Keanu Reeves ‘believes he is John Wick while making John Wick’

Shay Hatten became a screenwriter and was then given the writing job. John Wick, Chapter 4.He said that there wasn’t a plan in place for how the movie would look. “It’s cool. It’s really thrilling,” he told Polygon in an interview ahead of the movie’s release. “Because there’s no blueprint, you’re just like, You get the chance to pose the obvious questions. Where did John end up after the last film?You then have to put everything together.

“It’s in some senses tiring, because you try 100 different versions, but it’s also really gratifying when you finally start to crack an idea that eventually makes its way into a movie.”

That also meant there weren’t specific guidelines for the new characters put in orbit around Keanu Reeves’ hero in John Wick, including blind swordsman Kaine, played by Donnie Yen, and the preening villain known as the Marquis, played by Bill Skarsgård. Hatten’s co-writer Michael Finch says the two writers “had our wishlist” of people they hoped would play the characters they were writing, which affected their script. But they weren’t told to write with specific actors in mind, so the people who did end up in the roles often reshaped their characters.

Finch was introduced to Chad Stahelski (John Wick series director) during the 2015 film. Hitman Agent 47, says he was brought in to assist on the script after “Shay got tired of working on John Wick, and threw up his hands a little bit!” Hatten previously worked in a similar role for John Wick Chapter 3 – Parabellum: “I was kind of the guy who came in when it was already rolling,” he reminded Finch during the interview. Both men were surprised at the movie’s eventual casting, but excited at how it changed the story.

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“It’s so grand and rewarding when you write a character, then you get an actor who actually understands it,” Finch said. “And I think that part of the system is that Keanu believes he is John Wick while he’s making John Wick [movies]. He has to, for all kinds of reasons, mostly for the physical beating he’s taking. He manages to convince the others to do that. Two days into the audition, these people believe they have what it takes to be the role. This is why they feel seamless. These characters are theirs. And for us, that’s a huge win.”

Finch says that dynamic lets the actors inject more of themselves into the characters, and reshape them in the process — for instance, what Donnie Yen did with Caine. “The original character, as written, was a little bit rough around the edges,” he says. “Donnie is an incredibly polished guy, incredibly elegant. Not only that, he’s incredibly crisp. He carries himself in a way that reflects his fighting moves. They’re incredibly precise, incredibly sharp. He brought this to his character. He brought a certain level of laser-like intensity, shark-like intensity, that wasn’t necessarily written into the character.

“Keanu winds up all chewed up, beat to shit. Caine, however, manages somehow to remain sharp and crisp. His sunglasses never go out. And that was something he brought to the character, this precision.”

Hatten says the chemistry between Yen and Reeves also “adds a tremendous amount to the movie.” Their performances imply more familiarity and comfort with each other than was necessarily in the script. “Just by the nature of the performances these two guys are giving, whenever they’re on screen together, you as an audience member get a real sense of a shared history they might have together,” he says. “You can imagine the adventures these guys might have been on 20 years ago, in a John Wick movie we never saw. So he brings a ton to the texture of the franchise.”

Hatten thinks the John Wick franchise cast frequently uses their performances to imply those kinds of rich, complicated connections, and that it’s a significant part of the series’ success.

“It just lets you create this whole mythology in your head for the thousands of adventures this guy probably went on,” he says. “It makes him seem that much more epic. If we ever defined exactly what John Wick’s specific backstory was, it would make him less of a myth, because you’d have all the answers. You don’t want the answers. I think it’s cooler that it’s a limitless thing, where we can just keep pulling out new, unspoken pieces of the past to explore in new movies.”