20 JOHNWICK
ACCORDING TO THE internet, which is never wrong, in the three movies in which he’s featured, John Wick has killed 299 people. He has shot people. He has stabbed people. He has punched people. He has kicked people. He has killed people with cars, with horses and even with a pencil. So, Keanu Reeves, can we even consider the man once known as Jardani Jovonovich to be a hero?
“Ah,” laughs Reeves. “The old ‘anti-hero/ hero’! When I think of the character, I think of his will, his fortitude and his honour. And he’s trying to fight for an independence for his life, to a degree. And within the world, he’s just fighting bad guys. So yeah, I think he’s heroic. Is he someone that could be a role model for the kids? Maybe with a little curating.”
So that’s settled, then. John Wick is a hero. In fact, he may be one of the most engaging, and iconic, movie heroes to come along for quite some time. When he first appeared in 2014, it was easy enough to dismiss the character, and the movie, as the latest in a long line of Taken-inspired revenge thrillers. Instead, what Reeves, stunt-gurus-turned-directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski (who has since helmed the two sequels on his own) and writer Derek Kolstad constructed was a compelling, indefatigable, inscrutable assassin. Yet, according to Stahelski, the character was almost an accidental creation.
“We didn’t really know who John Wick was when we started,” he says. “That’s not to say we didn’t have a direction.” That direction involved looking in any number of directions for ways to fill in the character, who had been a much older man in Kolstad’s original script (then called ‘Scorn’). They looked to cinema, and the films of Sergio Leone (“The Man With No Name is definitely a hero with a dark side; not good, not bad, right in the middle,” says Stahelski) and Akira Kurosawa (“If you watch any of the samurai films, you realise it’s roughly the same character. There are cultural differences, but it’s got the same kind of vibe”). In fact, Stahelski sees John’s tailored suit as “his samurai armour”. The way he holds his gun is designed to mimic holding a sword.
Stahelski and Leitch then turned to mythology as a way of fleshing out the shadowy underworld in which Wick operates, with its emphasis on gold coins and hotels-for-hitmen. “I’ve always been a huge mythological fan,” says Stahelski. “And I don’t just mean Greek or Roman myths. We did a mythological version where everything was slightly hyper-real. We’ll do it like Dante’s descent into Hell.” And they had New York. “What city, more than New York, feels like an underworld? So we rewrote the script and layered it in terms of basic mythology. And Keanu became our Perseus, or whatever you want to call him.”
Plus, of course, they had their ace in the hole. “Keanu became our anchor,” says Stahelski. He and Leitch had worked with Reeves for years, but for their
