Keanu Reeves ‘believes he is John Wick while making John Wick’
When screenwriter Shay Hatten was handed the job of writing John Wick: Chapter 4, he says there was no specific plan for what the movie should look like. “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, Oh, it really is a blank page where you get to ask the natural questions: Where would John have gone off after the last movie? And then you figure it out and put it 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 4, 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, who met John Wick series director Chad Stahelski on 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 4, 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.
“It’s so grand
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