David Leitch Said That the First Time He Read the Script, He Thought of Bruce Willis to Play the Assassin.
The first John Wick movie is celebrating 10 years of its release and one of its directors, David Leitch, said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that Keanu Reeves was not considered for the lead role, instead, Bruce Willis would be the one who would become the iconic revenge-seeking assassin.
According to him, the script for the story was written by Derek Kolstad, which was titled Scorn, but, was based on the novel John Wick written by Basil Iwanyk.
“We first learned about the script through our manager at the time, Kelly McCormick, who is now my wife and producer. She had introduced us to Basil Iwanyk and Peter Lawson at Basil’s company [Thunder Road] to maybe do some second unit work on that script. So that was the first time we read it, and I think Bruce Willis might have been involved at that point,” he recounted.
However, it is known that Reeves was aware of the plans to bring this story to the big screen, as months earlier the artist’s agent called him to see if he had something he could act in, so after thinking about it, he accepted the project and Derek Kolstad went to the action star’s house for several months to work on the plot, especially since the character was initially over 70 years old.
“He read the script on a Friday, in 90 minutes, and said, ‘I want to do it.’ At that point, before I met him and really clicked with him, I said, ‘Yeah, I really want to do it too.’ He got his paws on the script and made it his own. The first thing Keanu said to me was, ‘Okay, Derek, I’m going to make it 35′. And I could only affirm, ‘Okay,’” the screenwriter said in an interview.
Later, when the role was more than his, the artist came up with the idea of calling directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski, to take the project, so Bruce Willis was discarded practically immediately.
The complicated filming of “John Wick”.
In the interview with The Hollywood Reporter David Leitch also told that they faced several obstacles during the shooting, mainly money. Keanu Reeves had to give up a portion of his salary to make expenses go down considerably, while Leitch and Stahelski had to split the Directors Guild of America (DGA) fee.
It seemed that these cuts would not be enough, as the film was in danger of being cancelled due to lack of financing. To the good fortune of those involved in John Wick, Eva Longoria prevented the whole thing from ending in disaster. The actress covered the shortfall of USD 6 million dollars so that filming could continue.
But that wasn’t the only bad news for Leitch. The DGA itself refused to officially recognize him as co-director. Instead, he was given producer credit, and Stahelski received full credit for directing.
“We felt very cheated. We were both senior members of the DGA, and we were told we could co-direct: ‘You have our blessing. We’ll send people and blah, blah, blah.’ ‘ When we talked to them again, they said, ‘We went over it and you guys don’t have a history of working together enough. So you guys will have to decide who did it,’” he recounted.
Finally, David Leitch assured that John Wick was not only his directorial debut, but also a milestone in his career, since at first he thought the public would have no interest in going to theaters to see this story: “We thought nobody was ever going to see it. But then Fantastic Fest blew it up and genre fans got it. So it was a really great year between getting married and having a movie that people really responded to. Now it’s spawned a whole world and a franchise,” he noted.