Why ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ Earns Its Almost 3-Hour Running Time
When editor Nathan Orloff first met with “John Wick: Chapter 4” director Chad Stahelski about working on the latest entry in American cinema’s greatest franchise, he quickly realized that this “John Wick” was going to be a bit different. “Chad said that it was going to be more of an ensemble movie, where you’re toggling between different stories,” Orloff told IndieWire. If the stripped-down original was Stahelski’s “A Fistful of Dollars” and the second and third installments expanded the “John Wick” universe in a manner comparable to “For a Few Dollars More,” “John Wick: Chapter 4” is Stahelski’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” the movie that takes “John Wick” into the realm of the epic.
At 169 minutes, the film is epic in length as well as scope, but it never feels overlong, the result of arduous but intuitive work in the editing room by Orloff and Stahelski. According to the director, there was no mandate for how long or short the movie should be, just an organic process of watching and rewatching the material to figure out the proper pace. “To be really honest with you, zero was planned out,” Stahelski told IndieWire. “Our first cut was three hours and 45 minutes, and it felt like three hours and 45 minutes. We were like, oh, we’re so screwed.”
Orloff and Stahelski arrived at that initial cut simply by servicing the multiple characters and storylines that expanded this version of “John Wick” beyond its title character. Orloff noted that there was a lot of experimentation in the movie’s first half to figure out how much time to spend on the supporting characters while always bringing the story back to John Wick. “I wanted to make sure that he was still the center of the universe, that everything always led back to him even though we were cutting away from him.”
Stahelski describes the structure as a tightening spiral in which all the components of the story gradually come together until they culminate in a climax that pays each character’s arc off. For fans of the series, the finale is about as satisfying as movies get — once all the puzzle pieces lock into place, “John Wick: Chapter 4” achieves a level of mythic poetry that not only invites but earns comparison with “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” The emotional impact comes from Stahelski’s willingness to take his time with the characterizations. “It’s rhythm,” he said. “Music is more about the space in between the notes than it is just the notes. And silences help define action.”
That said, he and Orloff knew that their initial cut had too much space, so the editor removed everything that wasn’t essential. “You just compress, compress, compress,” Orloff said. “I went through a pass where anytime someone repeated an idea they had already expressed, I cut it out. No repeated ideas. It’s a very linear story, so there wasn’t a ton of reconstruction or rearrangement we could do. It was just a matter of sifting out what we didn’t need.”
Of course, that kind of compression is easier in theory than in practice, as Stahelski found that it wasn’t possible to cut any of the film’s 14 individual action sequences without affecting the whole. “You’ll never know if a five-minute car scene or a 10-minute car scene is good until you watch the whole movie,” Stahelski said.
Sometimes Stahelski and Orloff found that cutting a scene too short made the movie feel longer because it wasn’t the correct rhythm, which led to many, many viewings of the entire film to figure out the right balance. “My editorial staff probably hates me because even if we just took 30 seconds out of something, I’d make everybody watch the movie again,” Stahelski said. “That’s the only way you know you have the right pace. You feel that bump in movies all the time because they were doing it in pieces and not seeing it as a whole. The last thing you want to do is treat it as a bunch of parts.” Once again, Stahelski — who’s as influenced by directors of musicals like Bob Fosse and Stanley Donen as he is by Sergio Leone — finds the analogy he’s looking for in music: “It’s not a piece of the song, it’s the whole song that makes you rock out.”
Lionsgate will release “John Wick: Chapter 4” in theaters on Friday, March 24.
