Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1995 - Chad Stahelski
Uploaded: 2023-06-07T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1995 - Chad Stahelski' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-06-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1995 - Chad Stahelski' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-06-07. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1995 - Chad Stahelski

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Yeah, Chad, just get, take, oh.
Is that how I'm going to start the show?
Take a hit of that, we'll start the show.
Just get in there.
Oh, jeez.
And that's, that's not even a fresh one.
Okay.
When they're fresh, they're brutal.
I just wanted to do it twice to make sure that was real.
Shout out to, how do you say his name?
Jujumufu.
Jujumufu.
Smelling salts.
It's fresh.
If it's fresh, you get like that close.
And you're just like.
Yeah, no, I'm awake.
That was a good one though.
I'm definitely awake.
I'm going to bring these to the comedy mothership.
I'm going to see.
I'm going to see.
I'm going to take a big blast right before I go on stage.
It's supposed to wake up your central nervous system or something.
I don't even know if there's any science to it.
No, it just sucks.
It might be just a bunch of psychos who just like freaking their.
Brain out with smelling salts.
I'm awake.
Anyway, man, congrats on the movie.
Looks awesome.
Thank you very much.
It's very exciting.
Very nice to be here.
Big fan.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
It's a boy.
Jesus Christ is it over the top.
Way over the top.
I saw a thing online of the amount of people that John Wick has killed compared
to like Michael
Myers and Jason.
Oh, yeah.
I think we beat Rambo too.
I think you beat everybody.
But I think we had more deaths than Keanu spoke words in the movie.
Oh, for sure.
A hundred percent.
What everybody's bringing up to me.
I think he spoke 308 words in the movie or something.
Yeah.
Well, listen, it works.
It's perfect.
Yeah.
Something fun.
Something for the guys.
Yeah.
And the action fans and everybody out there.
Oh, yeah.
It's murder porn.
Hopefully it's artistic murder porn.
It's artistic.
It is.
It's interesting how they're all so different too.
Like the fourth one is like almost like a comic book movie.
It's like it's so over the top and crazy.
Graphic anime.
I think it's probably the best story that we've told.
But it's definitely wrapped up in the hyper real world.
You know, we get bored.
So we wanted to go somewhere and do something.
And it's always like how do we start these things?
What do we do?
Like we never start with a concept, right?
It's usually we're done.
We're done.
We're never going to do one again.
And then Japan gets released like six months after the rest of the world.
So we're usually doing a press tour in Japan.
And we're sitting in the Imperial Hotel.
They have an amazing scotch bar.
And we start off with the first drink on.
Thank God it's done.
God we survived.
And by like the fifth scotch, we're like, hey, man, I got a great fucking idea.
Let's have them fight ninjas.
And then that's how it starts.
And it's been that way for the last three.
So you started off as a stuntman.
Yeah.
And how did you transition to becoming a director?
Because that's like there's got to be a lot of barriers that are in the way.
I think different time for sure.
You know, before cell phones, before all that stuff.
We started as a stunt guy, before all the streamers.
You know, I was working for this guy Ernie Ersadi way back in the day.
Brilliant stunt coordinator, second unit director on television.
And I was working on, I don't know if you remember the old show, like Pretender.
With Michael T. Weiss.
Sure, yeah.
He could be anything.
That kind of thing.
And I was doing a gig on that.
I had just done a car hit.
I think I was on like 24.
I split my head off on the windshield.
I was a mess.
And then he comes to me as I'm holding the ice pack on my head.
He's like, hey, they're having auditions for this sci-fi film in Burbank.
You're like, you know, you're off.
You can, if you hurry, you can make it.
And I'm in jeans and a t-shirt and I'm bleeding.
And I'm like, all right.
Yeah, sure, I'll go make it.
It's for that Keanu Reeves guy.
You know, Speed had come out.
I'm like, Keanu Reeves?
I'll go see him, sure.
So you go up there and it was an audition for The Matrix.
And, you know, at the time, you remember, back in the day, there weren't a lot
of martial
art movies at a big budget level.
It was like Steven Seagal or Van Damme or, you know, Mark Dacoskis, all those
guys at the
time.
And martial arts, you know, they didn't do them in big budget films.
It was considered low budget, you know, action porn kind of thing.
And we get there, you get to this big warehouse in Burbank, and you saw this
guy really scruffy
looking with a neck brace, you know, punch.
And it's Keanu.
He had just come out from neck surgery.
Oh, Jesus.
And there's like 15 Hong Kong and Chinese stuntmen there screaming and yelling.
And I said, hey, I'm here for the audition.
And I meet these two fellows that come over, and it's the Wachowskis at the
time, now Lana
and Lily.
And they introduced themselves and were like, hey, you know, I'm Chad.
I'm here for the audition.
Okay, great.
This is Yung Wu Ping.
And I was like, oh, no one told her.
And Yung Wu Ping, we knew from, was the big choreographer that started Jet Li
and Jackie
Chan.
Did like Iron Monkey.
Oh, wow.
Once upon a time in China and all that stuff.
So it was Yung Wu Ping and his guys.
And they're like, okay, you just, you just follow this guy.
And this little guy named Tiger Chen.
Tiger Chen.
Fucking phenomenal.
Guy could do triple flip, twist.
Just could do anything.
A Wushu champion.
Just follow that guy.
Just do what he does.
And for the next hour, I tried, you know, being the tall white guy, trying to
just keep
up with him.
Can you do all that stuff?
God, no.
God.
I just do as much as I could until I fell down.
But I was pretty flexible.
I had a good gymnastic background.
So I'd throw a backflip.
I'd do the kicks.
I'd do all the spin hook kicks.
And, you know, we'd train with a lot of Taekwondo guys and stuff.
So we were pretty good at all the kicking and punching and some of the acrobatics.
But then it got to a level.
He picks up a stick.
And now it's, you know, you've seen the Wushu guys.
Yeah.
They're going mental.
And I'm like, oh, boy.
You know, at the end of an hour, you know, I'm in jeans and a T-shirt still
bleeding from
a head wound.
Oh, Jesus.
Did you have a concussion?
I probably, yeah.
I think so.
Knowing now, looking back, like, yeah, it didn't seem too good.
But I finished, drove home, thought, wow, I really screwed the pooch on that
one.
I never thought I'd hear from those guys again.
And then, like, a month later, I got called, hey, can you come back?
An exact same audition again.
Exact same.
And then got the call saying, hey, would you like to double Keanu Reeves on
this sci-fi
movie in Australia?
And I was like, ah, yeah, I got this other gig on TV I think I'm going to have
to pass.
And the producer at the time was Barry Osborne, who went on to do all the Lord
of the Rings.
And he was like, ah, he's kind of a little angry.
I mean, saying no.
And I thought, okay, if I fuck that up, I'll never work again.
And then cut to two months later, it was in February, and he calls back, he's
like, hey,
we had to push the shoot.
Are you available now?
I was like, yeah, actually, I am.
So I literally flew to Australia, like, two weeks later, got there.
And within a day, you realized, oh, this wasn't, this isn't a normal show.
You saw the rehearsals.
You saw some of the sets.
You saw some of the footage.
And it was the fucking Matrix.
Oh, wow.
So that's how we got in, how I got in with the Wachowskis.
And I spent the next eight and a half years with them.
Through all the Matrix sequels and some of their other shows and with James Viteague
doing
V for Vendetta.
I just lived in the Wachowski world.
And that's probably one of the most incredible film schools you'll ever have.
That's where I got to know Keanu and all that.
Cut to years later after all that, Keanu and I had worked together for so long
there.
He knew I had been doing a lot of second unit directing, which for people that
don't know,
it's the action or the fight scenes, the car chases, the sunsets, all the shit
first unit
doesn't want to deal with, usually big action sequences.
So they have these action directors or second unit guys go out and do the units,
trying
to do it more efficiently without the cast, with the stunt doubles and such.
And Keanu had gotten this script that he thought was something interesting
about it.
It was called Scorn.
And it was the original John Wick script.
How did it become called John Wick?
Derek Colstead's grandfather's name is John Wick.
Derek Colstead being the writer of it.
So he just gave tribute to his grandfather, called him Wick, John Wick.
Oh, wow.
Pretty trippy, yeah.
And so how did that become the name of the movie?
Keanu, at the original script Scorn, the guy was like 65.
He lived in a little brown, so it was very, very grounded script.
I think only two people died in the original script.
It was like one to the car crash.
That's hilarious.
Yeah, it was just very, it was kind of, it was very Cold War, old school.
And that's where the gold coins came from, because you didn't want to leave a
paper trail.
It had very simple little ideas.
Oh, wow.
And he handed it to myself and was like, hey, would you like to take a look at
this?
And I was like, sure, sure, sure.
I read it and I was like, yeah, I don't know what to do with this action-wise.
He only kills two people.
He's like, well, we're trying to change it and we're thinking of this.
I'm like, well, you know, he's like, would you like to direct it?
I was like, whoa.
Yes, as a matter of fact.
So you had no experience directing and then you direct John Wick?
Yeah, just second unit.
Dude.
Me and my partner at the time, Dave Leach, I called Dave, that was on a Friday,
I called Dave on a Saturday going, hey, we might have a shot.
We got to put a pitch together in 24 hours.
So I always had this idea about Greek mythology and how we could layer it and
do this like, I'm a big Tolkien fan.
So how do you take a fantasy gig and make it modern day?
So we're like, let's take it that way and we'll put gods and Greeks and Sharon
and the river Styx and we'll make this whole Zeus thing going on.
And we kind of layered it and Keanu just heard it on Monday and went, hmm,
interesting.
And he said, sure, you want to do it?
I'm like, yeah, you know, me and my partner Dave, but we'll co-direct, we'll do
this.
And we got it to the producer, Basil Ionic, the next day.
And he goes, well, Keanu, why don't you?
Sure.
We had done a little tape on that Sunday about, you know, the gunfu stuff.
We took Aikido, Aikijutsu, put it while the close quarter tactical shit with
some reloads.
And we did a quick little previs in our space 8711 back in LA and showed it to
him.
Everybody thought, oh my God, this is going to be, you know, great.
Can Keanu do it?
We're like, yeah, I hope so.
Where did the magazine reload flip come from?
That funny thing that I'm going to give total cred to Keanu.
Wow.
100%.
He started doing that in the second one.
I'm like, dude, what are you doing?
And he's like, yeah, I'm going to check it out.
Fuck.
He started doing it.
I was like, that's awesome.
It is awesome.
People do that now.
Yeah, it's a legit thing.
They're doing competition.
You know how crazy that is?
That an actor for a film decides to come up with a thing and it's actually a
quicker way to eject a magazine.
He can do forehand and backhand.
He does it with the AR too.
Like you're watching the second one.
They do a quick flip with the AR and he'll put it on.
You're like, where the fuck did he get that?
Well, he really, really trained for that movie.
That's him.
I mean, you can really tell.
I mean, there's films where guys do tactical scenes where you go like, okay,
you know, I can buy it.
But in that movie.
The typical military way of cutting through, you know, pieing the corners and
down on stuff.
The very tactical sense.
I think you're right.
I see that.
It's just, it's like with martial arts.
You can do the quick finger jab in the eye, right?
Right.
Once in a 