Why John Wick: Chapter 4's Club Sequence Was The Most Challenging Scene To Film [Exclusive]
This article contains spoilers for "John Wick: Chapter 4."
"John Wick: Chapter 4" is an action movie spectacle. The same could be said of the three previous films in the franchise but, this time around, director Chad Stahelski and Keanu Reeves pulled precisely no punches. For most of the movie's nearly three-hour runtime, it's insane action sequence after insane action sequence, with only mere moments left for the audience to catch its breath. But what was the hardest scene to film? Logistically, the club sequence featuring B-movie superstar Scott Adkins was a true challenge.
/Film's own Vanessa Armstrong spoke with the film's stunt coordinators Stephen Dunlevy and Scott Rogers in honor of its release in theaters this weekend. Speaking of the club scene, Rogers explained "that water was no joke. There was a lot of water there." Indeed there was. How did that complicate matters, exactly? Dunlevy had this to add:
"When you're there as well, with all the lights on and the music and the people dancing, that is one of the biggest, craziest, most fun sets I've been on in 20-something years. The scope of it — you see it on camera, but to be there in person, I wish you could convey how big that was and how much water there was, and the sound and the noise and everything that was going on. They did a pretty good job on camera, but just to be there in person was amazing."
Massive amounts of water, massive amounts of planning
Rogers also explained that prepping for a sequence with so many moving parts is "layered." There's water, loud music, lots of people fighting, people dancing, a complicated set. It's a lot to take into account. Speaking about how they actually pulled it off, Rogers explained:
"That scene specifically the production design of the set, combined with the mechanical effects of how to get the water to do this thing and then just dissipate, and look like it's just coming out of nowhere. There's huge, huge hoses, pumping massive amounts of water. The curtain when John Wick walks through, just to watch it live is like, 'Oh my god, that's amazing.' So the beautiful thing is when you see something live that's that amazing, you're like, well this will be easy to make look good in film because it already looks stunning."
It sounds like dealing with all of that water ended up being the trickiest part. So, how did they do it? It involved keeping puddles from forming, special concrete, and lots of ingenuity. Rogers added:
"Early on in prep, we had these curtains of rain and they developed a system for the water to disappear so that we're not fighting in puddles, and so you can move. They make this specific kind of concrete that still has traction. It used to be a famous club in Berlin and it's four stories tall and this rain is coming down all the way from the top. Then the fight team does some fighting in the curtain, and you see how that is, and you start piece by piece, and then you got to have a dog and how does that work out here? And then where can we put padding?"
Stunt people dancing rather than fighting
Aside from the water, this is probably the scene in the film that has the most actors on set at once. It is not entirely unlike the rave scene in "John Wick: Chapter 2" though, again, this one has the added complication of lots of water being thrown in the mix. Handling the extras, it turns out, was another complicated element that needed to be sorted out. "The last level is obviously the extras," Rogers explained. "You have extras in the background, and then you have stunt dancers or there's stunt people acting like they're dancing, not sure they were very good dancers."
Chiming in on that front, Dunlevy added, "Stunt people dancing was the most dangerous thing we did. You never know how that's going to work out." Rogers then quipped, "Yeah, that's not good. They're much better at getting shot." Indeed, quite a few stunt people and extras do get shot in this movie, and they are quite good at doing just that.
"John Wick: Chapter 4" is in theaters now.