For more than two decades, Chad Stahelski has been getting hit by cars, kicked in the face and buried alive for your entertainment. So when he makes proclamations like this, it's best to just take him at his word: "When you see one of us get hit by a car, that's a human being, being hit by 2,000 pounds of metal. There are repercussions to that. No matter how good we are, you are sore in the morning."

Stahelski studied martial arts as a child after his father took him to his first Bruce Lee movie. He later trained at the world-renowned Inosanto Martial Arts Academy in California, becoming a competitive kickboxer for a time. A stunt coordinator saw one of his demonstrations ("I would walk into the ring and show off a little bit, do backflips, kicks, standard stuff") and asked him if he'd ever considered stunt double work.

After getting his start working for Albert Pyun—the ultra-prolific director of direct-to-video martial arts cheapies such as Kickboxer 2: The Road Back—Stahelski body doubled for his friend and training partner Brandon Lee in The Crow, and helped complete that film after Lee's accidental on-set death. Later, Stahelski worked with Lana and Lilly Wachowski on The Matrix films (as Keanu Reeves' stunt double in the first movie and as a martial arts stunt coordinator for the sequels). Since then, he has been one of Hollywood's most in-demand action guys, working as a stunt double, second unit director and action choreographer for films such as The Expendables, 300 and Spider-Man 2.

In 2014, he co-directed (along with frequent collaborator David Leitch) his longtime friend Keanu Reeves in the sleeper hit John Wick, arguably the best American action movie of this decade. He returns as the lone director for the sequel, John Wick: Chapter 2. To celebrate the blood-splattered occasion, Esquire recently asked Stahelski to reminisce on key moments in his high-octane career.

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He got his start in the super low-budget cyborg basher Knights.

It was a Kris Kristofferson, Kathy Long low-budget sci-fi movie by Albert Pyun. It was awesome. I was doing fight scenes, dressed up like a cyborg on the cliffs of Moab. It was pretty goofy. But if you're not from the movie world, it's little overwhelming at first. It took a couple weeks to get into the full-time job swing, the hours they work and the pace they move at. But I finished with that job and was completely fascinated by the process. That's when I started getting into film.

In the most early '90s move possible, he got to work with Andrew Dice Clay in the direct to video classic Brain Smasher... A Love Story.

Yeah. Andrew Dice Clay. He was a funny guy. Very nice man, very professional. You know, you see him on stage, and you think he's that persona. He's got a little of that to him; he's a shit-talker. But he's also a very nice guy. Super polite, super nice to the crew.

He traveled the world and learned his craft in the espionage thriller Spitfire and doesn't mind if you didn't see it.

You're in your early 20s, you don't have a care in the world. I'd just graduated from college, and I tried to have a day job for about half a day, before I quit to become a professional kickboxer. I got to study martial arts, I got to learn driving on these low budget shows. There was a really funny movie called Spitfire. It was another Albert Pyun thing. I don't know if anybody ever saw it, but it was a blast. We got to go to the Philippines to Rome to Hong Kong, and we just go around doing fight scenes and car chases. You can't go wrong, you know? For a 22-year-old, that was pretty fun. And you learn the whole time.

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He graduated from stunt man to creating action sequences in Bloodsport II: The Next Kumite and Bloodsport III.

That's where I started choreographing martial arts sequences. I had a strong Judo and Jujutsu background, so I was used to pulling [punches], which unknowingly lent itself very well to stunts. Whenever the instructor would have to demo, he would use me, because I could fall and not land on my head. And that just stayed with me as a stunt guy. It felt very natural for me to fall down. Martial arts choreographer is very much like dance choreography. You are trying to tell a story, you're trying to enhance character, at the same time you are trying to excite the audience. We want to create the illusion of pain.

He's gotten hit by every vehicle you can imagine, most prominently in Escape From L.A.

I've been hit by two thousand cars in my career. I was in a few Die Hards, Escape From L.A., some other features. I mean, that was a standard skill in a lot of TV shows and movies in the '90s and 2000s. I've been hit by a car, I've been hit by a van, I've been hit by a motorcycle, I've been hit by a truck. I've been hit by a golf cart. I've even been run over by a scooter. Every movie is so different. You think, "Oh, I'll never get run over by a scooter." But yeah, you'll get run over by a scooter. Some writer will write it, and you'll get cast to do it, and it's up to you and a stunt coordinator to figure out how to do it safely.

You think, "Oh, I'll never get run over by a scooter." But yeah, you'll get run over by a scooter.

He was buried alive in the TV show Angel, amongst other places.

I get asked [what the most dangerous stunt I've done is] a lot. It's never really what you think. It's never the big fight scenes or hanging from a helicopter; it's not the the high falls or the fireballs or even the car hits. I look at it as the confinement stuff. I've been buried alive before, with a special tube for you to breathe through six feet of dirt. That, mentally was the toughest thing I've ever done, because you have to hold your shit together. You can't freak out. You have to be patient and calm. It sounds so simple, until you're put into that. Five feet of dirt, mixed with peat moss, and you have about a hundred something pounds sitting on your chest, you're trying to breathe through a small tube, you feel pressure everywhere, you cannot move until the person you are supposed to complete the stunt with digs you out. You have a small radio next to you, and you have to hold your shit together. If you freak out, there's a good chance that you suffocate yourself.

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He also spent a lot of time underwater, most spectacularly on Alien: Resurrection.

I've done the Houdini thing where you are chained and handcuffed and thrown off a 30-foot pier into the water, and a safety diver is supposed to pull you out. But if they can't find you... that's where a lot of mistakes happen for us. When you are underwater, you have got to hold your shit together. You can't freak out, you can't take in a bit of water. I spent five to six years pretty hardcore in the TV world... The Profiler, The Pretender, NYPD Blue, and I was doubling all the leads, so there's wasn't a week going by where I wasn't going underwater. The third Aliens movie, there was a great underwater scene we did.

Like the rest of us, his mind was blown by The Matrix.

I was Keanu's stunt double for the first Matrix. To spend a year of my life with the Wachowskis, and to see how they make film, was a life-changing event. For most of how I made John Wick, and most of how I direct, it's pure Wachowskis—their attention to detail. To sit back and watch them work was the Harvard of film school. I remember we were testing the bullet time down in Australia and—cut to a year later—we all saw the movie. I was sitting behind Keanu, and we both looked at each other and went, "Holy shit."

Actor Keanu Reeves and director Chad Stahelski on the set of Bobby Bank Getty Images

He helped figure out how everyone's favorite wall-crawler moved on Spider-Man 2.

In the script, it might say "car chase," and it's up to us to come in and design it. We sat with them as they were designing a lot of the web swinging and hanging guys up by the light post. We would come into our gym and fuck around with motion conceptual: How does Spider-Man move? It's almost like we're selling cool choreography. We conceptualize a bunch of stuff, and we give it to the stunt choreographers, and they pick and choose what they like out of our reference stuff. We're like the cooks. You can choose off the menu.

He sat in the director's chair for the first time with John Wick.

It was a little scary, but very, very fulfilling. You don't want to let people down. Especially because I'm so close with Keanu. He's trusted me to do this; trusting his career in my hands. We were tiny. We had $20 million for the whole thing, which isn't much for a 47-day shoot in New York. Pretty trivial. But every project is different. Sometimes money isn't always a good thing. Sometimes we prefer working on the smaller budgets. It forces us to be creative, and do cooler stuff for less. Money brings in too many cooks into the kitchen and it gets a little kooky.

He set out to top himself with his most most challenging fight sequence yet on John Wick: Chapter 2.

When you shoot in a room full of mirrors, it's always going to be tricky. Where do you put your crew? How do you hide your cameras? How do you refract images? No one has ever done it without massive digital help before. We did every trick in the book, [and] we did have some digital effects help, but we tried to do as much as we could practically—just to keep the realism and the grittiness there—and still shoot a beautiful scene. I'm very proud of that one. Not a lot of people would be willing to try that, logistically, in the time it took. But I'm very proud of how it looks.

Michael Tedder Michael Tedder has written for Esquire, Stereogum, The Village Voice, and Playboy, and is the founder of the podcast and reading series Words and Guitars.

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