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Ballerina Director On How He Approached The Action Scenes

Ballerina director Len Wiseman discusses how he approached the action scenes to add his own spin while making them authentic to the John Wick universe.

From The World of John Wick: Ballerina is finally coming out this June, and while we still have a pretty significant wait until the film is released, you know that Lionsgate will be pushing this one hard. After The Continental didn't do that well over on TV, this is the thing that has to prove people are interested in the world of John Wick without Keanu Reeves as the star. There has also already been some drama about this one, too, as rumors were that this film was in trouble, and that was why it needed reshoots. Still, it's unclear at this time if the reshoots were improving something already solid or trying to save something from a tailspin.

Either way, the teases of action we've seen in this movie look pretty cool. It's always good to see actions where the fact that a woman is the one fighting is taken into account. Collider recently interviewed director Len Wiseman, and he was asked about his approach to crafting the action scenes for Ballerina as he needed to do something unique while also making it feel authentic to the world this film is joining. It turns out he did what most people would do if they were given the chance to jump on a project like this; he did what he would want to see as a fan himself.

"The way that I approach it, really, is coming at it from love and being a fan of the series myself," Wiseman explained. "So I really go into as, 'What would I want to see if I wasn't directing it?' Because you can get caught up in your head a lot if you really start to try and guess what other people might want from it. The starting point for me is, 'What would I love to see, being such a fan and loving the movies? What would I want to see? What would I be expecting?' I come at it that way and then just start to build and have fun. I love creating action sequences and the ideas behind them, so I just start workshopping a lot of those things into the world. But I really, not from a selfish point of view, but I just go, 'What would I love to see? What would I love to sit down in a theater and see if I was watching something tie into this world?'"

From the first John Wick movie to the last one, the movies have always used the locations to their advantage. We saw that from the first gunfight in the first movie to the fight on the stairs in the fourth film. So you know that Ballerina would have fights going down in new and interesting places, and Wiseman needed to craft coherent and badass action scenes. It's a process that requires many moving parts, and Wiseman specifically cited a restaurant scene because it was "just because it was so close quarters. There was a lot of choreography within a small space. I fell in love with this location that I found that's more of a tavern — you see bits of it in the trailer. It was so complicated just because it was so narrow with low ceilings, so it became more dangerous because we wanted it to be so violent and not be restricted by anything. For me directing, that was hard to work out the space."

All you need to do is watch an action movie where your eye can't follow the lead and where they are in the middle of the scene to see how action can go so wrong when done poorly. It can be difficult to choreograph those scenes when you have huge open spaces, but it gets even harder with smaller ones because you not only have a smaller space, but you also have to make sure you don't accidentally make the space look bigger or smaller than it actually is. Provided it's the scene I'm thinking of, we've seen some teases of this tavern fight for Ballerina, and it looks awesome — fingers crossed they nail it this time.

Ballerina Is The First Big Screen Spin-Off Of John Wick

It's still a little amazing that John Wick, the action movie in 2014 where the only real notable thing about it was that they managed to snag Reeves as its leading man, has turned into the franchise juggernaut it is today. That is what happens when you have good people working on a film from the beginning because it would have been easy for John Wick to fade into obscurity with a ton of other disposable action movies. However, the creative team of director Chad Stahelski and screenwriter Derek Kolstad took the time to build a fascinating world around that action movie. The world of John Wick is the thing that everyone fell in love with on top of the fact that Reeves is the best at this.

So it wasn't surprising that a sequel was greenlit, and it was even less surprising that in 2017, it was announced that a spin-off film and television show were in the works. The Continental focused on the hotel that plays a central part in the assassin world that John Wick moves in, and Ballerina will be something different. Len Wiseman was brought on to direct, with Wiseman & Shay Hatten, and Emerald Fennell working on the screenplay. Hatten also has a story credit. The cast includes de Armas and returning John Wick players Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, Anjelica Huston, and Lance Reddick. We also have some new faces, including Norman Reedus, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Gabriel Byrne. A brief summary has been released, "Taking place during the events of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, the film follows Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas), who is beginning her training in the assassin traditions of the Ruska Roma." From The World of John Wick: Ballerina is set to be released on June 6, 2025.

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