The overarching director of the John Wick series, Chad Stahelski, is quite a charismatic man. The 53-year-old director has done the main work behind all four John Wick movies up to date, and he doesn’t plan on stopping there as John Wick: Chapter 5‘s production will follow soon after the release of John Wick: Chapter 4.
In an age of movies where visual effects seem to be trumping an actual sensible storyline (like the Transformers series which has grossed over $4 billion), director Chad Stahelski has chosen to go towards the path that leads to a story-driven action thriller, something that he has invested a lot of time in, and we’re all for it.
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Stahelski Says The Movie Is A 50/50 Game In Terms Of Quality
When you direct or work on a certain project long enough, doing the same thing over and over is bound to get boring.
Chad Stahelski does not want the John Wick series to go bland in terms of plot, and he’s sticking to this new philosophy that he’s adopted while making the fourth installment in the series.
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During a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Stahelski touched upon the quality of the upcoming John Wick: Chapter 4, where he said that the film could go either way in terms of quality. He said-
“Keanu and I talk about it a lot, but doesn’t everybody want to improve at whatever it is they do? So I just tried to put all the things I’ve gotten better at in the last two-and-a-half years, into this movie. I hope that will make the movie better, instead of just trying to do bigger explosions and bigger shit.”
“If I tell a better story, which I think I’ve done, and do my job a little bit better in every avenue, I think the movie will be better. I also know I’ve got an amazing cast. So that’s my philosophy, and I’m going with it. I could be completely wrong. It could be a bomb, but I’m going to stick with that philosophy for now.”
Yes, please stick to that philosophy, we need substance with style.
The One Movie That Chad Stahelski Credits His Career To
The 2008 Speed Racer movie was one of the greatest box-office flops, grossing over $93 million as compared to its $120 million budget, but did you know that Chad Stahelski credits the racing movie for what his career is today?
During an interview with Collider, where he talks about the upcoming vampire flick Day Shift, Stahelski touched up on Speed Racer, and boy did he have a lot of praise for it. He praises the racing movie for being a major learning experience in his career-
“Are you kidding? Yeah, a ton. […] we had just got done with all the ‘Matrixes’ and we had done ‘V for Vendetta’ at that point, [and] the Wachowskis came, ‘Hey, we want to do the live-action version of ‘Speed Racer’. […] We’re thinking about doing this in a very anime look. Almost with different layers, like these big composition shots, but we might need some real driving. […] we’ll use motion-based systems because we wanted to move the background and stuff as well. […]’ So, it became a much different movie, more technological movie than a practical, which is super interesting to us at that time because we had done so much practical [effects].”
He sums it up by saying that he’s thankful that the chance to work on it came to him-
“Thank you, ‘Speed Racer’, [I don’t think I’ve] ever learned as much in such a short period of time.”
John Wick: Chapter 4 comes out on 24 March 2023.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
