John Wick: Chapter 4 has just been released to cinemas. The John Wick franchise has grossed more than US$855 million dollars, you might say it has been successful, but it almost never made it and was nearly a straight-to-DVD production.
At the time, old-guy action films like Taken were all the rage and it wasn’t till Keanu Reeves got attached that the film took a slightly different direction.
Work with people you know
Reeves reached out to people he knew that had talent but hadn’t had an opportunity. Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, who were stuntmen he had worked with on The Matrix. They expressed a desire to direct and their frustration with modern shaky cam action films.
John Wick was greenlit with a US$30 million budget, which is tiny for what they were trying to do.
Get Specific
Elisabet Ronaldsdottir was brought on board to edit. She had not done a project of this size or of this genre, and with the limited budget, there was no money for reshoots.
She had to cut everything out that didn’t work and take the film to its essence. She helped create a brooding often silent Wick
Some people won’t get it
The initial test audiences loved it. The production team then tried to organise executives to view the film. As the story goes, one of the executives got up 30 minutes in and walked out.
At this point, it was thought it might just go to DVD or streaming and with Reeves’s previous cold streak it isn’t a crazy idea to discount the movie.
However, critics didn’t and word of mouth of excited viewers helped spread the word and here we are US$855 million dollars and 4 films later.
How to John Wick Your Team
There is more talent than opportunity. Just because someone in your team hasn’t done something doesn’t mean they can’t do something.
You don’t need the best people, you need to get the best out of your people. They can do more than what they are doing if they are given a chance and purpose to achieve more.
As a leader, you want to continuously put people into challenging, but achievable situations. You want to be pushing them gently, out of their comfort zone.
Sometimes it might be a big push in terms of position, but philosophically not really. Take Stahelski and Leitch, you could say they are “just” stuntmen, but they had years of experience putting scenes together to tell a story. To figure out how to tell that story in interesting and inventive ways. It sounds very similar to directing even though they only got called fight choreographers.
Ronaldsdottir had to do more with less and showed that getting ruthless with her edits made the film better. Narrow down the focus of your team, get to the heart of what you are trying to achieve and move forward from there.
There is a good video about John Wick’s production here
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 