[Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for John Wick: Chapter 4]
One of the scenes that most got teased during John Wick: Chapter 4’s promotional campaign was a big car chase and massive fight among the cars moving around the Arc de Triomphe, in France. While it’s pretty safe to assume the scene wasn’t filmed in a normal day’s traffic, Chad Stahelski’s stunt team managed to make a pretty impressive sequence with stunt drivers moving while actors punched the heck out of each other. In an interview with Collider, the director explained how all of that was accomplished.
During the interview, Stahelski and Keanu Reeves explained to our own Editor-in-Chief Steve Weintraub how they figured out ways to make the scene happen. As you can imagine, it was no easy feat. Even for “normal” action movies, the stunts have to be perfectly coordinated so that no one is in danger. In John Wick, where the action is turned up to eleven, the same had to go for the precautions during the stunts. The team used stunt performers, stunt drivers, real cars, fake cars, wires, foam, and a lot of people got hit by cars for real, but everyone made it:
“We have an amazing stunt team that we had figure out how to do it safely and still have the speed going by. What you don’t see, we put down all these little cone markers, different colored cone markers. So all the stunt drivers know which lane they’re in: The red lane, they’re in the blue lane, they’re in the green lane. And then we have little spot markers almost like Twister. Keanu’s got to stay in his footpath to make sure. That’s it—just have really good people and don’t step too far left, don’t step too far right.”
How the John Wick: Chapter 4 Stunt Team Managed to Stay Alive
Stahelski went on to break down how the stunt team managed to get hit by cars and not end up at the hospital. The director explained that even at slow speeds, getting hit by a car is still quite an impact, which meant that stunt performers had to use every protection and trick in the book so that they could film without major accidents:
“Most of the time when a guy is getting hit by a car, a stuntman’s being hit, it’s only about 10 to 15 miles an hour. That’s considered a pretty extreme car hit […] But when we wanted to get more speed out of the car, say upwards of 18 to 20 miles an hour, that’s a hard hit for a stunt guy. And hitting the car is the hard part, but hitting the ground is the much harder part. So we put the guys in these small wire systems, so when we hit, we put a special pad on the windshield so they don’t get hung up. Stunt guys pad up, they rehearse, we hit him with the car. They go up and we slow down their rate of descent so we can put them down the ground a little bit easier so they can survive. The probability of surviving is much greater when we do that. We try to make it as safe as we can and still get a great impact.”
The Arc de Triomphe is just the initial part of a massive action sequence that wraps up John Wick: Chapter 4. After that, the title character moves on to an apartment building in which the movie’s best action sequence happens, and then Wick has to fight his way up the Sacré Coeur, a 220-step staircase that is also another great moment in the action flick.
John Wick: Chapter 4 is playing in cinemas everywhere now. You can check out the full conversation with Stahelski and Keanu Reeves below.
