Look behind the scenes at the climactic sequence in “John Wick: Chapter 4,” set on 222 steps leading up to the Sacré-Coeur Basilica in Paris.
The following contains spoilers for “John Wick: Chapter 4.”
The first thing the “John Wick: Chapter 4” fight coordinator Jeremy Marinas thought when faced with the prospect of staging a fight scene on 222 steps leading up to the Sacré-Coeur Basilica was: “My quads and hammies are going to kill me.”
At the same time, he wasn’t exactly surprised when the director Chad Stahelski presented him with the concept. “It’s like, of course that’s what you want,” Marinas said. “You want 100 guys falling down the stairs and you want me to make every reaction and fall different. Of course you do. It was like we were just another day at work.”
In the bravura action sequence, Keanu Reeves’s immensely talented assassin has to defeat a gantlet of enemies to reach the top of the staircase. When it finally seems like he’s made it to the summit, he’s sent plummeting back to the bottom in full slapstick fashion and has to start from scratch while the clock is ticking. After all, he needs to get to the church by sunrise to compete in a duel with an evil marquis (Bill Skarsgard) that will decide his fate. Luckily a foe comes to his aid: Caine, played by the martial arts master Donnie Yen, who had been hunting Wick for most of the movie’s running time and will shoot on behalf of the marquis.
The climb comes close to the end of the nearly three-hour film, and after a flurry of ingenious and relentless fights that feature Wick running around Paris trying to avoid killers who want to collect the price that’s on his head. But somehow it outdoes everything that has come before with its mix of technical proficiency, emotional stakes and Looney Tunes-style tumbles. The plan was to make it a “whole John Wick metaphor,” Stahelski said in a phone interview, where the hero beats up people and then gets beaten up and has to start all over again.
The idea for a fight set on these steps came to Stahelski during a trip to Paris to scout shooting locations. The director, who has worked as a stuntman, was a big fan of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Amélie” and was eager to look at locations used in that film. That brought him to the Sacré-Coeur, which seemed like a good spot for the final showdown. But he wasn’t impressed by the steps that directly face the structure. “It didn’t look that terrifying to the stunt team I had with me at the time,” he said.
Then they walked around the left side of the church and saw the more daunting climb. “You never saw three stunt guys smile faster when we saw those stairs,” Stahelski said. “Everybody instantly knew what we were going to do. There was no verbal communication. It was just big smiles.” In addition to the Buster Keaton of it all, Stahelski had a spaghetti western in mind for the final alliance between Caine and Wick, who must team up to make it to the top before they can turn their guns on each other.
The stunt coordinator Scott Rogers described Stahelski as like a “kid” thinking about what he could engineer at the location. “I’m thinking, mechanically, a guy’s got to go down these steps,” Rogers said. “He just turns, and goes, ‘Yeah, that would be great.’ But it’s not something he wouldn’t have done in his prime.”
Prep work for the shoot began in both Berlin and Paris before cameras rolled, but the team kept rehearsing and altering movements even while Stahelski was filming on another part of the staircase.
According to the stunt coordinator Stephen Dunlevy, the scene was “no more complex than any other fight” on a “John Wick” film, but Rogers added that the very act of scaling the stairs had its challenges. “There’s probably more of a physical toll on it because you are fighting in the middle of steps,” he said. Reeves had to ascend during each take, then reset — the cinematic version of a StairMaster.
And while charging up flights is exhausting, not to mention a great workout, Reeves had to do that while executing the choreography, which Marinas said is a mix of Wick’s regular “gun fu,” judo and jujitsu. He also had to find what little cover there is, ducking behind bodies and trees. “We all know how hard it is just to walk up stairs when we don’t want to,” Marinas said, adding, “Just to think about how well Keanu — not John Wick — Keanu was able to do shooting upwards while stepping. It’s hard enough to be a marksman on flat ground.”
Filming took place over seven sometimes wet nights, during which the crew occasionally had to wait for the Sacré-Coeur’s funicular, carrying tourists up the incline, to pass. There were 35 stunt people involved, some of whom were felled by Wick multiple times in the course of his ascent attempts. Rogers estimated that one man was probably “killed” five or six times on the steps. “He was like Gumby,” Rogers said. At the end of the shoot, Reeves made T-shirts for the stunt performers emblazoned with the number of times they were slain over the course of the entire movie. Some had more than 20 deaths.
Of course, Reeves is no slouch. According to Stahelski, you’re watching him perform everything on the steps himself, except for the “really big stair fall.” That task fell to the stunt double Vincent Bouillon, whose second take, captured with a cable camera, was the one that was used. (During the first take he got stuck on a railing.)
For added protection, some of the steps had hidden padding that could be removed with visual effects, but in certain cases the performers had to take the impact without that cushioning. Rogers said that he was proud that “outside of some bumps and bruises, there were no concussions” among the stunt team.
And for continuity in the final edit, Reeves did have to roll a little bit. “I still gotta throw Mr. Reeves down a couple of stairs,” Stahelski said.
While Reeves was always game, Stahelski did sense a weariness when his star confronted the stairs. “That look John Wick gives when he looks at his watch and actually looks up the staircase, I think that’s maybe 50 percent John Wick and 50 percent Keanu Reeves going, ‘Ugh, Stahelski did it to me again,’” he said. But, Stahelski added, the effort makes the character who he is: “You got to suffer. That’s what’s fun about John Wick. He suffers and he keeps going.”
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March 30, 2023 at 04:05AM
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A John Wick Action Scene, Step by Step - The New York Times
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