-out hit The Matrix, which both Stahelski and his co-directing partner, David Leitch, worked on as stunt men. It has its roots in the Hong Kong cinema of John Woo films such as Hard Boiled, which combined the balletic elegance of kung-fu with the brutality of gangster movies. Gun-fu, a style of martial arts played out with bullets instead of fists, is not new. It’s a gag that’s opened up further in the sequel, where Wick must navigate the murky world of Rome – complete with its own hitman hotel, which allows guests to order weapons at the bar.īut John Wick is a film of many different stars, and the world, and the joke, and the perfect blankness of Reeves’ performance would mean nothing if they were not aligned with a genuinely inventive approach to action one driven by the hyper-real art of gun-fu. John Wick sketched a surreal, comic-book world: an underground society of contract killers, bound by their own codes and currency a ridiculous, bombastic world that, much like Wick himself, is treated with utmost reverence. Just stay with the guy, open up the mythology, push the action even further.’” “In the end me and Keanu talked and we said, ‘What do we like about the first one? We like the guy, we like the world, we like that it’s a fun action movie that goes to extremes. We said, ‘What do we like about the first one? We like the guy, we like the world, we like that it’s a fun action movie that goes to extremes.
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