Yahoo News Curious About The ‘John Wick’ Prequel Series ‘The Continental?’ Albert Hughes Directed Two Eps & Spills What We Can Expect As Producer Basil Iwanyk Teases Keanu Reeves-Chad Stahelski Return
EXCLUSIVE: While the title character ended John Wick: Chapter 4 under a headstone, the John Wick franchise is alive and kicking for Lionsgate. This week, Lionsgate brass got a first look at Ballerina, its Len Wiseman-helmed spinoff film that stars Ana de Armas and brings back Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, the late Lance Reddick and Anjelica Huston. The big question is, after the last film grossed over $400 million on a $90 million budget, what right minded studio would retire a franchise that just turned in its highest gross and best reviews?
Basil Iwanyk has produced the series since the beginning, and he told Deadline that a lot more will be known by September. That’s when director Chad Stahelski and star Keanu Reeves head to Japan where, Iwanyk said, they will split a couple bottles of whiskey. “Once they get through their hangovers, if Keanu and Chad have figured out something cool, if they’ve an organic way back in that doesn’t feel like bullshit, then there will be a John Wick 5. That trip to Japan, it’s like waiting for a boat to emerge out of the smoke, but that’s the impetus. These movies are really hard for Keanu and Chad, and everybody. By the time each one is over, most involved have said, never again, this is too hard and we’re not getting any younger. Then time goes by, you see it embraced by fans, and after working together every year for 11 years, it’s become a family and in some demented way, and we miss each other. But I totally defer to Chad and Keanu to figure out what and if that story is.”
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The same month Stahelski and Reeves will be imbibing in Japan, we’ll see the Peacock release of The Continental, the three-episode prequel that focuses on the Gotham-based hotel that is a fulcrum for the crime syndicate Wick is a reluctant part of. The series is set in the ‘70s, and focuses on the origins of McShane’s Winston and Reddick’s Charon, his right hand man. The hotel is run by Cormac, an insecure and psychotic caretaker whose tenuous hold over the hotel causes him to do frightful things. Presiding over all this is Albert Hughes, who directed the first and third of the action packed episodes (Lord of the Rings’ Charlotte Brandstrom directed the middle ep). Hughes, long half of The Hughes Brothers, continues on a solo track after decades co-directing with twin brother Allen that brought The Book Of Eli, Menace II Society, From Hell, and Dead Presidents. It has been five years since his first solo outing as director, the prehistoric drama Alpha. Iwanyk said Hughes was exactly what the series needed.
“The challenge of doing a TV show from John Wick is, people think this is based on some underlying IP,” he said. “It’s an original idea that was never meant to be a franchise, and we’ve been making it up as we’ve gone along. The issue we had with television was, how are we going to create a John Wick offshoot without cannibalizing ourselves or feeling like we’ve stripped mined the franchise. Also, the action in the movie just got so big, we shot up half of Paris in the last one. How do you compete with that?
“Our showrunners came in with the idea of the prequel, for Winston and the start of The Continental,” he said. “I love the film aesthetic of New York in the ‘70s; Sidney Lumet is one of my three favorite directors of all time. What a genius idea of doing a prequel because, as we expand the current day Wick franchise, it all feeds the prequel, it doesn’t take storylines away from the TV show. The more good characters we come up with for The Ballerina, or whatever spinoffs we come up with, it’s more material for the prequel to grow. It was so different than anything we have had in the Wick world.
“I’ve wanted to be in business with Albert a very long time, and he passed on everything I’ve ever given him, and I don’t know that he even read 2/3 of them. Just, ‘nope, I’m good.’ He’s an idiosyncratic guy who does what he wants, when he wants. I’ve always admired those movies, great style and point of view, swagger, emotion and heart. I always felt I was watching a real filmmaker. You think about the Wick world, it’s muscular and a lot of swagger, but it’s heart and emotion. We felt Albert would be perfect. An underappreciated art of casting the director is casting the person. Chad is an incredible director, and we needed someone to come in who had enough confidence in himself that he would leave his mark and not be subsumed by the franchise. Or be afraid of the challenge of the budget, period and comparisons to the movie. That’s Albert. He’d said he had been offered these things about race relations, dirty cops, corruption. I was glad when he said, I just want to do something fun and twisted that pushes the envelope. And the series came out nuts, in the best possible way. I’d get texts from him, ‘I can’t believe you’re letting me do this.’ But that’s the great thing about the Wick world. There’s no text to adhere to, the crazier and more absurdist it is, the better for the franchise.
DEADLINE: When you are making a prequel based on the hotel in the John Wick films, what were the constants you had to have to create connective tissue to those movies?
ALBERT HUGHES: I just love what Chad Stahelski did with those movies, the way they looked. It’s not necessarily the kind of style I would do, but I love watching someone do that stuff. Noir, Greek mythology, and he’s very much influenced by Bob Fosse dance movies. He talked to me about his influences when I got asked to do this by the producers. I said, what do you guys want from this? Give me three things. One was to open up more of the mythology but keep it grounded. Chad was very supportive and said, do your own thing, make it yours. I got to reverse engineer the John Wick movies, and make them more gritty because we’re in the ‘70s, in the middle of a sanitation strike.
Then it became what do I have that’s mine, that I can bring like Chad brought to the movies, with all that gun-fu, stunt background and visual flair? I started with, I love ‘70s music and got to explore the two sides of my culture. I grew up in a house with a white mother, and a black father. He’s playing James Brown and Parliament, and she’s playing Jimi Hendrix, Credence and Pink Floyd. I got a wonderfully done script and completely connected with Kirk Ward. We are same age and geeked out on the same commercials and music.
I come from a past of doing needle drops, my brother and I do it all the time. And I go, okay, this is gonna be fun. And then we got to doing it. And it turned out at the time of my life, it, it was the most fun because there was no social app. The John Wick films had their hyper-stylized impressionist take on New York. We brought our own with a ‘70s feel. For me, the industry, the world, everybody was feeling angsty after Covid, looking for escapism. I wanted an escape, and this was it.
DEADLINE: No Keanu Reeves here. Your way in is Winston, Ian McShane’s character played in younger years by Colin Woodell. And Charon, the role played by the late Lance Reddick in the four films, and here by Ayomide Adegun. The Continental is run by Cormac, with an intense perormane by Mel Gibson, who proves he is not above chewing the scenery.
HUGHES: Winston had been established by the writers before I came on. It was a good take, we see how Winston and Charon became who they are, and how their weird, mysterious partnership formed. As it hashed out in drafts, it was the old 48 Hours or The Defiant Ones, the Black and White guy partnership with two cultures coming together. What was also interesting about the script was a multicultural feel that wasn’t cynical. You’ve got powerful women of different ethnic backgrounds, and that’s what’s great about New York. Chad did this in the films. They’ll have a non-binary character, an Asian character, a Black character, a powerful female, and they’re all in this world of baddies. It becomes by degrees how bad they are to determine who is our true protagonist.
DEADLINE: Mel Gibson’s character lacks the decorum and discipline Winston brought to the hitman hotel in the movies, to understate it.
HUGHES: The showrunner Kirk Ward and I talked in detail about it. Kirk is a massive action movie fan, and his references are 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, The Warriors, stuff like that. With Mel, Kirk and I decided he should be a little shabby on the edges. His organization skills aren’t as tight as Winston’s are later on. It feels a little cheap. Then I started coming up with my own motivations for the character, that was a cross between Joel Silver and Donald Trump. I would tell Mel little things along the way, but what I really told him was, go big. Chew up the scenery if you want. John Wick films do that. He was like, oh, really? Really? I can do that [laughs]. He’s done such grand parts in the past that are very explosive, but he’s highly intelligent and he does these little minute brush strokes. By the end, it was exactly what I wanted it to be, and he did it in this very deliberate and artistic way.
DEADLINE: Had you worked with Kirk Ward before?
HUGHES: No, but he’s like the third Hughes Brother. We have a connection that is pretty hilarious. He came to Hollywood in the nineties, and he was parking cars at the Beverly Hills Hotel. One day me and my brother pull up and by then we’re, we made it, and he’s parking our car. He’s sees TVs in the car and says, you mind if I watch? I said, go ahead man, we’ll be right back. He jumps in and watches Goodfallas or something, and we come out and he’s getting cursed out by his boss for being in the Hughes Brothers truck.
DEADLINE: From your last film Alpha to films like Book of Eli and others, you and your brother Allen created worlds. What’s the appeal and challenge of re-imagining New York in the grimy ‘70s?
HUGHES: Our past movies, the only one that took place in a contemporary time was our first one, Menace II Society. Otherwise it’s been prehistoric, or 1880s London, or post-apocalypse. John Wick was all world building. It felt like somehow contemporary, but they were not hampered by the past. Like that wonderful thing with those women in the mail room, typing out murder contracts. The challenge is, you are shooting in another country, not in New York, for this hyper stylized, impressionistic take on New York. Last thing I would want New Yorkers to do is say, that doesn’t look like a New York. But it’s not really supposed to. It’s supposed to be this kind of combination of influences you know, down to Easter Eggs from my favorite seventies movies that are all in there.
DEADLINE: The John Wick films had very distinctive style. Different from those great Hong Kong kung fu movies, where you could see how the moves choreographed. John Wick was more fluid, almost hypnotic and then you say, did John Wick just kill 200 people there? How do you live up to expectations?
HUGHES: Yeah, you have to give it to them, you have to do the fan service, you know? What is great is that Chad Stahelski and David Leitch have this company 87Eleven, and it’s a think tank on how to do these sequences. They do this stunt vis, as they call it, bring it to you and you make adjustments. But it’s all that same DNA. The difference between a TV series and the movies is you have two hours plus to tell one story, but in television, which felt refreshing to me, you have a longer story arc and more characters. But you can’t just go wall to wall John Wick style. Also, not everybody’s John Wick, he’s a singular character.
So what kind of fighting styles do all these people have? This one’s into guns, this one, karate. This one has a kung fu style. They’re very much different but of the same world and it is really crucial we service the fans. Early on, there’s an opening sequence that is Kirk and I nodding to the fans, don’t worry, we got you. And we weave it in, throughout.
DEADLINE: In the most recent John Wick film, Lance Reddick’s Charon told John Wick he treated the hitman well to atone for the terrible things he did. We haven’t yet seen that part of Charon, but it is a piece of subtle mythology there for the taking. Presumably this three episode series arc leaves open the possibility for more of Winston and the hotel’s formative years. What kind of seeds did you drop along the way?
HUGHES: There are Easter eggs and nods to the future. These actors start playing, and they make great ad libs. One would say, I just saw John Wick 2 and this character said this. So can we try this? Sure. Try it on the next take. It was a fun and playful thing to do when you have four films out there and you can reverse and pull from lines of dialogue, articles of clothing or props. You put them in for the fans, and there are a lot of die hard Wick fans, both men and women. I was surprised to see women make up a large part of the fan base. Some of the Easter eggs are more apparent and some are buried pretty well.
DEADLINE: You moved out of the US and after directing Alpha, you took a break…
HUGHES: I live in Prague. But my brother and I never did one movie after another. I did Alpha, which was a big movie, and the limited series The Good Lord Bird. It was fun to work on but dealt with trauma. I got to the point where I said, I just want to have fun. Two things came to me. One I won’t mention, but it was a generational trauma thing. And then The Continental. I was just about to turn 50, and there’s a lot I’ve learned in 32 years in the business. It was like a light bulb went off, sometimes, man, you have to go do stuff for fun; what it does is it makes you more creative in other areas. Like you’re just using muscles you haven’t used. The fun muscle, basically.
DEADLINE: I’ve interviewed each Coen Brother about making movies together, and apart. Ethan said there were points where he was looking through the camera, getting his shot. He’d turn to say, what did you think of that? And his brother wasn’t there. What is the biggest adjustment in you and your twin brother Allen peeling off and doing separate things?
ALBERT: I was extremely introverted and I stayed with the crew and the camera, and he was more the actors’ person. Moving to Prague too…when twins separate spatially, I had to learn to do things for myself. I found that I can play the role of extrovert very well, even though I’m not one. What I had to develop was how to better communicate with people and actors in particular. I do come from the Hitchcock school of…theater when it comes to actors. I love what they do, I love their talents, but I just think they’re a part of the process. There’s a lot of weight, too much weight given to certain departments. I think everybody’s equal. I developed my voice in talking to actors and crew and what I found was actors give me an energy that I had missed out on. When I worked with my brother, I dealt with equipment, DPs, gaffers and grips. I could go through a day feeling moody. But when an actor is talking to you about their character and story, it keeps you on your toes.
Kodi Smit-McPhee was my star in the movie Alpha, a very young talented actor who would do The Power of the Dog. He said to me after a take once, I don’t like acting by the numbers. And then he did the second take and I realized his method was that he does everything from his gut and that’s where he gets these wonderful things. Takes could be inconsistent, but there were marvelous things going on. That was the first time I was on my own, dealing with an actor, one-on-one, every day. Just me and him. Using a made up language in that movie. You can learn a lot. In the past, Denzel Washington showed my brother and I a lot of things. And on The Continental, Mel was very clever. He wouldn’t go to his trailer, he’d just sit on set and watch. He’s watching everything and talking to everybody, PAs and extras. And I realize what he’s doing. He’s seen it all, and he’s trying to figure out what I know and what I don’t know. And doing it in this very clever way. He’d feign ignorance about a lens. Like, oh, what lens is that? He knew exactly what it was.
I would go up and ask him questions about all my favorite movies that he did. I’d see how a guy who has done that many films can turn it on and then turn it off. He knows his edit points because he is a filmmaker too. I’d never seen that with an actor, where he’d know how to do something that was an efficient cut. No waste. He could be fumbling around, and you’re feeling that wasn’t good and then boom, he snaps in and he starts going, and then he snaps out while you’re still rolling. He’s doing all the lines but you realize he’s only focused on this one section and then he’ll go clean up the other section or he’ll say, let’s go back. And he’ll snap right in. It’s because he’s been in that editing room and he knows, I can turn this on right here, and turn it off right now, and collect myself. Then I’ll turn it back on. When you put it together, you’re like, my God, this guy’s a genius. He knows exactly what’s going on behind the camera, in front of the camera. He knows what lenses I’m picking. He came and looked at the monitor one day and he goes, that’s your B camera? I’ll play to that. Because it’s a better angle.
DEADLINE: Denzel Washington is also an accomplished director, and you and Allen worked with him on Book Of Eli. When they offer input of someone who sees it as a director as well as an actor, how intimidating or intrusive is that to a filmmaker?
HUGHES: If you’re an insecure person, that can feel like a bit of a threat. But I think my brother and I with Denzel, we were very open because he was one of the smartest guys we’ve ever worked with, in the extreme. Mel and him, they’re highly intelligent and rarely come with an idea that’s not good. But every idea isn’t good. You can deal with it with diplomacy or you can deal with it with directness. And I prefer sometimes, ah, I don’t know, let’s just try it. And they try it and sometimes you’re like, oh, I was fucking wrong. This guy’s, he’s right. Sometimes, it wasn’t a great idea, but we had to try it, and I do that not knowing because I want them to be comfortable in exploring. A lot of the way my brother and I worked in the past and the way we work now is that we like those happy surprises and we learned this from Scorsese, those ad libbed moments. You like those moments where someone comes and makes a scene. Sometimes, it seems like a day you are obliged to get through, and then you get that actor that does something special and you’re like, oh my God, I thought this scene was gonna be shit, and look what this actor is doing.
There was a scene in the show that takes place in a restaurant that I thought it was just…servicable. Like, hey, I gotta shoot a bunch of fu*king close-ups. I hate those days, hate ’em. Then I see this actress do her part and I go, my God, I’ve never seen a tape like this. I’ve never seen a woman, man or woman come and just bounce off the walls like this and just paint this picture that made this scene exciting to me. And she got hired that hire her. So she came in and I said, can you just study the tape that I saw because whatever you did is gold. So we did the whole scene and I said, keep going, keep going, keep chewing up the scene, keep doing it. Her name is Claire Cooper. I said, you realize Claire, I’ve never once directed you. She goes, oh, well you’re gonna direct me today. I’m gonna be sure of it. You’re gonna direct me today. I go, no, I don’t think so. There’s no need. And so I give her this piece of direction for the end of this closeup and she does it, but it’s not right. It’s still not working for me. And then the next take, she does something with the other actor that’s so surprising to me. And I’m like, whoa. I ask the guy, was that your idea? He said, no. I said to Claire, you one-upped me again. I tried to direct you. You you had a better idea than I did.
So that’s what I look for. My brother and I would do the same thing during the movies, and auditions. Like, who’s gonna make this exciting for us? Cause we’ve read this for a year and it’s not as exciting as it was at first. There are those scenes where you’re excited and then those scenes that I’m sure if every filmmaker’s honest, they’re gonna say it’s just the serviceable shit, exposition.
DEADLINE: It helps to be changeable, open to a pleasant surprise…
HUGHES: Francis Coppola refers to ‘accidents,’ a lot,. You read all his interviews, you know, the happy accidents are the best. You go, they’ll give me credit, but this just happened and I don’t even know how it happened. Everybody’s trying kind of get credit for something that’s magical but wasn’t meant to happen. That happens on every project, if you’re open to it and it’s not one of those tense fraught with problems productions.
DEADLINE: Your brother Allen just directed a multi-part series on Tupac Shakur. Given the brawl you and he had with Tupac and his friends, how surprised were you that Allen told his whole story, brawl included?
HUGHES: I don’t think I was that surprised, because he tried to get me involved early on and I helped out a little bit. The first few months, I shot some stuff and edited some examples for him and he really wanted me to be a part of it. But I’m like, no, this is yours. Because he was the more social of the two of us, I was there for mostly all the stories. I was there during that incident, but he was the more talkative one and it was a more his personal story. I saw the first two episodes and it just feels like a love letter to a friend.
They had that little thing, for five minutes. It didn’t overshadow the deep friendship. And I think this was lovingly done and fair. And something I think that, the friend that we knew, Tupac would’ve been proud of. He speaks to it in the film, and that he was pissed off and had a lot of anger over it. You still see it on chat boards; our kids have to deal with this shit, that Tupac beat up the Hughes Brothers. That is mathematically impossible. We were 200 pounds apiece and he’s a hundred forty, soaking wet and holding a brick.
It just doesn’t jibe, or make any common sense. But that was held over my brother for many years, and me too, the narrative we got our ass kicked by this guy. I was like, no, that wasn’t what happened. To my brother’s credit, he didn’t speak about it until a couple years ago. He wasn’t trying to defend his honor. I thought he did a good job handling it in the episodes. He didn’t go into the weeds. He didn’t get into the blow by blow of what actually happened. He just said, for the record, it was 10 guys [laughs]. 10 guys.
DEADLINE: You were there. What do you remember about it?
HUGHES: I remember. My brother does a good job of couching it this way. In hindsight, it was a couple of 19, 20 year old guys who were hotheaded. We handled it wrong and he handled it wrong. He was hurt because he’d been fired from the movie for being a little disruptive. A little, that’s being kind. My brother dealt directly with him. My brother back then was 20 years old and I saw it. He was a man about it. He may have not understood what Tupac was saying because, for all the bluster, we weren’t able to understand what he was saying his grievance was. But what my brother doesn’t mention is they were in the room together by themselves. That is a very interesting story that Allen was very respectful in not putting in the documentary, when they had to confront each other. In that room, my brother was thinking it was gonna be a fight. And so my brother stood up, getting into the position of like, I’m not gonna get swung on. And Tupac backed out of the room and said, call my manager. Because there was nobody around, Tupac had some pretty crazy stories that are real, and actually did happen. Shooting two off-duty police officers. That was pretty crazy. But when it came time to confront a friend, it was a different story. And also, like us, he was dealing with what we were dealing with, a lot earlier. Success and fame at a very young age, when you still have lifelong traumas, daddy issues, mommy issues. Nobody gave us all a guidebook on how to be young men. It was, you’re handed cash and a few cars and, figure it out. I’m saying it in hindsight, like my brother. This is easy to figure out. And part of it’s toxic masculinity. We’re coming out of the hip hop culture, like we’re gonna be blah, blah, blah. So I think if we were all three here, at 50, it would’ve been a very calm conversation. Well, you don’t understand, Allen and Albert, I think this character should be like that instead of that. Back then, what Tupac would do is he’d be disruptive in these other areas when he really was frustrated with something else.
DEADLINE: You all operate in an emotional business where the job is to make us feel something in our boring lives. It must be easy to put too much weight on perceived slights.
HUGHES: You’re onto something there. Musicians or artists in that area deal with it and so do filmmakers and actors deal. You can be quickly labeled as difficult and sometimes people don’t differentiate between two types of difficult. There are those who are completely disruptive and unhealthy. There are others who have a method to their madness. My brother and I dealt with that tag because partly because of our skin color too. The angry Black men. And we were like, no, we actually know what we want. We want it this way. You have these people coming in that are undermining you and you gotta clip them, or you gotta deal head on. And then in this business, if it’s a woman or, or a Black man or an Asian man, a lot of people don’t take too kindly when you stick up for yourself and say, no, I’m not I’m not having that. That’s not the way I work, and we’re gonna do it this way. I mean, we were coming out a hip-hop culture, with Tupac, with a chip on our shoulders. And knowing that he’s going into the music game and we’re going into the film game. Already with the cards are stacked against us. And then if we speak up for ourselves, then we’re labeled as something. To this day, Allen is still dealing with it. I still deal with it. Tupac, if he was 51 right now or 52, he would still be dealing with it. It’s a frustration that that never leaves, especially with creative people of color or women.
DEADLINE: You’ve intellectualized it, but I keep thinking, it must be scary to have 10 guys thump you, I wouldn’t know what to do other than try to stay on my feet so I don’t get stomped.
HUGHES: We knew, driving up. Allen was driving his Jeep, I was in the back seat and our friend was in the front seat. We saw Tupac in the corner, and we saw, I would say 15 guys. Smoking and drinking 40 ouncers. I was like, uh oh, we know what’s going down now. I still wonder why we just didn’t just turn the car around and go like, today’s not the day to be parking. But we parked. I don’t know why we did. We parked.
DEADLINE: Back to The Continental. It’ll be a couple months before this series airs. Every John Wick fan wants to know, what am I getting here. What can they expect?
HUGHES: I wouldn’t say anything specific, but the whole point was to explore the mythology more, the secrets of the hotel through the characters Winston and Charon, and play with the intersecting characters and storylines. There’s this wild cast of new characters that come in and out of that world… I’d say they can expect the high style that the John Wick films give. But different, because we’re in the ‘70s. It’s good eye candy, escapism and fun. That’s the one thing that drew me in. I think they have fun with it because it’s something different than what you see on TV. It’s a longer form than the movies, but the challenge was, can you keep in the fun? I think so many women are fans because you don’t take this violence seriously, it’s almost a ballet dance, a ballet of bullets. People can check out and go, oh, it’s not like the real world. This is not, this is not the real world. And I think that’s what’s so genius about what Chad and Keanu have done with that series. They’re winking and nodding to the audience. That’s what Chad said, I’m winking and nodding a lot, and I do the same in the series.
It’s like when I was 10, watching Raiders of the Lost Ark and this archaeologist is running from bigass boulders, and doing all this ridiculous shit with Nazis. We knew it was an old TV serial throwback with a good time to be had. The last thing I would want is to leave people bummed out. It’s supposed to rock you, musically, sonically, visually with colorful characters, which is what the franchise had, too. The ‘70s music needle drops, twists and turns that are unexpected.
From a technical aspect, if you look at The Continental in three parts, you’ll see direct things that are nodding to ’70s movies. We were like, how can we bring in all this stuff? The lenses we used were MGM and Pathe and built in the early 1950s. They’re not great lenses by today’s DP standards, but they were used to shoot Dr. Zhivago, Cool Hand Luke, and The Graduate. If you look closely at it, you’ll see all these weird flares and glares and, at the bottom of the frame is a little blurry and the top over here is a little blurry. It’s because of these imperfect lenses that were made in 1950.
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