Chad Stahelski’s five-point guide to shooting… | Little White Lies

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Chad Stahelski’s five-point guide to shoot­ing great action sequences

17 Feb 2017

Words by Adam Woodward

Cameramen filming a man in a suit standing in front of a colourful backdrop.
Cameramen filming a man in a suit standing in front of a colourful backdrop.
The John Wick: Chap­ter 2 direc­tor and one­time stunt dou­ble reveals some of the secrets of his craft.

Any Hol­ly­wood action movie worth its salt will pour a sig­nif­i­cant amount of ener­gy and resources into attempt­ing to pull off a pulse-quick­en­ing car chase or a thrilling­ly real­is­tic fight scene. But shoot­ing a mem­o­rable cen­tre­piece action sequence is almost nev­er a clean kill. It’s a huge col­lec­tive effort that can take months to plan, only for the ground­work laid by teams of stunt coor­di­na­tors, fight chore­o­g­ra­phers, pro­duc­tion super­vi­sors and oth­er crew mem­bers to be undone by fac­tors beyond the film­mak­ers’ control.

So how do you stack the odds in your favour, ensur­ing that every­thing goes accord­ing to plan on the day? And how do you get the most out of a mod­est­ly-sized bud­get? What does it take to pull off a feat like John Wick: Chap­ter 2? A film which, like its 2014 pre­de­ces­sor, is crammed full of aston­ish­ing, edge-of-your-seat action, with Keanu Reeves’ tit­u­lar hit­man once again tasked with dis­patch­ing an ever-increas­ing ros­ter of adver­saries. To find out, we sat down with the film’s direc­tor, for­mer stunt dou­ble Chad Sta­hel­s­ki, to get his tips on craft­ing the per­fect action sequence.

I’ll tell the pro­duc­ers, I’m putting all my mon­ey in prep’. I’m not gonna spend it on fan­cy hotels, it’s going on the script and prep­ping the action scenes. You need at least one mil­lion dol­lars for prep. Min­i­mum. Some pro­duc­ers think, Well, we’ll get the actors in for three weeks of train­ing…’ Can you tell me one thing you’ve done in your life where you’ve become world-class in three weeks? Ain’t gonna hap­pen. Not a sin­gle per­son on this plan­et has become a world cham­pi­on in three weeks. It takes time to make an action movie. I’ve spent about 15 years design­ing and shoot­ing action, and it always comes down to the same two or three ele­ments. You get those right, you stick to your process, you’re gonna be fine.”

I’ll sit the crew down at the start and go, Okay guys, this is the com­mit­ment that’s required to make this hap­pen; this is what I need from you. We shoot well and we shoot tight. We are going to have great faith in our actors and we are going to have great faith in our stunt team.’ The trick is to start plan­ning as ear­ly as you pos­si­bly can, start think­ing about how to hide the lights, start think­ing about the cam­era – where are you gonna place it, what angles are you gonna use to get the shot you need?”

The scene in the cat­a­combs [in John Wick: Chap­ter 2] took five days to shoot. We had 14 or 15 Ital­ian stunt men, and we also brought in a team of about nine Bul­gar­i­ans. I love Bul­gar­i­an stunt guys, man, they’re the best in Europe, hands down. Bul­gar­i­ans are awe­some. They are some of the tough­est, most com­mit­ted, more per­for­mance-ori­en­tat­ed guys out there. So we had about 20 stunt peo­ple, plus our cast. We spent two weeks in the cat­a­combs ini­tial­ly with the Ital­ians and the Bul­gar­i­ans, walk­ing, block­ing, decid­ing who was gonna do what – who’s gonna wear a bal­a­cla­va, who dies where. Then dur­ing the last week we brought in the cam­era guys to walk every­thing through with the stunt dou­bles, get it all dialled in. And then Keanu came in a cou­ple of times and we did a full day of dress rehearsal.”

Peo­ple often say, You can direct action, but can you do dia­logue?’ What they’re real­ly ask­ing is, can I talk to actors? Well, yeah, cause I used to get down with Will Smith, Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves… To flip that ques­tion, say you’ve got a direc­tor that tells a great sto­ry but half the movie is action, and they’ve nev­er done an action movie before… What now? Dia­logue is the easy bit – you just got­ta let your actors do their thing, and if you’ve got that mutu­al under­stand­ing that you always need, then it means you can spend more time wor­ry­ing about the action and all the oth­er stuff.”

What’s the best way to fake being good? I’ll tell ya: be good, just be good. Then you can fake it. Can Jack­ie Chan take him­self out of a movie and put some­body else in his place? No! Cause it’s freakin’ Jack­ie. Chan. So we have to raise Keanu to that lev­el, to the point where it can’t be any­body but him. You’ll hear sto­ries. How many times have you lis­tened to actors go on about how they did their own stunts, or spent eight hours a day in the gym? I’ve worked as an A‑list stunt per­former. I’ve done this for a liv­ing, pal, train­ing cast and per­form­ing key stunts and I couldn’t do eight hours in the gym. It’s bull­shit. When you see the cam­era drift around Keanu, that’s real­ly Keanu. Just like when you see Jack­ie Chan fall off that bell tow­er, that’s real­ly Jack­ie Chan. You see Keanu do 20-sec­ond takes and kill 50 guys, and pull off seri­ous judo or jiu-jit­su moves, it’s all him, baby.”

John Wick: Chap­ter 2 is in cin­e­mas 17 Feb­ru­ary. Read the LWLies review.

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