Speaking candidly about the making of John
Popular action hero Keanu Reeves has revealed details about the production of John Wick: Chapter 4 and the casting process.
“Chad really hooked into this idea of trying to study John Wick through the situations of other characters, and he was really drawn to the good, the bad, and the ugly,” Reeves said in a press interview about the new cast members of the movie.
He continued, “And so enter Donnie Yen as Cain, and Shamir Anderson as the tracker, we have Hiroyuki Sanada, who I worked with on 47 Ronin, he has a daughter who’s working with him, and that’s the incomparable Rina Sawayama, and then the antagonist of the piece, the Marquis, Bill Skarsgard.”
During an interview with Variety, director Benjamin Caron unwrapped the details about the key scene, which the studio did not proceed with.
The scene shows Cassian’s late adoptive mother, Maarva, delivering a fiery speech which ends with her slogan, “** the Empire!”
But the filmmaker revealed the line was switched to: “Fight the empire!”
“Disney wouldn’t let us use it,” he remembered. “So we changed it to ‘Fight the empire.’ I remember having a call with Tony Gilroy saying, ‘Are we gonna get away with this?’”
The filmmaker revealed he made strenuous efforts to add the slang as he even “wrote a legal brief” to the studio to acquire their permission.
“I wrote a memo on it and said, ‘Here’s why I think it’s economically prudent, and here’s why I think it’s good,’” he revealed.
Earlier, Diego Luna recounted his secretive Star Wars audition for Rogue One.
In a chat with Variety’s Actors on Actors series, the Andor actor revealed, “It was the first time such secrecy happened around anything I was going to be part of,” he said, adding the setting seemed to be some spy-thriller flick.
“I was asked by my agent to meet someone for something that couldn’t be said on the phone,” he continued. “I went into a meeting in a restaurant that was completely empty.
Adding, “There was a guy sitting in the corner with a computer open, and this was Gareth [Edwards], the director. I sat down with him, and it was just us for four hours.”
