John Wick and the man who saved action movies

“There are movies which we won’t mention, that are just a CGI Fuck-You fest,” says stuntman-turned-John Wick director Chad Stahelski, taking no prisoners

“Let’s blow some shit up, and half the movie is directed by the VFX team and not the director. That’s just lazy directing.”

The John Wick series has gone from little-hyped action movie to full-blown cult phenomenon, with the latest instalment  John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum seeing the series reach new levels of martial arts delirium. And Stahelski is the man behind it all.  Trained at the dojo of Bruce Lee’s legendary training partner Dan Inasanto, he went from doing martial arts on cheap action movies, to being Keanu Reeves’ stunt double on The Matrix to giving American action movies the shot in the arm they desperately needed.

It’s a pretty incredible journey.

Then word of mouth started to spread. This was a revenge movie where the dude’s motivation was that he wants to get the people that killed his puppy. It had a stylish, dreamlike quality, set in a strange, unexplainable world of secret societies and mythical assassins. A mysterious hotel for hitmen called The Continental, with its own unwritten rules and currency.

But what made the film really special was the action. In an era dominated by superhero CGI slugfests, Avid fart editing that cuts fight scenes to the point of incomprehensibility, and shaky camerawork that all but obscures what is going on, John Wick was a revelation. The shootouts and fist-fights were shot in clean, clear long takes, that focused on clarity and geography instead of spectacle. It resonated with action movie fans in a way few films have in recent years, and spawned two sequels expanding on the mythology and upping the mayhem, with spin-offs and a TV show in the pipeline.

It was the project that 50-year-old director Chad Stahelski’s life had long been building to. Born in Massachusetts, into a sport-obsessed family, he got into martial arts at a young age – “I started off as a judo guy, then I was a karate guy for a while,” he says of his youth. He eventually moved to the West Coast to attend the University of Southern California, which brought him into contact with film industry pros that noticed his martial arts talents.

“I did an exhibition match in Hollywood, senior year of college,” Stahelski says of his first break. “At the time there were two very famous stunt coordinators in the audience who saw me, and said ‘Why don’t you get into stunts, it could be fun?’” His first stunt job was on a 1993 film called Knights, a cheapie vehicle for kickboxing champ Kathy Long, directed by beloved low-budget auteur Albert Pyun. “Post-apocalyptic, cyborg knights in the future,” laughs Stahelski. “I don’t know if it holds up, but it’s fun!”

It was around this time he joined Inosanto Academy of Martial Arts in Los Angeles. Dan Inosanto is a legendary figure in martial arts, who was a training partner of Bruce Lee, and became the principal spokesman for Lee’s hybrid fighting style of Jeet Kune Do following his early death. Inosanto’s students have included everyone from Denzel Washington to MMA star Anderson Silva.

“He was very eclectic in his approach,” says Stahelski. “He did anything from Filipino Eskrima, to Muay Thai, to Brazilian jiu-jitsu, boxe française savate and Indonesian pencak silat. All different kinds of things mixed in.”

At the Academy Stahelski would meet many of his team that he still works with today – but two names would stand out. One was Jeff Imada, a veteran film and TV stuntman who already had over a decade of experience by the early 1990s. The other was Brandon Lee, the only son of Bruce himself, who was at the beginning of his own burgeoning acting career.