Wick Is Pain, a new documentary from director Jeffrey Doe, offers an inside look at the early struggles of making the first John Wick, tracking star Keanu Reeves and filmmaker Chad Stahelski for a decade as it goes from being an indie film to becoming a billion dollar franchise.
At a special screening of the doc in Santa Monica on Thursday, Reeves and Stahelski joined Doe, producer Erica Lee, writer Derek Kolstad and producer Josh Oreck for a Q&A about the highs and lows depicted the doc.
Stahelski noted of the film’s title and mentality that goes along with it, “I think anything hard is supposed to hurt a little bit… anything great takes effort, sometimes effort hurts a little bit.” Reeves echoed that when it came to the months and months of fight training he would go through for each film, when the directed pushed him in workouts he was ready to “do some more because Wick is pain and we fucking love it.”
The star also pointed out that he trains with the film’s stunt performers, so “when we get into the level of choreography and stuff, everyone’s been used to being thrown by me. If I do 100 throws, there’s fucking six guys who are getting fucking thrown and doing it. So I’m not in that alone, and then just the cinema part of it is that all of the operators are in it with us to capture everything.”
Several of the franchise’s stuntmen were in the audience at the screening, and as Reeves reflected on his love of working with directors “who wanted to explore character in action” in Matrix, Point Break and Speed before the John Wick films, he gave much of the credit to those stunt performers.
“I really love being able to do as much as I can, but I don’t do stunts. Stunt people do stunts,” he said. “They’re like, ‘Look at all those stunts you did’ and I’m like, ‘Fuck that, [stunt double] Jackson [Spidell] just got hit by a car twice.’ And [Stahelski] is like, ‘Hmm, maybe we can hit him with two cars,’” as the director joked that was just because they couldn’t afford three.
“Anyway yeah I don’t do stunts, I do action,” Reeves insisted. During the conversation he also teased Ballerina, the upcoming John Wick spinoff starring Ana de Armas in which he appears.
“It was really cool to have a chance to put the suit on. I’ve worked with Ana a couple of times and she’s a wonderful artist, and she committed to the action,” the star told the crowd. “I just had like eight days on it, but it was fun to play the role again and I’m excited for people to see the film. It’s in the spirit of John Wick and has new characters and opens up some stuff, so hopefully people like it.”
Looking back on his decade of playing the hitman, Reeves noted that it was “a special thing to have something you love chronicled in such a way” with the documentary. “It’s kind of like a picture book. I mean it’s like 10 years of our lives and it changed our lives for the better, personally and creatively.”
And as for his takeaway from the franchise, after getting initial pushback over the storyline of the first film, Stahelski teased, “Always kill the dog.”
Wick Is Pain is now available on digital.
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