Chad Stahelski, ‘John Wick: Chapter 2’ Director, On Keanu Reeves, Ruby Rose, James Bond Rumor [VIDEO EXCLUSIVE]

For Chad Stahelski, director of John Wick: Chapter 2, helming a sequel to the original John Wick film was all about evolving the characters and the franchise.

Chad Stahelski Video Exclusive

The film, which stars Keanu Reeves, Common, Laurence Fishburne and Ruby Rose, continues the story of assassin Jack Wick who in the first film comes out of retirement in order to seek retribution when mafia boss Viggo’s son Iosef steals his vintage Mustang and in the process also shoots and kills the dog his newly deceased wife gifted him to help him with his mourning. Losing one of the last links to his wife, Wick is set on killing Iosef and as a result has a bounty put on his head. In this new installment, Wick is forced to repay an old debt. In order to retire, prior to the events in the first film, and marry his wife, Wick made an unbreakable oath with Italian crime boss D’Antonio, which is legitimized in the underground world of assassins with a device known as a Blood Oath Marker which records the debtors blood thumbprint.

A challenge for Stahelski was creating a film that lived up the original world created in the first film. “I think the trick with the sequel was to try to do — basically encapsulate what’s familiar or what people really enjoyed about the first film and then try to expand or give a little original material in with the familiar, and that’s what we really tried to do,” he told uInterview. This creativity can be see in the film’s mirror scene, where it took a certain degree of ingenuity to shoot in a room with over 300 mirrors without capturing any of the staff or cameras. He labeled it as “probably the most creatively difficult ” in the film.

The director only had positive things to say about the stars of his film, muffling a few chuckles as he recalled some moments with cast, yet he made sure to challenge his stars. Keanu Reeves, for one, received intense physical training worthy of an actual professional assassin. When brainstorming on how to take John Wick’s character to the next level, Stahelski and his creative team decided that “if we want to see the world get bigger and more involved we also need to get the character a little bit more — or just expand on what the character can do, and in this case that’s physical skills so Keanu went through twice the training that he did on the original film and we tried to get him a few more skill sets and improve on what he already did,” he told uInterview.

Co-star Ruby Rose had her own unique set of challenges. Her character Ares, crime lord D’Antonio’s personal bodyguard is deaf and has no spoken lines in the film. Stahhelski recalled the humorous encounter in which he first pitched the idea to the actress. He told her, “look I have this kooky idea what do you say we make you mute, and the only way you communicate is through sign language.” She was was slow to warm up to idea until the director explained the motivation behind the choice. “It took a little bit of convincing of how we thought that was going to be cool with the sign language and the subtitles and the payoff when John actually signs back to her because in our world John seems to know about every language there is. And, to her  credit, I think she got the joke after my 20 minutes of a lot of gesturing, and she went full on with it, so it was pretty cool of her.”

With the success of the John Wick films, Stahhelski is musing about the potential of directing a James Bond film, a series that inspired him in his youth and got him interested in film. “Bond was super cool, he was super sleek. St the same time you were having fun through all the movies, not at the expense of goofy gags or jokes or side-gags, but it was so slick. It was fun. And I think Bond can use a little of that,” he told uInterview. “It would be challenging to re-create the Bond world and to infuse a little bit more of what bond was known for back in the ’70s days which is epic action while still having fun and giving it a really slick look. I think that would be a very unique world-building challenge.”