Man, I love that grenade scene so much. How many different variations of the choreography do you guys go through once you settle on, “Okay, we’re only using grenades”? You’re limited in terms of like, “What can I actually do where my protagonist is not going to be obliterated by this?” So how many different variations did you end up going through there?
I mean, one, it was a lot of fun building that dynamic because they are grenades, so even the set and the setting, the steel doors, it was built out of, it’s all a rock-based underground bunker. So you start from there where you could actually shelter yourself just behind a door. But I just went kind of nuts on the lobbing, almost volleyball aspect of just a hot potato kind of sequence. So the set itself, we built with a lot of — because [we also have] a lot of continuous takes, so there were a lot of trap doors in the set. So like when the guy gets pushed behind the door, we don’t cut. Ana pushes the door closed, and he goes through a little magic trap door right before the explosion goes off, because it’s a real explosion. So it’s a bit, I felt like it was almost like little theater tricks that we would do as we’re blowing people up.
That’s really cool. So there are several other extended fight sequences here that I think action junkies are just going to really enjoy and I wanted to run through a few of them with you in a lightning round format and see if you could just tell me any stories from the set or moments that you discovered during editing or really anything that jumps out to you about these. So there’s this hard-hitting fight scene that takes place in an ice club, which again was something that I’d never seen before. So what do you remember about that?
I mean, that’s something that was, in terms of using elements that are there, of what would be in an ice club? Part of it is just grabbing weapons, because when she comes in, she can’t have a real gun, so she has to use the rubber bullets. So that was a unique idea too of, again, taking something like, say she had a gun. Say she had a gun in the club. It would feel like something we’ve seen before, outside of the ice club [aspect], but using the rubber bullets established this idea of, with metal detectors, you just can’t go there. So what do we do? So using the rubber bullets, what she practiced with in the Ruska Roma, that becomes a different kind of sequence. So it’s almost like punching with bullets. Just driving and just pop, pop, pop, you’re having to drive them back as if you’re hitting them. So that became a new thing. “What about if we’re punching with bullets, what would that look like?”
That’s great. And then there’s also this scene that takes place in this kind of lodge environment, which we’ve never really seen in a John Wick movie before. What do you remember about that one?
We had a great time with it, and I really wanted this, I had this image early on of a silhouette samurai, just wild Ana, wild Eve, just getting out all of her anger in one tableau of her going to town. So using the fire specifically — having the grenade that goes off, but then it does roll by the fireplace, so I needed the place to be on fire, mainly because I wanted that silhouette shot. So that’s kind of how you go through it. You have these ideas, I go, “Okay, so the cabin has to be on fire because I want this tableau shot.”