Pclean-shaven and fast like a black belt punch, athletic fit in a dark suit, piercing gaze: Chad Stahelski, 53, bears the hallmark of the saga John Wick. The manly chic. Met by The Point Pop in Paris for the promotion of Chapter 4, currently in theaters, this tall guy of one meter eighty-five leads with an iron fist a franchise now recognized worldwide for the virtuosity of his bloody brawls. Keanu Reeves plays this widowed ex-hitman who, in the first part, takes out the big guns to avenge the death of his puppy, shot by a gang of Russians who came to steal his shiny racing car. The thugs were unaware that the animal was a gift to Wick from his dying beloved: big mistake.
Produced in 2014 for just 30 million dollars, this John Wick introductory will fill, to everyone’s surprise, the coffers of the Lionsgate studio while winning a harvest of rave reviews. A small phenomenon was born, soon destined to become big. The film is set in a New York by night hyper stylized, colored like a box of Quality Streets, where assassins, members of a mysterious brotherhood, act in the shadows.
Resuming service in this universe of which he was one of the brightest stars, John Wick proves to be a formidable and indestructible mass killer, unsoldering his assailants without blinking in his impeccable suit and tie. The spectator discovers in passing the existence of a sanctuary in the middle of Manhattan for these discreet assassins: the Continental Hotel, a palace managed by the suave manager Winston (Ian McShane) and where his own codes apply, as well as his own currency.
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Seduced by the reinvention of Keanu Reeves as a ruthless assassin marked by mourning, the crowds also savor choreographies and shootings breaking with the eternal cameras on the shoulder / hysterical editing redacting all the pale copies of the Jason Bourne saga since the 2000s. In John Wick, we fight while shooting each other (a style called “Gun-Fu” and inaugurated in the films of John Woo), but the action is filmed in a succession of sequence shots framed by a camera with fluid movements. “I love live performances, dance shows, ballet,” explains Chad Stahelski. ” John Wick was an opportunity for me to test, for the first time as a director, a fighting style emphasizing movement. The handheld camera works very well in The death in the skin For example [le second Jason Bourne, sorti en 2004]. But too often, this style and the quick editing are there to hide poor choreography and sloppy sets. »
A vocation due to Burt Reynolds
Scholarly film buff, lover of westerns (from John Ford to Sergio Leone) as much as of kung-fu films, Japanese animation and early james bond, Chad Stahelski admires the cinema of large formats, spectacular landscapes and sets. This desire to immerse the fights in an aesthetically licked case is becoming more and more refined John Wick to another, as the budget grows, thanks to the combined talents of Stahelski, director of photography Dan Laustsen and production designer Kevin Kavanaugh.
Side fists and feet, Stahelski knows his stuff. Before moving on to staging with John Wick, he sweated blood and water as a stuntman and stunt coordinator on more than fifty action feature films. Martial artist accomplished in karate, judo and other Thai boxing, Stahelski founded, in 1997 with his colleague and friend David Leitch, the company 87Eleven Action Design, whose mission is to prepare for combat the actors of blockbusters such as The Hunger Games, The Expendables, Atomic Blonde and of course the John Wick. Risk-taking in the name of entertainment, the great Chad has had it under his skin since his discovery, at the age of ten, of the film The Fury of Danger (Hooper in VO) by Hal Needham, where Burt Reynolds embodies a stuntman on the return.
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The eldest of three male siblings, in a family of great athletes, he began martial arts as a teenager and, at the age of 17, he joined the famous academy of Dan Inosanto in Los Angeles (ex-tatami partner of the late Bruce Lee, now 86 years old), where he will learn other disciplines such as Thai boxing, kali (a Filipino martial art), Pencak-Silat (Indonesia), ju-jitsu, savate … “I took part in several competitions until a stunt coordinator spotted me and made me work on my first films in the early 1990s.” His meeting with Keanu Reeves, for whom he became the regular understudy on the top three Matrix and other films of the actor, will be decisive. It was Reeves, whose career was then experiencing an unfortunate standstill, who submitted to his friend Stahelski the scenario of John Wicksigned by a certain Derek Kolstad (later author of the script of nobody with Bob Odenkirk).
Stahelski sees in John Wick the opportunity to put into practice his vision of the staging of action. “Chad Stahelski is one of those stuntmen who have been thinking for years about how to film bodies in motion, which is the very principle of cinema,” explains journalist Julien Dupuy, director of the documentary. Keanu Reeves: pop messiah. “He was frustrated with constantly having to deal with directors whose way of directing an action scene produced a result that was not up to their expectations. Frustrated also to deal with the physical limits of the actors. ” ” His first John Wick is a statement of intent. Stahelski tells us: The stunt can be that too: a show that we appreciate over time, like dancing, in the tradition of Jet Li and Jackie Chan. A work of art that mobilizes all the departments of cinema at its service. On Twitter, some sequences of John Wick are dissected by many film professionals – editors, visual effects specialists, mixers… – who analyze them with great respect. »
John Wick, metaphor of Keanu Reeves
The art of combat, in John Wickis therefore nothing realistic: the fighters exchange long sequences of blows, Wick falls several meters and gets up practically without a bruise… “In John Wick: Chapter 4, the scene of the stairs in Montmartre is in this respect surreal, it’s practically cartoon”, comments Julien Dupuy. “It is precisely to make us accept this surrealism better that Stahelski situates these films in an almost parallel reality, with this world of underground killers, these tattooed secretaries who place contract orders via an old school telephone switchboard… We are almost in steampunk. This context helps us to accept the idea that John Wick are pure concept films, set in an alternate reality where the physical rules applied to basic humans don’t apply here. »
Finally, Chad Stahelski, in addition to having breathed new life into action cinema, offered Keanu Reeves the opportunity for professional reinvention on set: “ John Wickit’s the latest revival of Keanu Reeves, an actor whose career had already been saved by the Matrix,” concludes Julien Dupuy.
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” THE John Wick aren’t necessarily his biggest movies, but they connected the essence of the character to Reeves’ new social media notoriety. John Wick is this sacrificial figure who stays upright no matter what and it’s a bit of a metaphor for the life of Keanu Reeves [qui a connu quelques tragédies personnelles, dont la mort de sa compagne Jennifer Syme dans un accident de voiture en 2001, NDLR]. In his desire to perform as many stunts himself as possible, Reeves can be compared to a Tom Cruise. Both want to show how much they drool to entertain the public and that they have earned their success. In France, all things considered, an Alban Lenoir has that in him too. All we have to do now is find our hexagonal Chad Stahelski…
– John Wick: Chapter 4, by Chad Stahelski (2:49). Indoors.
– Keanu Reeves: pop messiah, by Julien Dupuy: broadcast on Arte on March 24 at 10:55 p.m., available for replay on Arte.fr and on Youtube.
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“John Wick” saga: how Keanu Reeves and Chad Stahelski revolutionized the genre