The fight scenes in the John Wick movies are a bizarre balancing act between grounded reality and otherworldliness. They pair unexpected settings with extremely capable fighters, like Roman gods duking it out in a gas station bathroom. Yet there’s always a sense of clumsiness and realism attached, as if the gods you’re watching are truly fighting for their lives.

At the heart of these scenes is Keanu Reeves, of course, but also director Chad Stahelski, the mastermind behind the action that defines the series. Stahelski began his career as a stunt performer, most notably acting as Keanu’s stunt double in the Matrix trilogy. Stahelski is clearly a student of the history of action movies, and uses that knowledge to ensure that nothing in the Wick series has ever been seen before.

John Wick 3 - Parabellum is no different. The director sat down with Polygon to talk about the creation of four of the most intricate fight scenes in the newest movie.

[Ed. note: this post contains major spoilers for John Wick: Chapter 3.]

Related The unexpected origins of the John Wickiverse

THE HORSE STABLE

After breaking The Continental’s sole rule by killing someone on hotel grounds, a $14 million bounty is placed on John’s head. Every assassin in New York is after him. A wounded John tries to lose some bounty hunters in a Central Park horse stable and a fight breaks out.

Chad Stahelski:

I love big buildings. Love big open spaces. I love the production design of things. We were walking around Central Park and I was asking the location guy, “Hey man, where do they keep the horses?” “Oh right over there, we have a stable.” “Oh I want wanna go see the stable.” I’m like, are you fucking kidding me?

So he takes me over to the stable and it’s this four story brick building with horses, it looks like an apartment building right off of Fifth Ave. and I was just like, that’s awesome. John was running into one of these. So Idea Two on the board before we even have a script is: John runs into stable.

Then I started dealing with all my friends that do horse stunts and I’m like “What can we get this horse to do?” “Well they can kick, they can do that.” I’m like “Hold on, wait, let me see him, kick. Aww, death by horse. Got It.”

And you come up with this list of a hundred great ideas and then you know with me and my choreography team, you start saying, “Okay, how are we going to fucking do this?”

As a stunt person, I was doing some training many, many years ago, over 20 years ago, and I got kicked by a horse. It sent me against the wall, I was down. Luckily I took it in the arm and shoulder but I didn’t use my arm for a week. Like, it fucking hurt. And I was like, that’s awesome. You know, so you start seeing all this stuff and just the guy getting hit by a horse and you ask the horse guy, well, how do you get a horse of kick? And he slapped him on the end. Okay. Done. You know what I mean?

It’s a claustrophobic space and that’s why we thought it’d be fun with five horses. We spend probably three times as much money on rehearsals as prep as the average action movie. And that’s where all our money goes is to making sure we can pull this off. A lot of people think you can, but you don’t know. By the time I walk on the set, I know it’s going to work. I have all the faith in the world that I haven’t put my guys in harm’s way and we’re going to be okay.

THE ANTIQUE STORE

Still running for his life, John stumbles into an antique store filled with ancient weaponry. The only gun he can find is old and disassembled. Racing for his life, he struggles to repair the gun and fire off a single shot. The fight then proceeds into a room filled with knives in display cases. Chaos unfolds as John and his attackers hurl sharp things at each other. Eventually a dude gets stabbed in the eye. Ouch.

Chad Stahelski:

The antique gun thing is a direct ode to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Eli Wallach, putting the gun together. I’m a huge, massive Sergio Leone fan. So that’s a direct link to that. As far as the antique shop goes, I love antique shops. I love museums. I spend a lot of time here going through old antique stores and we always said, “What’s your big set piece?” Well John Wick’s going to walk in and find this old gun set piece right?

That was my first start and then you know, I don’t have much of a life so when I go out to the gun range we shoot guns, we throw knives and you know, as a dude you’ve probably thrown a few knives in your day.

[Note: The interviewer has thrown a single axe at one of those campy, axe-throwing bars.]

And you know as well as anyone that’s done this … well first of all in every action movie the hero always throws a knife. And what does it do? It sticks in every time. I know professional knife throwers. That’s where I learned from. Seven out of ten? Miss. Like legit miss. Like all the time until they get their distance and they do it. So we were like, wouldn’t it be nice to do a real knife fight? “Well you won’t do it because the hero never misses.” And we’re like: fuck you.

Keanu’s going to win, but … we call it the snowball fight. Like you and your little brother, you have a snowball fight. How many snowballs can you get in? So we’re we’re gonna have a snowball knife fight where nothing fits. Again, it’s just reality. Everybody has thrown a knife and it’s not stuck in and bounced back off. And even if you get it to stick three times, just when you tell your buddy, “Hey, watch this.” It bounces out, right? So we’re going to do that. We’ve got all these assassins throwing knives and nothing’s sticking and one sticks in here and that one doesn’t. Ahh! We just thought that’d be hilarious. And it’s super serious. No one’s trying to do a gag. But the whole time people are laughing going, oh my god. And I think that’s the secret of a good action sequence.

We didn’t plan on [the eye stabbing]. We just do choreography and we got in the choreography and I was like, “Okay good, this is where you’re gonna slide, you’re going to poke him in the eye, then you’re gonna pick up the Tomahawk and throw it.” You know, that kind of thing. We didn’t think twice. And just the way it ended up, Tiger Hu Chen, the stunt performer, who’s a great action actor in China, and Keanu have worked together many times, so Keanu’s like, “I’m going to push [the knife] right in and I want Tiger to be right here, pushing it” and I went, “Okay, good.”

It wasn’t meant to be gory. It wasn’t meant to be anything. Like tactically, this is what you go for, right? You don’t always stab to the body. You know, if you want to kill you gotta go to the brain, that was a kill shot. We wanted him to be killed so we could move on to the next [attacker].

So we get to the digital world where we have to make that happen. We didn’t want to be gory. But we started doing all these research things. What happens when you get [stabbed in the eye] is you see the pupil move and it slices in and he gets this little bit of eye goo. So we just try and make it real but not overly gory. And we also, at that point, we want to trigger the audience to go: John Wick’s back. This is who he was before the first movie, so let’s get used to it. And that sets the tone of the action level we’re going to do because when we get to shotguns, obviously other things happen to heads. So we kind of just use that as a bar.

THE DOG SHOOTOUT

John travels to Casablanca and recruits the help of Sofia (Halle Berry). Sofia, like John, is particularly fond of dogs and keeps a pair of them with her at all times. The two travel to The Foundry (where the famous golden coins are minted) but are quickly double-crossed and swarmed from all sides. John and Sofia must shoot their way out, and use Sofia’s expertly-trained dogs to give them the upper hand against dozens of attackers.

Chad Stahelski:

I love dogs. I had this idea years ago, just couldn’t find the right trainers to help. I bumped into Andrew Simpson, who does all the wolves in Game of Thrones.

Some quick background: When you usually see a dog attack on the screen, the dog doesn’t know it’s a movie. There’s no such thing as a movie dog. When you see an animal attack, the animal’s intelligence is: They’re trying to kill the individual. That wasn’t going to work for us. Safety wise. When you see a dog attack [in a movie], what do you see? A dog, a medium-to-tight shot on one person because the animal’s focus is on one person in a padded suit, the whole deal. What you don’t see right outside of frame are three trainers with fucking prods ready.

We couldn’t do that the way we shoot John Wick and I wasn’t going to change our style because of that. So I talked to a couple of trainers. Like, “Look, I want to train the animals to know it’s play.” [And they said] “Well that’s not going to happen.” Like how many times do you get your little puppy and you play with a piece of rope, like they know it’s play! It just made sense to me. Like, why can’t we just fucking train dogs to make it seem like it’s play? [So a trainer would say] “Well you can’t, he ain’t get that intensity.” So I tell my idea to [Andrew Simpson] and he’s like ... He’s a very quiet guy and he was being very, very quiet for five minutes. And he just looked up and said, “Yeah, I think that’s something we can do.”

So I went around like literally a year out and did a cross country trip through America and picked out five Belgian Malinois, which we decided was the most intelligent, aggressive breed we could find. Found five that we thought had potential when they’re about a year, year and a half old. And for the next 11 months they were trained to be around people and trained that it was play time and it was okay to attack.

The deficit is you can’t put these dogs back into the community when you’re done because then they’re all trained to attack. What you don’t see is that we digitally removed these bright green pads over the groin in the chest — the dogs are triggered by the color green. They see color quite well. Yeah, you didn’t want to wear green to work.

So the dogs would go after the green toy and you know, [dog chomping noises], cut. And we had to pull the thing off and put him in his little cage and relax him. But for them it was play. It was not kill. So if there was a mistake, the dogs know this is not a bad thing. And emotionally it would be bad for the dogs to have seven months of aggressive training always. Like, that’s not good for any creature. So Andrew came up with a great training method, but he just said it’s going to take a lot of time to instill that behavior. And no one can be around an animal in that state without being identified by the animal as a friend.

So the stunt team had to work with the dogs every day for five months. Halle Berry had to be with the dogs every day for five months. Keanu, too. Okay, that’s on camera. Who else is involved in movie? Everyone behind. So the cameraman have to be standing around the dogs all day, the dogs have to recognize the scent, the smell, anybody that was going to be on that set in close proximity had to spend a lot of time with the dog. So even if you’re not shooting with them, they’re still on set and hanging out.

We keep them somewhat contained in close proximity. The dogs, once they lose focus you know, it’s a dog. If he doesn’t want to come out of his box, he doesn’t come out of his box. You can’t negotiate. You have to understand the method and the methodology behind what we wanted to do. First we had to get with intelligent people that could figure it out and we just had to slowly, day-by-day, work for it. You need a lot of patience just, I mean it’s not that massive of a sequence but it took a lot. It’s probably the one that took the most prep.

ASSAULT ON THE CONTINENTAL

After being sent to kill Winston (Ian McShane), the owner of The Continental, John refuses the kill order by The High Table. This creates some … friction. The High Table sends everything they have at John, which includes soldiers in full body armor capable of withstanding gunfire. John is forced to knock down the soldiers at close range before moving in for a killshot.

Chad Stahelski:

We wanted The High Table guys to be next level. Again, you can see Keanu, the way we choreograph, is very repetitive. Like he does judo, it’s all grappling, it’s throws and it’s Aikido, Aiki-jūjutsu, kind of stuff like that. So you need different adversaries. That’s why [Boban Marjanovic] is eight feet tall. And Cecep [Arif Rahman] and Yayan [Ruhian] are five feet tall and okay, Mark [Dacascos] is a ninja with swords and then the underwater guys and guys on motorcycles. Okay. So what are The High Table guys? What, we’re just gonna have them come in and have Keanu shoot those guys too? Gunfights can be incredibly boring. So how do you keep close-quarter gun work with multiple attackers that are supposed to be every bit as good?

Well, fuck it. We call it boxing with bullets. Yeah. The guys react like you’re punching him. So he’s gotta punch them with the bullets, like “Jab, jab, jab, cross.” But they don’t die and he’s got to go back and he’s got to find the weak spot in the neck to do it.

I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I looked at all the suits of armor. And I was looking with my stunt coordinator. I was like, “Fuck it! They wear suits of armor.” That’s how they sword fought back in the day. They’d find the loose parts and the chinks in the armor through the armpit or the back of the neck. And that’s how they got ‘em. Like “Back of the neck, arm pit, got it! That’s how he’s going to win.” So we call it boxing with bullets.