How Keanu Reeves Trained for John Wick

But that's Keanu. Like, Keanu bring... Like, that's not just Keanu. That's Keanu. Keanu loves cars. He loves bikes. He loves the discipline of it. He loves... Like, that's why he's got arch motorcycles, right? If you ever get a chance, you should check that shop out. It's the most pristine... I'm sure. I can't fuck with motorcycles. I'm scared of them. Yeah. But to build... Just to watch how he's got all the water cutters there. It's a very artistic... Oh, the bikes he makes are incredible. They're great. But he brings that to every... He just... He's very... Not compulsory. He's very... He loves the art of it. He loves the art of it. He's fascinated by... Like, who makes this cup, Joe? How do you... Like, everything he just fascinated over. He wants a story on it. He's one of the most curious, most... I guess, curious, artistically, like, how things are done, who people are. He's just got a genuine curiosity and love for things. He's a very unique guy. I think so. I've never met him. But just every interview you see with him, every movie, he's a very unusual person. You know what? I think anybody really artistic, or at least the really, I think, artistic people that I've met, they maintain that little bit of... And I mean this in the best of ways, a little bit of childness wonder. They're still kids a little bit. Like, I could talk to you all day about archery. I could talk to you all day about Marsau. I could talk to you all day about motorcycle. I could talk to you all day about movies. And I think that's... You gotta have that. You need that little inspiration. I think you need that little bit of wonderlust into certain things. And I think he's still got that. He will still... He'll see a sequence with the nunchucks and do something. And he'll start giggling. He's like, you want me to do that? He's like, okay, that's pretty cool. And he just goes from totally serious guy to, okay, now how do I learn how to do nunchucks? Everything you need to know about nunchucks, he wants to know about nunchucks. He just throws himself into it. So how much time did he have to train martial arts before John Wick 1? Oh, God, it wasn't that... He was coming out of a couple of films. So he hadn't been... Like, he wasn't in fight shape. So you can't just jump back in. So we gave him, I think, three to five weeks with some of the trainers we found to get into shape, to get into shape. Cut weight, got himself back in, stretched. Kind of got back into where he was on The Matrix. And then we stuck him with the fight teams and the stunt guys. I think we had him within three months. That was probably the shortest one we did. That was about three months to get him into that shape and teach him all the Aikido stuff and the Aikijitsu. Well, you need... There's so much going on in those movies physically that you need to be proficient in. The gun stuff, the throws, jiu-jitsu, striking, everything. The jiu-jitsu was the new thing for him. Probably not the most physically demanding, but you know how it is. You used to use your hands and feet. I mean, I'm sure you remember the first time you transitioned jitsu. It's like, it looks easy, but you're like, ahh. It's an eye opener. Yeah, it really is. And only even recently for me, I'm starting to feel like, oh, I can move. It feels just as good to be on my back as my butt. But I think we took a lot of inspiration from dance. Most of what we do is dance. They're based on dance drills. They're not based on martial arts drills. They look like martial arts. We kick, punch, but we don't train the actors in Thai pads or focus mitts or heavy bag. We'll do maybe a little of that for impact stuff, but it's mostly about memory. Because if a guy can punch and kick, that's great. But if you can't remember five moves, you're not much good to us. And it's more, you know, martial arts is action, reaction, or causing the guy to be off balance. All our guys are trained to keep him on balance to make it look crazy, but they got to dance with him. So it's about that metronome, keeping the beat going. So when we trained him, he hadn't been trained that way before. It was more like memorizing, you know, a few moves, hitting some guy. But we realized we had no money and we had no time. And every time you do punches and kicks, you see in most movies, right? Like they're on you right over my shoulder. Then, you know, you take the hit and it goes over your shoulder so I can sell the hit. So you're always doing these reverses. So if I do a big wide shot profile, you throw in a nice roundhouse kick. I got to cut somewhere to show the impact, unless you're really kicking me, which is not advisable most of the time. So every time the more punching and kicking striking you do, or if Keanu's not doing the motion, I got to cut more. And every time I cut, it's a setup. It's just time consuming. Not that it's bad or good. It's just time consuming. We knew we weren't going to have that. So we're like, fuck, what do we do? OK, we're just going to grab people. We're just going to make it all grappling. And like, is that going to look, you know, remember, it's all during the born. So everything's going to look very slow, you know, compared to what it was. But we're just we're going to do all great. We're going to do I get it. I get it. So you get it. That's it. That's all you get. And if you get a punch, it'll be a contact hit. That's all we're going to do. No punches, no kicks, no nothing. And we'll do it all in one take. Hmm. And we're all like, yeah, sounds good. You know, no, no. Yeah, we thought it was a complete disaster after the first two days of shooting the fight scenes. We're like, this is going to suck. We're fucked. Why do you think that? I think it was everyone's mindset. Like we did it out of necessity and we thought it was cool. But like you'd see people that were where's the kick? Like, you know, some sometimes people look at it like, well, he's doing the same throw over. I mean, Ipan Sayonagi looks the same. But for us, the different grips, the different throw, it all looks different to me. Like I'm a throw. You know, I love judo porn. I could watch a million different throws. It's awesome. For some people, it all looks the same. They want to see the cool jump spin hook kick or something like that. But then we put in the close quarter stuff. And when you're seeing it, remember, we don't have the muzzle flashes on. We don't have the blood splatters. So you're just kind of seeing, you know, it looks like they're dancing. Right. And then you put in the sound effects and you put in the muzzle and then you put in the fucking relay and like now it's making sense. So what do you when when he's shooting in the actual filming, is he just pulling the trigger and it's just going click? Well, see, that's the thing. You have dummy rounds. When you when you most movies always see A to B cutting, right? I'm on you. You're the guy like guns in the camera. You fire the blank. Most firearms up to very recently fire blanks. And for the people out there, a blank is around without the actual bullet. The lead piece that hits. But a blank still has a gunpowder charge in it. Say maybe, you know, even if it's only 50 grams of black powder. But at a range of 10 to 15 feet, that'll still that can kill you. Yeah, concussive force. That's when you hear about all the accidents that have happened with blanks over the years. Like you can't put a blank under your head and pull the trigger. It can't. Right. So we wanted to do all this close quarter shooting. Like we wanted to put the muzzle and do all this stuff, close quarter contact stuff. So we, you know, we went to our VFX guys and the trick is not so much the muzzle flask, it's a lighting interaction, especially at night. And it's cycling the automatic. Yeah. Getting it in and having the casing ejection. All do, but it can add up with visual effects costs. So we went and we found the armors and, you know, through Taren and the other the technologies that we found through the armors, we made a plug gun. A plug gun is a gun that has almost a steel rod inside the barrel and it kicks the gas a different way. So we still have an ejection, but nothing, no energy, no flash, no padding or wanting comes out the barrel. Like, you know, you couldn't put a live round in it if you tried. So is it a lower round, a lower level? It there in England, they use some that are like almost air contained. They can do it. And it's a very, very small charge of black powder. So it's a very, very we call them plug guns. They're very, very limited in the drainage. So it's just enough to cycle the round. Just enough to cycle it. Yeah. And nothing. Yeah. Exacting, but nothing comes out the barrel. So all that stuff that you see, the blood splatter, that's all CGI. The blood is all CG. There's one or two instances where it's not. But most of the blood is the blood so good nowadays digitally that it saves so much time to change the world. Oh, but get it. I mean, like, you know, you see in like a Tarantino, like in Django, Tarantino still uses old school blood packs, which I you know, I'm old school. I fucking love that. I think it's amazing. But with just the time and, you know, you like you see a John Wick movie. It's like, you know, the reset on 20 stunt guys taking hits. I went to it'd be a three hour reset to change the wardrobe. Right. And headshots. You'd have to put a special head pack on with a wig and all that stuff. So we do we do the blood hits digitally. The muzzle flashes, we actually shoot against a green screen and we'll call them elements and then we'll plug actual muzzle flashes back into the movie later on. So they're not digital per se, but they are comped in or in a composition. And that's how we get the cool lighting effect and keep the cool muzzle flashes. How long did it take you to film that red circle bar scene? I think less than four days. Really? Yeah, we weren't really. And can always he had the flu. He had like 103 degree fever. He was going down. It was it was a rough day. It was freezing cold. New York. He had the flu, a super high temperature, and we were just flying through it like literally two, three takes move on to three days filming it with the flu. Wow. Yeah. He's a trooper, man. He's a wow. That's incredible. Yeah, he's a tough fucker. Well, the actors have a fucking earache. They'll call it quits for the day. Ah, yeah. Yeah. No comment. No comment. But like most of the people we work with, they get it. And we try to be smart to look if we if there's another way, if we could have shut down and let them. We just it was like one of those. We either got to stop or we don't, but we only get one shot. And you couldn't account as that guy to you can't you can't make him. Where did you film that? I was on New York City. But the red circle, it was in this little it was up in the theater. District, I forget the name of it. It was a shut down little club that we just kind of opened back up and put our own throw on lighting rig in there and just kind of lit it up. I mean, if you had seen it in the daytime, it was all like that shit brown leather. It looked like you're walking to like, you know, big boys. So then it looked really bad. That gives credit to John Sela, the cinematographer on the first one. We went in, put our lighting grid up, flashed a lot of big screen lights, put the extras in funny colors. And, you know, we ran out of money. So we're like, we didn't we didn't know how to put the bad guys in some sort of like, OK, what would Star Trek do in Star Trek? We always call them the red shirts. You know, the guys in Star Trek that were always getting killed. You have to do was right there. Kirk was transported down to the planet with the red shirt guy. That guy was gone. So we put all our bad guys in the red shirts. They were just going to kill them all. I think we had a deal. There's a local like one of the garment district things. I think we got all those red shirts for like 10 bucks. It was like a whole deal. All the stunt guys, red shirts. But yeah, we did it all in this shitty little club in like four days, five, maybe four and a half days.