How To Shoot Action: John Wick 4

INTRODUCTION

The first thing that I thought about while watching the fight scenes in the new John Wick movie, was another fight scene in Oldboy. And it’s not only because of the great action choreography.

Both movies use cinematography in a very deliberate way to enhance these fight scenes. Through the use of wide shot sizes, vividly saturated lighting and a smoothly moving camera.

So, let’s break down how cameras, lights and grips were used to elevate action scenes in John Wick: Chapter 4.

APPROACHES TO SHOOTING ACTION

Watching this movie got me thinking about the different ways that fight scenes can be presented by filmmakers. I think a large part of how we as an audience interpret or get involved in these scenes comes down to the kind of visual style in the cinematography.

There are basically two directions that filmmakers can go in when shooting action: one is more realistic, immersive and first-person, the other approach is more elevated, observational and third-person.

John Wick very much falls into the second camp. The fight scenes are larger than life and something of a spectacle. Somewhere in between semi-reality and a comic book world. 

This look is in a large part created by three aspects of the cinematography: the shot sizes used, the lighting and the camera movement. Lots of slower cutting wide shots are used. The lighting is hard and vividly colourful. And the camera moves are smooth.

Compare this to a fight scene in The Bourne Identity. There are lots of quick cutting close ups. The lighting is softer, more motivated and naturalistic. And the camera moves are rough and handheld.  

To me, this way of shooting feels much more like the audience is being forced into the more realistic perspective of the main character. 

While this way of shooting feels like the audience is being invited to sit back and enjoy a heightened, action packed spectacle.

Of course, this isn’t a hard and fast rule that has to apply to each and every fight scene in a movie. For example, Oldboy has one long-take fight scene that feels almost like you are watching a video game from a wide, 3rd person perspective. 

And, it has another fight scene where the perspective shifts to first person, includes POV shots, and covers the scene with close ups, quicker cuts and a rougher camera movement.

SHOT SIZE

Part of what makes the fight scenes in John Wick impressive from a technical perspective is that they often play out in wider shot sizes, with slower cutting. This relies on the performances of the stunts by the actors to be at a high level, rather than getting stunt doubles to do the action and using lots of quick cutting to break each stunt down shot by shot.

Cinematographer Dan Laustsen enhanced this feeling of width through his camera selection.

“I think that is the goal or the key. To shoot it wide and beautiful. As wide as we can.” - Dan Laustsen

The previous John Wick movies had been shot on Super 35 cameras with Master Anamorphic lenses. One way to pull off an even wider look is to shoot on a camera with a larger sensor - the Arri Alexa LF. 

The bigger the sensor is the wider the field of view that it is able to capture. However, they ran into a snag. Previously you could either choose to shoot with a large format camera and spherical lenses, then crop to widescreen in post, or you could shoot with a Super 35 size sensor with anamorphic lenses that natively creates a widescreen aspect ratio.

To overcome this issue, they turned to Arri, who had recently developed a set of anamorphic lenses which were able to cover large format sensors. These lenses are called the Arri Large Format Anamorphics, or ALFAs. 

This gave them the combination of a large format wide field of view and the anamorphic look - all in one. These were used to shoot 95% of the movie.

Since the widest ALFA lens is a 32mm, the remaining 5% was mainly made up of super wide angle shots using spherical Signature Prime lenses - probably with a 12mm. You can tell which are the spherical lens shots in the movie because of their almost fish eye look and round bokeh, while the ALFAs have oval bokeh. 

“We also shoot wide so Keanu could do what Keanu had to do. And then getting into the close ups for whatever reason super fast because Keanu is running out of speed, of course, because he’s not a stunt guy.” - Dan Laustsen

So, they mainly used wide focal length lenses to capture the stunt scenes in two or three full takes of wide shots. Then used long focal length lenses mainly for close ups during dialogue scenes, not really using many focal lengths in between.

LIGHTING

Another large part of what elevates the John Wick movies from reality, and places them in an exaggerated, comic book like world is due to the lighting.

Laustsen is known for lighting with exaggerated colours, often mixing steel blue, cyan, or green tones, with warmer light. In fact it was partly his use of colour in Crimson Peak that won him the job to shoot the franchise with the director.

“I think he loved Crimson Peak because he loved the colours. We talked a lot about colour. He really likes colour. You know, he loved this heavy world.”  - Dan Laustsen

This coloured lighting, that lifted the story out of the normal, realistic world, was created in two ways. Firstly, with practical lighting and secondly by using film lights.

Practical lights are sources that are included in the frame of the shot. These were normally built into the sets themselves using different coloured strips of LEDs. Or, in this movie, they were done by rigging hundreds of RGB Astera Titan Tubes across the set, which were placed inside fluorescent housings. 

These fixtures could then be wirelessly controlled through a DMX board to tweak their brightness or colour.

Often these tubes would be set to a colour that contrasted with the colour of the key light. For example if the key was set to a cyan-green, then the practical tubes could be set to an orangey-red. This not only creates a vivid, exaggerated, colourful palette, but it also separates the background from the foreground.

These practicals also served an extremely important practical purpose - they could be seen in the shot. This is especially necessary for the kind of super wide shot sizes they were shooting, where the camera saw everything. Like this scene, where they rigged these practicals next to the canal for an incredible 2km. 

When you’re shooting in such an enormous space at night, there is little to no place to hide film lights anywhere near the actors without them being seen.

“You know, that is my goal with lighting all the time. I want to have the light as far away as possible. Of course if you do a close up of something I have light close to the camera but normally all my light is far, far, far away.” - Dan Laustsen

The further that you place a light source from an actor, the less effect that light will have. The only way to counteract this is by having stronger sources of light that compensate for the light lost through distance. This means either hiring higher output sources, or increasing the amount of sources - which, either way, is an expensive endeavour.

The wider you want your night exterior shots to be, the more difficult and expensive it becomes to light.

They also shot basically everything at night - even the day interiors and a scene that was meant to take place at dawn. This is because it was the only way to control the level of ambient sunlight and maintain the kind of strong, hard, consistent light for long periods of time without competing with sunlight - which would have overpowered the film lights.

His team either lit the scenes with very high output, hard sources, like T12 or T24 tungsten units. Or they used loads - and by loads I mean like 85 units - of lower output, RGB LED Creamsource Vortex 8s. These gave an even spread of RGB light and were also water resistant - which was very necessary for certain scenes with lots of water.    

CAMERA MOVEMENT

The camera movement generally tracks the action of the choreography with slow, fluid, smooth movement. 

The technical team pulled out almost every piece of gear they could to do this in a variety of different situations: from a drone, to a Spidercam, to a Technocrane. For example, this long take, top-down God’s eye view shot meant rigging a line with a Spidercam, that could move the camera precisely above the large set. 

However, the two main tools that they used to move the camera for the fight sequences were a Steadicam and a dolly - with A-cam on dolly and B-cam on a Steadicam AR.

The AR allows operators to quickly change from high mode to low mode, while keeping the camera completely stabilised. 

Shooting from a Steadicam meant that they could get smooth, flowing movement that followed the action, but which also allowed the operator to be flexible and adjust their movements to the movements of the actors. 

Because the fight scenes were not easy on the actors, they didn’t want to have to do more takes than were necessary. Therefore, the whole movie was shot at quite a deep stop of T/4, which gave the focus puller a little bit of leeway for the difficult, fast moving action scenes.

Because of the speed of the scenes, the 1st AC also chose to often pull focus by judging distance by eye. Since it’s easier to pre-empt where the actors, and therefore the focus, needs to be when you are watching their movements as opposed to watching on the monitor. 

CONCLUSION

John Wick 4 is a great example of how action and the world of the story can be made to feel more elevated due to the cinematic choices made by the filmmakers.

 All three elements of wide shots, vibrant, colourful lighting and fluid movement combined to make the action scenes in John Wick feel like an entertaining, extravagant spectacle.