The Continental: how to stay credible when you’re doing John Wick?

“We always wonder if we’re not doing too much.” Autopsy of John Wick-style fights, by the person responsible for the action sequences of the Prime Video series.

There where John Wick passes, the corpses pile up. And the series The Continental continues this bloody work. The prequel – currently watching on Prime Video – still delivers its share of sequences that are all guns blazing, with a battalion of henchmen massacred with headshots. Hyper-spectacular fighting with a frantic rhythm and meticulous choreography. Behind the scenes, the conductor is called Larnell Stovall. Former martial arts specialist converted to Hollywood, he is the director of the action scenes of The Continental. And for Première, he dissects the manufacturing of these enormous gun fights to the John Wickalways larger than life.

What is style John Wick in terms of action scenes?
Larnell Stovall: We are very specific about what we want to instill: tension, drama, cool. What I mean is that we pay attention to everything, even to not doing the kill too much. We can do a cool action sequence with 10 bad guys being shot in the head. But this same scene might be even cooler with 5 kills ! Better 5 kills that we will remember, rather than too many kills which make you lose the thread.

So, are you counting the deaths on set? You act like a kill count video games?
No I don’t do kill count ! (laughs) I don’t count the deaths and besides, I don’t think we killed that many people in The Continental when I think about it… Anyway, it’s tricky to do this kind of calculation, because some guys are killed, others are only injured. Afterwards, I know precisely when a character goes to the mat whether he is dead or not! I need to know for my staging. In the opening sequence, on this staircase of Continental, there’s a near endless influx of killers and assassins getting in Frankie Scott’s way. So we have to know what we’re doing with it. One headshot, and he is unambiguously dead. But sometimes it’s broken ribs or just a busted knee. In all cases, we must ensure each time that such adversary is not going to get up and come back to join the fight.

How do you deal with blood? Because this kind of killing should logically result in countless pools of blood, right?
It’s true that we don’t use too much blood so as not to make it too gory. It was voluntary. We had to have a certain continuity with the films in terms of tone, but also it’s much simpler for the connections. You can’t spray the main character with blood all the time, on his face, his costume… You have to think about that too. As a result, it’s the special effects that take care of the blood in post-production. That way, we don’t have to deal with it in the staging. If this character gets shot in the neck or head or elsewhere, they can add a big splash on the wall in VFX or a blood stain on the floor.

The heroes of the saga John Wick are shot at all the time, without ever being hit or almost. Are you trying to keep these sequences credible or ultimately, is it not important?
Yes, we think a lot about the credibility of the sequences. We do not want to fall into the caricature of storm troopers of Star Wars who don’t know how to aim and who never hit anyone with their laser guns (laughs). But at the same time, the idea is not to be 100% realistic. We make entertainment. It has to be cool. And then we also think about the following sequence! If he takes a bullet in a particular action scene, it means that the character will be injured in the next scene, which leads to complications. So we try to take all these factors into account. We give him bodies to use as shields so that it remains credible at times. We pay close attention to places where he can take cover. We play with camera angles to make the viewer accept that the villain misses the hero 3 or 4 times in a row. We do everything we can to keep it credible at the end of the day.

But don’t you sometimes say to yourself that this is going too far? That it doesn’t work anymore and he should be dead a long time ago?
Yes, of course ! We always wonder if we’re doing too much. We always look to see if, in a given scene, there isn’t someone in a position to shoot the hero. If there isn’t an enemy too close to him. Can we really believe that the bad guy missed at such a close distance? Yes ? No ? We ask ourselves all these questions when we design the choreography of these scenes. We imagine absolutely everything upstream, from top to bottom. We also follow a stopwatch to the nearest second for each movement. You have to keep in mind that we only had one day, for example, to film the opening scene of The Continental in the stairs. We did everything in 10 hours. But it’s also because we knew exactly what we wanted. We had everything carefully planned in preparation.

The Continental, in 3 episodes, to watch on Prime Video since September 22, 2023.