#1995 - Chad Stahelski
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Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day.
Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day.
Yeah, Chad, just get. Take a hit.
Start the show.
Take a hit of that. We'll start the show. Just get in there. And that's not even a fresh done.
Okay.
When they're fresh, I just want to.
Do it twice to make sure that was real.
Shout out to, how do you say his name? Juju mufu. Juju mufu for his smelling salts. If it was fresh, you couldn't do that twice. It's fresh. If it's fresh, you get like that close.
Yeah, no, I'm awake.
That was a good one, though.
Definitely awake.
I'm going to bring these to the comedy mothership. I'm going to see. I'm going to take a big blast right before I go on stage. Supposed to wake up your central nervous system or something. I don't even know if there's any science to it.
No, it just sucks.
Might be just a bunch of psychos who just like freaking their brain out with smelling salts.
I'm awake.
Anyway, man, congrats on the movie. Looks awesome.
Thank you.
Very exciting.
Very nice to be here. Big fan.
Thank you. My pleasure. Boy. Jesus Christ. Is it over the top?
Way over.
So crazy.
Yeah, it's so crazy.
I saw a thing online. Of the amount of people that John Wick has killed compared to, like, Michael Myers. And I think we beat Jason. Oh, yeah. By a long time.
I think we beat Rambo, too.
Yeah, I think you beat everybody.
But I think we had more deaths than Keanu spoke words in the movie.
Oh, for sure.
Everybody's bringing up to me. I think he spoke 308 words in the movie or something.
Yeah. Well, listen, it works. It's perfect.
Yeah. Something fun. Something for the guys and the action fans and everybody out there.
Oh, yeah, it's murder porn.
Hopefully. It's artistic murder.
It's artistic.
It is.
It's interesting how they're all so different, too. The fourth one is almost like a comic book movie. It's like, it's so over the top.
And crazy graphic anime. I think it's probably the best story that we've told, but it's definitely wrapped up in the hyper real world. We get bored. So we wanted to go somewhere and do something. And it's always like, how do we start these things? What do we do? We never start with a concept, right? It's usually we're done, we're done. We're never going to do one again. And then Japan gets released, like, six months after the rest of the world. So we're usually doing a press tour in Japan. And we're sitting in the Imperial Hotel. They have an amazing scotch bar. And we start off with the first drink going, thank God it's done. God, we survived. And by, like, the fifth scotch, we're like, hey, man, I got a great fucking idea. Let's have them fight ninjas. And then that's how it starts. And it's been that way for the last three.
So you started off as a stuntman?
Yeah.
And how did you transition to becoming a director? Because there's got to be a lot of barriers that are in the way, I think.
Different time, for sure. Before cell phones, before that stuff. We started as a stunt guy. Before all the know, I was working for this guy, Ernie Ursadi way back in the day. A brilliant stunt quarter and second unit director on television. And I was working on. I don't know if you remember the old show, like, pretender with Michael T. White. Sure. Yeah, he could be anything. That kind of thing. And I was doing a gig on that. I'd just done a car hit. I think it was only, like, 24. I split my head open on the windshield. I was a mess. And then he comes to me as I'm holding the ice pack on my head. He's like, hey, they're having auditions for this Sci-Fi film in Burbank. You're off. If you hurry, you can make it. And I'm in jeans and a t shirt, and I'm bleeding, and I'm like, all right, yeah, sure, I'll go make. It's for that. You know, in, like, Keanu Reeves. I'll go see him. Sure. So we go up there, and it was an audition for the. You know, at the time. You remember back in the day, there weren't a lot of martial art movies at a big budget level. It was like Steven Seagal or Mark Dakoskis, all those guys at the time. And martial arts, they didn't do them in big budget films. It was considered low budget action porn kind of thing. And we get there, get to this big warehouse in Burbank, and you saw this guy, really scruffy looking with a neck brace. It's Keanu. He had just come out from neck surgery.
Oh, Jesus.
15 Hong Kong and chinese stuntmen there screaming and yelling. I said, hey, I'm here for the audition. And I meet these two fellows that come over. And so wachowskis at the time, now Lana and Lily, and they introduced themselves. And we're. You know, I'm Chad. I'm here for the. Okay, great. This is Yung Wu ping. And I was like, oh, no one told us. And Yung Wu ping, we knew from was the big choreographer that started Jet Li, and Jackie Chan did, like, iron Monkey.
Oh, wow.
Once upon a time in China and all that stuff. So it was Yung Wu ping and his guys, and they're like, okay, you just follow this guy and this little guy named Tiger Chen. Fucking phenomenal guy. Could do triple flip twist, could do anything. A wushu champion, they just follow that guy, just do what he does. And for the next hour, I tried being the tall white guy, trying to just keep up with him.
Can you do all that stuff?
God, no. God. I just do as much as I could until I fell down, but I was pretty flexible. I had a good gymnastic background, so I'd throw a backflip, I'd do the kicks. I do all the spin hook kicks. And we'd train with a lot of taekwondo guys and stuff. So we were pretty good at all the kicking and punching and some of the acrobatics. But then it got to a level. He picks up a stick, and now you've seen the wish. You guys, they're going mental. And I'm like, oh, boy. At the end of an hour, I'm in jeans and a t shirt, still bleeding from my head wound.
Oh, Jesus. Did you have a concussion?
Probably. Yeah, I think so. Knowing now we're looking back, like, yeah, that didn't seem too good. But I finished, drove home, thought, wow, I really screwed the pooch on that one. I never thought I'd hear from those guys again. And then, like a month later, I got called, hey, can you come back? And exact same audition again. Exact same. And then got the call saying, hey, would you like to double Keanu Reeves on this Sci-Fi movie in Australia? I was. Yeah, I got this other gig on tv. I think I'm going to have to pass. And the producer at the time was Barry Osborne, who went on to do all the Lord of the Rings. And he was like, yeah, he's kind of a little angry at me for saying no. And I thought, okay, I fucked that up. I'll never work again. And then cut to two months later, it was in February, and he calls back, he's like, hey, we had to push the shoot. You available now? It's like, yeah, actually, I am. So I literally flew to Australia, like, two weeks later, got there, and within a day, you realized oh, this isn't a normal show. You saw the rehearsals, you saw some of the sets, you saw some of the footage, and it was the fucking matrix.
Oh, wow.
So that's how we got in, or how I got in with the Wachowskis. And I spent the next eight and a half years with them through all the Matrix sequels and all some of their other shows. And with James Matigue doing v for vendetta, just lived in the Wachowski world. And that's probably one of the most incredible film schools you'll ever have. That's where I got to know Keanu and all that. Cut. Two years later, after all that, Keanu and I had worked together for so long in there, he knew I'd been doing a lot of second unit directing, which, for people that don't know, it's the action director. The fight scenes, the car chases, the sunsets, all the shit. First unit doesn't want to deal with usually big action sequences, so they have these action directors or second unit guys go out and do the units trying to do it more efficiently without the cast, with the stunt doubles and such. And Tiana gotten this script that I thought was something interesting about it was called Scorn and it was the original John Wick script.
How did it become called John Wick?
Derek Colstead's grandfather's name is John Wick. Derek Colstead being the writer of it. So he just gave tribute to his grandfather, called him Wick. John Wick.
Oh, wow.
Pretty trippy. Yeah.
How did that become the name of the movie?
Keanu? At the original script, scorn. The guy was like 65. He lived in a little brown. It was very, very grounded script. I think only two people died in the original script and it was like, one.
That's hilarious.
Yeah, it was very cold war, old school, and that's where the gold coins came from, because you didn't want to leave a paper trail. It had very simple little ideas. And he handed it to myself and was like, hey, would you like to take a look at this? And I was sure, sure. I read it and I was like, yeah, I don't know what to do with this action wise. He only kills two people. He's like, well, we're trying to change it and we're thinking of this. I'm like, well, he's like, would you like to direct it? I was like, whoa. Yes, as a matter of fact.
So you had no experience directing and then you direct John Wick?
Yeah, just second unit, dude. Me and my partner at the time, Dave Leach. I call Dave that was on a Friday, called Dave on a Saturday going, hey, we might have a shot. We got to put a pitch together in 24 hours. So I always had this idea about greek mythology and how we could layer it and do this. Like, I'm a big Tolkien fan, so how do you take a fantasy gig and make it modern day? So we're like, let's take it that way. And we'll put gods and Greeks and Sharon and the river sticks and we'll make this whole Zeus thing going on. And we kind of layered it. And Keanu just heard it on Monday and went, interesting. And he said, sure you want to do it? I'm like, yeah, you know, me and my partner Dave, we'll co direct. We'll do this. And we done it to the producer Basil ionic the next day. And he goes, well, Keanu, want you sure? We had done a little tape on that Sunday about the gunfoo stuff. We took aikido ikijitsu, put it all the close quarter tactical shit with some reloads, and we did a quick little previz in our space 80 711 back in LA and showed it to him. Everybody's, oh, my God, this is going to be great. Can Keanu do it? We're like, yeah, I hope so.
Where did the magazine reload flip come from?
That funny thing that I'm going to give total cred to Keanu. Wow. 100%. He started doing that in the second one. I'm like, dude, what are you doing? He's like, check it out. Fuck. He started doing it and I was like, that's awesome.
It is awesome. People do that.
Check. Yeah, it's a legit thing. They're doing competition.
You know how crazy that is, that an actor for a film decides to come up with a thing and it's actually a quicker way to eject a magazine.
He can do forehand and backhand. He does some trippy things. He does it with the AR, too. Like, you'll watch in the second one. He'll do a quick flip with the AR and he'll put it in on. You're like, where the fuck did he get that?
Well, he really, really trained for that movie.
That's him.
You can really tell.
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