This past week, a behind-the-scenes video showing Keanu Reeves as John Wick filming an intense motorbike fight scene has gone viral on X (formerly Twitter).
The fascinating footage was filmed during John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum and it offers a glimpse of what goes into making Hollywood blockbusters that have plenty of special effects.
There was praise for the cameraman who is seen manically running around the action as he holds onto the movie camera that is attached to the ceiling.
Behind the scenes of John Wick’s intense bike fight sequencepic.twitter.com/i7R8ZNOEm1
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 25, 2024
The scene follows Wick as he is traveling to the Continental in New York City via the Verrazano Bridge on his motorbike but is attacked by a bad guy called Zero and his sword-wielding assassins. Of course, Wick sees them all off with a series of smooth maneuvers that fell the bad guys from their bikes.
While the scene wowed audiences in theaters and at home, the extensive planning and choreography that went into it is revealed in a behind-the-scenes video and subsequent interviews with Reeves and the crew.
Conspicuous in the BTS footage are the other actors in the scene who are invisible in the movie. They are wearing chroma key suits, otherwise known as Greenman suits, and they are pushing the actor’s motorcycles that are mounted to platforms to give the illusion of them riding.
Production visual effects supervisor Rob Nederhorst told Befores and Afters that the sequence was rehearsed four times before they photographed it for real saying it was a “crazy amount of work.”
Nederhorst and crew practiced the scene in a warehouse in New York but noticed the markings on the floor that identified the traffic lanes on the bridge seemed too small.
“Something didn’t feel right,” he told Befores and Afters. “I said, ‘Hey guys, how wide are these lane lines?’ They told me the number and I said, ‘Is that what the actual Verrazano Bridge lane lines are? Have you measured them?’ They thought these things were all standard, but I said I needed to send someone over there to the bridge to check.”
A lidar expert visited the bridge to make the exact measurements and lo-and-behold the markers were off by about a foot and a half so the crew had to do-over.
