Name: How Keanu Reeves Trained for John Wick
Uploaded: 2023-06-07T17:23:38.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Keanu Reeves Trained for John Wick' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-06-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Keanu Reeves Trained for John Wick' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-06-07. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan experience.
- But that's Keanu, like Keanu brings like,
that's not just John, that's Keanu.
Keanu loves cars, he loves bikes.
He loves the discipline of it.
He loves, like that's why he's got Arch Motorcycles, right?
If you ever get a chance, you should check that shop out.
It's the most pristine.
- I'm sure, I can't fuck with motorcycles.
I'm scared of them.
- Yeah, but to build, just to watch how he's got
all the water cutters there, it's very artistic.
- Oh, the bikes he makes are incredible.
- They're great.
- He brings that to every, like he just, he's very,
not compulsive, he's very, he loves the art of things.
- Ridiculous.
- Yeah, he loves the art of it.
He's fascinated by like, who makes this cup, Joe?
Like how do you, like everything he just fascinated over.
He wants a story on it.
He's one of the most curious, most, I guess,
curious artistically, like how things are done,
who people are.
He's just got a genuine curiosity and love for things.
- He's a very unique guy.
- I think so.
- I've never met him, but just every interview you see
with him every movie, he's a very unusual person.
- Yeah, and he's got, you know what, I think anybody
really artistic, or at least the really, I think,
artistic people that I've met, they maintain that little bit
of, and I mean this in the best of ways,
a little bit of childness wonder.
- Mmm.
- They're still kids a little bit.
Like I could talk to you all day about like archery.
I could talk to you all day about martial arts.
I could talk to you all day about motorcycle.
I could talk to you all day about movies.
And I think that's, you gotta have that.
You need that little inspiration.
I think you need that little bit of wonder,
wonderlust into certain things.
And I think he's still got that.
Like he will still, he'll see a sequence,
we'll come in with the nunchucks and do something,
and he'll start giggling.
He's like, you want me to do that?
He's like, okay, that's pretty cool.
And he just goes from totally serious guy to,
okay, now how do I learn how to do nunchucks?
And he just, everything you need to know about nunchucks,
he wants to know about nunchucks.
He just throws himself into it.
- So how much time did he have to train martial arts
before John Wick won?
- Oh God, it wasn't that.
He was coming out of a couple films,
so he hadn't been, like he wasn't in fight shape.
So, you know, it's just like, you can't just jump back in.
So we gave him like, I think, three to five weeks
with some of the trainers we found to get into shape
to get into shape.
You know, cut weight, got himself back in, stretched.
You know, kind of got back into where he was on the Matrix.
And then we stuck him with the fight teams
and the stunt guys.
I think we had him within three months.
That was probably the shortest one we did.
That was about three months to get him into that shape
and teach him all the, you know,
the Aikido stuff and the Aikijitsu.
- Well, you need so, there's so much going on
in those movies physically that you need to be proficient in.
- Yeah.
- The gun stuff, the throws, Jiu Jitsu, striking, everything.
- The Jiu Jitsu was the new thing for him.
Probably not the most physically demanding,
but you know how it is.
You're used to using your hands and feet.
I mean, I'm sure you remember the first time
you transitioned Jitsu, it's like, it looks easy,
but you're like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah,
completely important. - It's an eye opener.
- Yeah, it really is.
And only, even recently for me,
I'm starting to feel like, oh, I can move.
It feels just as good to be on my back as my butt.
Like, you know.
But I think we took a lot of inspiration from dance.
Like, you know, most of what we do is dance.
They're based on dance drills.
They're not based on martial art drills.
They look like martial arts.
We kick, punch, but we don't train the actors in tie pads
or focus mitts or heavy bag.
We'll do maybe a little of that for impact stuff,
but it's mostly about memory.
Because if a guy can punch and kick, that's great,
but if he can't remember five moves,
you're not much good to us. - Right.
- And it's more, you know, martial arts is action, reaction,
or causing the guy to be off balance.
All our guys are trained to keep him on balance,
to make it look crazy, but they got to dance with him.
So it's about that metronome, keeping the beat going.
So when we trained him, he hadn't been trained that way before.
It was more like memorizing, you know, a few moves,
hitting some guy. - Specific sequence.
- But we realized we had no money and we had no time,
and every time you do punches and kicks,
you see in most movies, right?
Like, they're on you, right, over my shoulder.
Then, you know, you take the hit and it goes over your shoulder
so I can sell the hit.
So you're always doing these reverses.
So if I do a big wide shot profile,
you throw in a nice roundhouse kick.
I got to cut somewhere to show the impact,
unless you're really kicking me,
which is not advisable most of the time.
So every time, the more punching and kicking,
striking you do, or if Keanu's not doing the motion,
I got to cut more.
And every time I cut, it's a setup, it's just time consuming.
Not that it's bad or good, it's just time consuming.
We knew we weren't going to have that,
so we're like, fuck, what do we do?
Okay, well, we're just going to grab people.
We're just going to make it all grappling.
And like, is that going to look, you know,
remember, it's all during the borns,
so everything's going to look very slow,
you know, compared to what it was.
But we're just, we're going to do all great.
We're going to do aikido, aikijutsu, or jiu-jitsu.
That's it. That's all you get.
And if you get a punch, it'll be a contact hit.
That's all we're going to do.
No punches, no kicks, no nothing.
And we'll do it all in one take.
And we're all like, yeah, sounds good.
No one, yeah, we thought it was a complete disaster
after the first two days of shooting the fight scenes.
We're like, this is going to suck.
We're fucked.
Why did you think that, though?
I think it was everyone's mindset.
Like, we did it out of necessity,
and we thought it was cool.
But like, you'd see people that would, where's the kick?
Like, you know, sometimes people would look and go,
well, he's doing the same throw over it.
I mean, Ipan Seinagi looks the same.
But for us, the different grips, the different throw,
it all looks different to me.
Like, I'm a throw, you know, I love judo porn.
I could watch a million different throws.
It's awesome.
For some people, it all looks the same.
They want to see the cool jump, spin, hook, kick
or something like that.
But then we put in the close quarter stuff.
And when you're seeing it, remember,
we don't have the muzzle flashes on.
We don't have the blood splatters.
So you're just kind of seeing, you know,
it looks like they're dancing.
And then you put in the sound effects
and you put in the muzzle,
and then you put in the fucking reload.
And like, now it's making sense.
So what do you, when he's shooting
in the actual filming?
Is he just pulling the trigger
and it's just going click?
Well, see, that's the thing.
Do you have dummy rounds?
When you, when you,
most movies you always see A to B cutting, right?
I'm on you.
You're the guy.
Like, guns into camera.
You fire the blank.
Most firearms up until very recently fire blanks.
And for the people out there,
a blank is around without the actual bullet,
the lead piece that hits.
But a blank still has a gunpowder charge in it.
Say maybe a, you know,
even if it's only 50 grams of black powder,
but at a, at a range of 10 to 15 feet,
that'll still, that can kill you.
Yeah.
With concussive force.
That's, and you hear about all the accidents
that have happened with blanks over the years.
Like you can't put a blank under your head
and pull the trigger, it'd kill you, right?
So we wanted to do all this close quarter shooting.
Like we wanted to put the muzzle
and do all this stuff, close quarter contact stuff.
So we, you know, we went to our VFX guys
and the trick is not so much the muzzle flash,
it's a lighting interaction, especially at night.
And it's cycling the automatic.
Yeah.
Getting it in and having the casing ejection all do,
but it can add up with visual effects costs.
So we went and we found the armors and, you know,
through Terran and the other,
the technologies that we found through the armors,
we made a plug gun.
A plug gun is a gun that has a,
almost a steel rod inside the barrel
and it kicks the gas a different way.
So we still have an ejection, but nothing,
no energy, no flash, no padding or wadding
comes out the barrel.
Like, you know, you, you couldn't put a live round in
and if you tried.
So is it a lower round, a lower level?
It, in England, they use some that are like
almost air contained that can do it.
And us, it's a very, very small charge of black powder.
So it's a very, very, we call them plug guns.
They're very, very limited in, in the grainage.
So it's just enough to cycle the round?
Just enough to cycle it, yep.
And eject it.
With nothing, yeah, ejecting,
but nothing comes out the barrel.
So all that stuff that you see, the blood splatter,
that's all CGI.
The blood is all CGI.
There's one or two instances where it's not,
but most of the blood is,
the blood's so good nowadays digitally,
that it saves so much time
because we don't have to change the wardrobe to get it.
I mean, like, you know, you see in like a Tarantino,
like in Django, Tarantino still uses old school blood packs,
which I, you know, I'm old school, I fucking love that.
I think it's amazing.
But with just the time and, you know,
you see a John Wick movie, it's like, you know,
the reset on 20 stunt guys taking hits,
it'd be a three hour reset to change the wardrobe.
Right.
And headshots, you'd have to put a special head pack on
with a wig and all that stuff.
So we do the blood hits digitally.
The muzzle flashes, we actually shoot against a green screen
and we'll call them elements.
And then we'll plug actual muzzle flashes
back into the movie later on.
So they're not digital per se,
but they are comped in or in a composition.
And that's how we get the cool lighting effect
and keep the cool muzzle flashes.
- How long did it take you to film
that red circle bar scene?
- I think less than four days.
- Really?
- Yeah, we went really fast.
He had the flu, he had like 103 degree fever.
He was going down.
It was a rough day, it was freezing cold in New York.
He had the flu, super high temperature,
and we were just flying through it.
Like literally two, three takes, move on two, three takes.
- Filming it with the flu.
- Wow.
- Yeah, he's a trooper, man.
He's hard to keep down.
- That's incredible.
- Yeah, he's a tough fucker.
- A lot of actors, they have a fucking earache.
They'll call it quits for the day.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- No comment.
- No comment.
- But most of the people we work with, they get it.
And we try to be smart too.
Look, if there's another way, if we could have shut down
and let them, we just, it was like one of those,
we either got to stop or we only get one shot.
And you couldn't afford, and Keanu's that guy too.
You can't, you can't make him.
- Where did you film that?
- It was on New York City.
- But the red circle, where was it?
- It was in this little, it was up in the theater district.
I forget the name of it.
It was a shut down little club that we just kind of opened
back up and put our own, put our own lighting rig in there
and just kind of lit it up.
I mean, if you had seen it in the daytime,
it was all like that shit brown leather.
It looked like you're walking into like a, you know,
big boys or something.
It looked really bad.
That gives credit to John Sella,
the cinematographer on the first one.
We went in, put our lighting grid up,
flashed a lot of big screen, neon lights,
put the extras in funny colors.
And you know, we ran out of money.
So we're like, we didn't,
we didn't know how to put the bad guys in something.
So we're like, okay, what would Star Trek do?
And Star Trek, we always called them the red shirts.
You know, the guys in Star Trek that were always getting killed.
You know, if the dude was right there,
Kirk was transporting down to the planet
with the red shirt guy and that guy was gone.
So we put all our bad guys in the red shirts.
They were just going to kill them all.
I think we had a deal.
There's a local, like one of the garment district things.
I think we got all those red shirts for like 10 bucks.
It was like a whole deal.
So we just bought all the stunt guys red shirts.
But yeah, we did it all in this shitty little club
in like four days, maybe four and a half days, something like that.

How Keanu Reeves Trained for John Wick

- The Joe Rogan experience.
- But that's Keanu, like Keanu brings like,
that's not just John, that's Keanu.
Keanu loves cars, he loves bikes.
He loves the discipline of it.
He loves, like that's why he's got Arch Motorcycles, right?
If you ever get a chance, you should check that shop out.
It's the most pristine.
- I'm sure, I can't fuck with motorcycles.
I'm scared of them.
- Yeah, but to build, just to watch how he's got
all the water cutters there, it's very artistic.
- Oh, the bikes he makes are incredible.
- They're great.
- He brings that to every, like he just, he's very,
not compulsive, he's very, he loves the art of things.
- Ridiculous.
- Yeah, he loves the art of it.
He's fascinated by like, who makes this cup, Joe?
Like how do you, like everything he just fascinated over.
He wants a story on it.
He's one of the most curious, most, I guess,
curious artistically, like how things are done,
who people are.
He's just got a genuine curiosity and love for things.
- He's a very unique guy.
- I think so.
- I've never met him, but just every interview you see
with him every movie, he's a very unusual person.
- Yeah, and he's got, you know what, I think anybody
really artistic, or at least the really, I think,
artistic people that I've met, they maintain that little bit
of, and I mean this in the best of ways,
a little bit of childness wonder.
- Mmm.
- They're still kids a little bit.
Like I could talk to you all day about like archery.
I could talk to you all day about martial arts.
I could talk to you all day about motorcycle.
I could talk to you all day about movies.
And I think that's, you gotta have that.
You need that little inspiration.
I think you need that little bit of wonder,
wonderlust into certain things.
And I think he's still got that.
Like he will still, he'll see a sequence,
we'll come in with the nunchucks and do something,
and he'll start giggling.
He's like, you want me to do that?
He's like, okay, that's pretty cool.
And he just goes from totally serious guy to,
okay, now how do I learn how to do nunchucks?
And he just, everything you need to know about nunchucks,
he wants to know about nunchucks.
He just throws himself into it.
- So how much time did he have to train martial arts
before John Wick won?
- Oh God, it wasn't that.
He was coming out of a couple films,
so he hadn't been, like he wasn't in fight shape.
So, you know, it's just like, you can't just jump back in.
So we gave him like, I think, three to five weeks
with some of the trainers we found to get into shape
to get into shape.
You know, cut weight, got himself back in, stretched.
You know, kind of got back into where he was on the Matrix.
And then we stuck him with the fight teams
and the stunt guys.
I think we had him within three months.
That was probably the shortest one we did.
That was about three months to get him into that shape
and teach him all the, you know,
the Aikido stuff and the Aikijitsu.
- Well, you need so, there's so much going on
in those movies physically that you need to be proficient in.
- Yeah.
- The gun stuff, the throws, Jiu Jitsu, striking, everything.
- The Jiu Jitsu was the new thing for him.
Probably not the most physically demanding,
but you know how it is.
You're used to using your hands and feet.
I mean, I'm sure you remember the first time
you transitioned Jitsu, it's like, it looks easy,
but you're like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah,
completely important. - It's an eye opener.
- Yeah, it really is.
And only, even recently for me,
I'm starting to feel like, oh, I can move.
It feels just as good to be on my back as my butt.
Like, you know.
But I think we took a lot of inspiration from dance.
Like, you know, most of what we do is dance.
They're based on dance drills.
They're not based on martial art drills.
They look like martial arts.
We kick, punch, but we don't train the actors in tie pads
or focus mitts or heavy bag.
We'll do maybe a little of that for impact stuff,
but it's mostly about memory.
Because if a guy can punch and kick, that's great,
but if he can't remember five moves,
you're not much good to us. - Right.
- And it's more, you know, martial arts is action, reaction,
or causing the guy to be off balance.
All our guys are trained to keep him on balance,
to make it look crazy, but they got to dance with him.
So it's about that metronome, keeping the beat going.
So when we trained him, he hadn't been trained that way before.
It was more like memorizing, you know, a few moves,
hitting some guy. - Specific sequence.
- But we realized we had no money and we had no time,
and every time you do punches and kicks,
you see in most movies, right?
Like, they're on you, right, over my shoulder.
Then, you know, you take the hit and it goes over your shoulder
so I can sell the hit.
So you're always doing these reverses.
So if I do a big wide shot profile,
you throw in a nice roundhouse kick.
I got to cut somewhere to show the impact,
unless you're really kicking me,
which is not advisable most of the time.
So every time, the more punching and kicking,
striking you do, or if Keanu's not doing the motion,
I got to cut more.
And every time I cut, it's a setup, it's just time consuming.
Not that it's bad or good, it's just time consuming.
We knew we weren't going to have that,
so we're like, fuck, what do we do?
Okay, well, we're just going to grab people.
We're just going to make it all grappling.
And like, is that going to look, you know,
remember, it's all during the borns,
so everything's going to look very slow,
you know, compared to what it was.
But we're just, we're going to do all great.
We're going to do aikido, aikijutsu, or jiu-jitsu.
That's it. That's all you get.
And if you get a punch, it'll be a contact hit.
That's all we're going to do.
No punches, no kicks, no nothing.
And we'll do it all in one take.
And we're all like, yeah, sounds good.
No one, yeah, we thought it was a complete disaster
after the first two days of shooting the fight scenes.
We're like, this is going to suck.
We're fucked.
Why did you think that, though?
I think it was everyone's mindset.
Like, we did it out of necessity,
and we thought it was cool.
But like, you'd see people that would, where's the kick?
Like, you know, sometimes people would look and go,
well, he's doing the same throw over it.
I mean, Ipan Seinagi looks the same.
But for us, the different grips, the different throw,
it all looks different to me.
Like, I'm a throw, you know, I love judo porn.
I could watch a million different throws.
It's awesome.
For some people, it all looks the same.
They want to see the cool jump, spin, hook, kick
or something like that.
But then we put in the close quarter stuff.
And when you're seeing it, remember,
we don't have the muzzle flashes on.
We don't have the blood splatters.
So you're just kind of seeing, you know,
it looks like they're dancing.
And then you put in the sound effects
and you put in the muzzle,
and then you put in the fucking reload.
And like, now it's making sense.
So what do you, when he's shooting
in the actual filming?
Is he just pulling the trigger
and it's just going click?
Well, see, that's the thing.
Do you have dummy rounds?
When you, when you,
most movies you always see A to B cutting, right?
I'm on you.
You're the guy.
Like, guns into camera.
You fire the blank.
Most firearms up until very recently fire blanks.
And for the people out there,
a blank is around without the actual bullet,
the lead piece that hits.
But a blank still has a gunpowder charge in it.
Say maybe a, you know,
even if it's only 50 grams of black powder,
but at a, at a range of 10 to 15 feet,
that'll still, that can kill you.
Yeah.
With concussive force.
That's, and you hear about all the accidents
that have happened with blanks over the years.
Like you can't put a blank under your head
and pull the trigger, it'd kill you, right?
So we wanted to do all this close quarter shooting.
Like we wanted to put the muzzle
and do all this stuff, close quarter contact stuff.
So we, you know, we went to our VFX guys
and the trick is not so much the muzzle flash,
it's a lighting interaction, especially at night.
And it's cycling the automatic.
Yeah.
Getting it in and having the casing ejection all do,
but it can add up with visual effects costs.
So we went and we found the armors and, you know,
through Terran and the other,
the technologies that we found through the armors,
we made a plug gun.
A plug gun is a gun that has a,
almost a steel rod inside the barrel
and it kicks the gas a different way.
So we still have an ejection, but nothing,
no energy, no flash, no padding or wadding
comes out the barrel.
Like, you know, you, you couldn't put a live round in
and if you tried.
So is it a lower round, a lower level?
It, in England, they use some that are like
almost air contained that can do it.
And us, it's a very, very small charge of black powder.
So it's a very, very, we call them plug guns.
They're very, very limited in, in the grainage.
So it's just enough to cycle the round?
Just enough to cycle it, yep.
And eject it.
With nothing, yeah, ejecting,
but nothing comes out the barrel.
So all that stuff that you see, the blood splatter,
that's all CGI.
The blood is all CGI.
There's one or two instances where it's not,
but most of the blood is,
the blood's so good nowadays digitally,
that it saves so much time
because we don't have to change the wardrobe to get it.
I mean, like, you know, you see in like a Tarantino,
like in Django, Tarantino still uses old school blood packs,
which I, you know, I'm old school, I fucking love that.
I think it's amazing.
But with just the time and, you know,
you see a John Wick movie, it's like, you know,
the reset on 20 stunt guys taking hits,
it'd be a three hour reset to change the wardrobe.
Right.
And headshots, you'd have to put a special head pack on
with a wig and all that stuff.
So we do the blood hits digitally.
The muzzle flashes, we actually shoot against a green screen
and we'll call them elements.
And then we'll plug actual muzzle flashes
back into the movie later on.
So they're not digital per se,
but they are comped in or in a composition.
And that's how we get the cool lighting effect
and keep the cool muzzle flashes.
- How long did it take you to film
that red circle bar scene?
- I think less than four days.
- Really?
- Yeah, we went really fast.
He had the flu, he had like 103 degree fever.
He was going down.
It was a rough day, it was freezing cold in New York.
He had the flu, super high temperature,
and we were just flying through it.
Like literally two, three takes, move on two, three takes.
- Filming it with the flu.
- Wow.
- Yeah, he's a trooper, man.
He's hard to keep down.
- That's incredible.
- Yeah, he's a tough fucker.
- A lot of actors, they have a fucking earache.
They'll call it quits for the day.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- No comment.
- No comment.
- But most of the people we work with, they get it.
And we try to be smart too.
Look, if there's another way, if we could have shut down
and let them, we just, it was like one of those,
we either got to stop or we only get one shot.
And you couldn't afford, and Keanu's that guy too.
You can't, you can't make him.
- Where did you film that?
- It was on New York City.
- But the red circle, where was it?
- It was in this little, it was up in the theater district.
I forget the name of it.
It was a shut down little club that we just kind of opened
back up and put our own, put our own lighting rig in there
and just kind of lit it up.
I mean, if you had seen it in the daytime,
it was all like that shit brown leather.
It looked like you're walking into like a, you know,
big boys or something.
It looked really bad.
That gives credit to John Sella,
the cinematographer on the first one.
We went in, put our lighting grid up,
flashed a lot of big screen, neon lights,
put the extras in funny colors.
And you know, we ran out of money.
So we're like, we didn't,
we didn't know how to put the bad guys in som