‘Wick Is Pain’ Interview: Chad Stahelski and Josh Oreck

Available on digital May 9th is the new documentary ‘Wick Is Pain’, which chronicles the making of the ‘John Wick’ franchise and was directed by Jeffrey Doe. The film features interviews with franchise director Chad Stahelski, Keanu Reeves, director David Leitch and producer Basil Iwanyk.

Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with ‘John Wick’ franchise director Chad Stahelski and ‘Wick Is Pain’ producer Josh Oreck about their work on the new documentary, revisiting the origins of the franchise and Stahelski’s career, utilizing existing behind-the-scenes footage from all four films, Stahelski long friendship with Keanu Reeves, how the ‘John Wick’ fighting style changes the industry, making a painfully truthful documentary, and the legacy of the popular franchise.

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Moviefone: To begin with, Chad, I was surprised to learn from the documentary that you had a really hard time making the first ‘John Wick’. Was it difficult for you to revisit those moments for this documentary?

Chad Stahelski: I think the first time Josh showed me all the footage again, but you have a very different experience when you’re watching it alone. When you watch it alone, it makes your palms sweat and it makes you have a psychosomatic response of, “Boy, I made a lot of mistakes.” But watching it with a few people that were there, like Josh, we all watched it together and it’s okay, it’s kind of comedy. You just watch and realize many mistakes, and it brings back all the good nostalgia. It’s always like anything, right? After college, you don’t remember all the stressful tests and all the things. You remember the good times and it’s like that. Now that it’s over and we were somewhat successful, there’s no stress, so it’s very fun to watch. At the time, no, it was not very enjoyable to live through.

MF: Was it cathartic in a way to revisit that time in your life now after all the success you’ve had with the franchise?

CS: In a way, a little bit cathartic. Success builds confidence a little bit, right? So, the only thing I really had, and my parents were like this, my brothers, we have a strong sense of that gut instinct of, “Hey, if I really believe in this, good.” If you have an argument with someone, you can sleep at night, you are in the right. If you had an argument with someone and you couldn’t sleep at night, you were probably in the wrong. You learn to trust your gut a little bit. As a competitor and as a performer, I always kind of trusted my gut more than anything. So, when you’re dealing with all these creative talks and you’re pitching, “Well, we’re going to kill a puppy and we’re going to make it like Odysseus. It’s going to be a Greek mythology, and we’re going to have him fight a female assassin, and then he’s going to go ride a horse and kill 1,000 people.” There’s a lot of people that are going to tell you that may not be the best way to take your career. “Those aren’t the best ideas, those are silly, those are stupid, that isn’t going to work. People aren’t going to watch it. That’s too much, that’s not enough.” Even people on your team are telling you twenty different directions, and it’s so easy to get lost in a creative process that’s as much collaborative as it is making a film. If I was a painter, I would paint what I see in my head. My brush stroke controls it. In a movie, I must go through a minimal of 200 to 300 people to make even the most basic of decisions. To get a movie greenlit, make the movie, do the stunts, get it finished and sell it, it’s 1,000 people, to be generous, right? Now, each one of those has their own version of the movie in their head, and each one of those is going to tell you, some have influenced, some don’t. So, how do you know? That’s where the phrase ‘Death by a thousand cuts” comes in. If I do a little of what you think and a little of what he thinks and a little of what they think and a little of this, I start to lose what I think. So, what I’m saying is, I’ve kind of always followed my instinct on ‘John Wick’. A thousand people are telling me what I should do, do I think about it? Yeah, you should think about it. But then again, the decision’s still mine. You must know when to say, “I’m doing it this way.” Or “Maybe I should try this.” Look, it’s cathartic in the way that I’ve learned to process. I’ve learned to try everything, listen to everybody, but make the decision based on what I feel. Looking back over ten years and four films, there’s two or three things in each movie I regret, and I now know, thanks to Josh and his documentary, those are the three or four things where I listened to somebody else. I’ve learned that all the moments when people cheer, cry and yell, it’s because they felt good. So, if nothing else, I’ve learned. If anything, I’ve gained confidence to trust my gut.

MF: Josh, having access to the behind-the-scenes footage from all four ‘John Wick’ movies, did you sort of use that as a blueprint for making this documentary?

Josh Oreck: Part of it was having this enormous trove of footage. Another part of it is just having had known Chad and Keanu since before that, since their ‘Matrix’ days where they had a different relationship that evolved into what we see in this documentary. Knowing that there was a bigger story to be told than what we had already done with the footage in the DVD extras and in the press materials for the movies. So, just knowing that there was both a more complicated backstory, for lack of a better term. Then also just stuff in our footage that we didn’t need to talk about, like the struggle to get financing, when the movie came out. We just needed to sell the movie and get people’s butts in seats. So, being able to come back to it and say there was so much of this journey that hadn’t been put to the screen was a good guiding factor there. Then, on top of it all, just there was so much good stuff that we wanted to still show. Finally, to be able to get Chad and Keanu to come in and having them be able to come back in and give some perspective to things was a really nice way of being able to relive ten years in an unusual fashion.

MF: As much as this is a documentary about the making of ‘John Wick’, it’s also a documentary about Chad’s life and career. Josh, can you talk about that?

JO: I mean, I would probably just add a tiny bit to it. I would add the immense force of nature that is Keanu Reeves into that. I don’t think that it’s not trying to delve into his inner psychology, but he’s an immense presence here. The relationship between those two is front and center in this film and obviously goes back 25 years. But, I feel enormously privileged and I feel amazed by what I’ve seen in watching Chad go from someone who was a performer when I first met him, to being a director who’s firing at the highest level, making films that he wants to make, that people go to see, that, to me, are really pieces of great cinematic art. That’s an amazing journey that I’ve been able to document the entire bit of thus far, and it’s been a real privilege.

MF: Chad, can you talk about your long friendship with Keanu and how has that relationship grown and changed since making the ‘John Wick’ movies?

CS: I think any good relationship comes from a lot of shared interest, and I guess, respect for the other person. Having known Keanu for twenty years beforehand, seeing his work ethic. Remember, I’m younger and I met him when he was at the top of his career. I didn’t meet him till ‘The Matrix’. I was only 24 at the time, and I was just medium way through stunts, a medium level performer, kind of getting in. There wasn’t a lot yet for martial art guys to get in. It was a different time before ‘The Matrix’. Now, it’s like everybody’s a martial arts guy. But there were times that I looked at him going, “Oh my God, I’m going to have to train way harder. This guy’s good.” I was used to doubling people on different shows and the cast members hadn’t had a lot of experience in the fight world or wire work. I meet Keanu who works so hard. I was like, “Well, if he’s in the gym at 7:00am, I better be here at 6:30am. If he leaves at 4:00pm, I’m leaving at 5:00pm”. You just make a commitment that I’m going to work my ass off because he’s working his off. I just figured that’s the way you do it. This is the actor. If he’s trying this hard, I got to try that hard. Imagine that for 10 years of doubling this guy and always having that work ethic, trying to keep up with him. You see that and then you see the way he relates to people. You’ve heard the stories and what he gave for wrap gifts on ‘The Matrix’, all the stunt guys, and he’s legendary for being humble, having humility and having this gentleman-like persona. It’s all true. So now, you’ve got that, so you’re learning to be a good human at the same time. In those quiet moments when we’re not working, we’re all on location. So, you go see movies and you realize that Keanu Reeves is a true audience member. He’s not going there for a professional study. He’s going to a movie theater because he loves movies. He loves it in the theater. So now, I’m laughing, and he’s laughing. You realize you’re not at work, this is just who this guy is. He wants to work hard, but he loves movies, and we both love movies. So, when it came time to do a movie, he’s like, “I want to make an action movie with a guy that loves movies. I don’t want to work with a director that says he loves movies but doesn’t really love action movies.” We all have the same pitches. We’re not idiots. We know why action movies don’t work. We know why some things are cheesy. We know the studios or different entities; we know their games on how they screw things up. We’ve been in it. We’ve been part of those movies, and you can see it getting screwed up. You can see it not servicing the crowd. So now, we’ve got a few people together that all love the same things, that all want to avoid the same trappings, and that know avoiding those trappings is going to take a lot of extra work, a lot of extra time for a lot less money. So, how do we do it? I think that’s the bonding thing that everybody talks about and is that mutual respect, that force of sheer will that you have a common goal and whatever that goal costs, you’re going to pay it. Now you have that, you’re looking across the line at each other going, “Okay, you in? I’m in. Okay.” Once you have that connection, you can do anything, and that’s the team we tried to build over 10 years.

MF: Chad, can you talk about creating the ‘John Wick’ fighting style and incorporating “Gun-Fu” into the franchise, and the way that it has changed the industry?

CS: I don’t know if we changed anything. I look at action design, or let’s just say fight choreography, just like fashion. Hey man, bell-bottoms were cool. They kind of made a comeback and will come back again. Cutoffs, the tank top. Who knows? I’m not a big fashion guy, but it’s all around. Look, Gun-Fu was around way before me. Maybe the name is new, Jackie Chan and Jet Li, they were doing. It’s like Aikido, Aiki-jitsu, Jiu Jitsu, it’s been around since cinema’s been around. Right? It’s just, we kind of, we were coming off the success of all the ‘Bourne’ movies and what they had done with that. Then ‘Taken’, the shaky cam and it was a very cool time. Look, we just wanted to do something different. We wanted to stand out, so we wanted longer takes and we couldn’t really do what we wanted to do with just punching, kicking and fast editing. We needed the slow editing style, longer takes, we needed the grappling and the close quarter gun stuff, so I didn’t have to edit back and forth. The technology had changed where we had what they either call plug guns or non-guns now that don’t fire blanks the way they used to. So, they’re very, very, very safe. We managed to do close quarter stuff like that. So, we took advantage of the time, the changing fashion sense of things, and kind of put that together with what we thought was a great character trait. John Wick is this husky, Sombo-esque Jiu Jitsu guy. He wants to get close and talk to you in it. We thought that was a cool way because Keanu had done all ‘The Matrix’s, and we just wanted to have a little bit of differentiation between us and Neo. So, rather than all the wire work, we went with really grounded hardcore stuff, and it gave us a way to shoot things and it gave us a way to characterize John Wick that he hadn’t seen Keanu do before. The most I can take credit for is trying to be clever of being different and utilizing techniques which hadn’t been seen in recent times. Did we invent it? No. Did we classicalize it? Maybe. But did we just bring it to the forefront of the fashion movement in action design? Yes, we’ll take a little credit for that. We were kind of clever in that way. But it was nothing more than a reinvention or a rediscovering of stuff that had been around.

MF: Josh, the documentary is incredible truthful and doesn’t sugarcoat anything. Was there any subject that felt too personal, or that you decided not to include for any reason?

JO: Well, I appreciate that. I think Chad really wanted to put it all out there at the service of what we’re trying to do, which is show how complicated it is to make a movie, and that involves a lot of personal sacrifices that people make. Chad talks about his own personal life being thrown into disarray because of working on these films. The core relationship between him and David Leitch was something that has been fraught, and we talk about it in the movie. I just think that we were lucky in that Chad was willing to allow us to tell these stories. I think it’s a cool thing, and it’s something that over time we’ll be happy that we didn’t avoid Chad talking about that his marriage broke up or things like that. But these things are things that happen because of this business that we’re in that’s really so consuming. So, we’re just trying to make something that’s true to the form.

MF: Chad, was there any subject that you did not feel comfortable talking about or wanted to avoid?

CS: No. Look, there’s always a fine line to walk and that’s where Josh is great. You don’t want to be too much the a**hole, but you don’t want to be coated with sprinkles and rainbows. The whole thing, the goal of the documentary, at least from my point of view, is to show people there’s nothing glamorous about making a movie. The glamour happens after. That’s another day. That’s way down the road. It’s work. Is it satisfying work? Yeah, but it’s work. Now, do you consider it a job, or do you consider it your life? That’s up to you. I consider it my life. It’s my career, it’s where I choose to be. I like hard work. Movies are hard work. To make a great movie is hard work. Like in anything, if you devoted 18 hours of your day to your job right now, how do you think your relationship’s going to work out? Now, is that because of the job or is that because of you? That’s because of you. So, on one side, I don’t think doing ‘John Wick’ cost me a relationship. I don’t think it cost me friendships, so I don’t think that was the motivating thing. I can be a bit of an a**hole when I work, but you can’t separate them. So, you got to walk that line of, no, you don’t blame the work, you don’t blame the job. You blame how you are in the job or how you react to the work. The thing is, we can’t stop doing it. You can’t stop trying to be good. I can’t stop trying to be good. Because you’re having a bad day, you must work through it. Does it influence you? Is there a cost of it? Yes, but you chose that cost. I don’t blame anything. I was an a**hole. I made my mistakes. Name me a relationship where there isn’t antagonism or controversy or debate. Dave (Leitch) and I fight like cats and dogs. We had so many arguments. At the same time, I have a personal thing I’m going through. That’s not his problem, he has his career too. So, we had arguments. One of us has got to cover for the other one. There’s no one job or career that doesn’t have all this stuff. So, you don’t want that to be the focus of the film. It’s not about being dramatic like that, but you also don’t want to exclude it. So, I would say the bar for Wick’s pain is, what’s staying on brand for what we’re trying to say? Is it entertaining? Is it telling a bit of the truth? Is it trying to skew one thing or another? No, it’s just part of it. It’s life. It’s every other job. Making movies are tough. But it’s your choice. No one’s sending an invitation going, “You got to make a movie for us. We’re dying to have you.” You chose to do it and that’s a sacrifice you make. Now, you talk about looking back, is there anything I would’ve changed making the movie? Nope. I would take every mistake all over again because without making the mistakes, I wouldn’t be here. Now, if you asked me if there were a few life things I would’ve changed, yes, because I don’t think it would’ve affected my filmmaking. I think there are better ways to handle myself as a human being. That I would like another go at, but I can’t do that. So, yeah, live and learn.

MF: Finally, Chad, what do you think is the legacy of the ‘John Wick’ franchise?

CS: I think Keanu says it on the documentary. He defines what it is. My favorite part of the documentary is the last two minutes with Keanu. I used to do a lot of climbing and that’s the big metaphor we always use. No one climbs for the view. You can’t just climb for the view. You climb because you love the climb. Talk to any climber in the world that loves to climb, ask them if it hurts. They look at you funny. “What are you talking about? Of course, it hurts.” You’re pulling yourself up in sub-zero weather. It hurts. What does that have to do with it? What does pain have to do with the result? Why else would you climb a mountain? Because you love it. It’s not about the pain or loving pain. It’s about the achievement. It’s about the satisfaction. It’s about the love that you put into the pain while you get to the top. So, when Keanu defines what pain is, pain is love. Tell me friendship without pain. Tell me love without pain. Tell me success without pain. Where is this rule that greatness and success don’t cost anything? The difference between us and everybody else out there is I wake up expecting the day to be absolutely filled with shit and obstacles and pain, and that you don’t stay in bed. Maybe it’s the people that wake up expecting the day to go smoothly that look at every little thing as painful because it’s an obstacle. You’re trying to achieve things. You’re trying to get the audience, hundreds of millions of people to see stuff that you’ve come up with. I mean, did you think that was going to be easy? We just wake up knowing it’s going to be painful and not letting that get in the way. So, when Keanu says all this stuff is pain, of course it is, but we don’t see pain as a negative. Pain is the necessary step you must take to get through it. It’s the veil of success that you want to go through.

What is ‘Wick Is Pain’ about?

Witness the never-before-seen footage and true story behind the ‘John Wick’ phenomenon – from independent film to billion-dollar franchise.

Who appears in ‘Wick Is Pain’?

• Chad Stahelski as Himself
• Keanu Reeves as Himself
• David Leitch as Himself
• Basil Iwanyk as Himself

List of Movies and TV Shows in the ‘John Wick’ Franchise:

Buy ‘John Wick’ Movies On Amazon