A lot has been written about the runtime of Chad Stahelski’s “John Wick: Chapter 4” which clocks in at a very sizeable 169 minutes – a good half an hour longer than the last entry.
However, it turns out the original cut of the film was considerably longer than that with the first cut of the film reportedly clocking in almost an hour longer at 225 minutes.
Stahelski and the film’s editor, Nathan Orloff, recently spoke with IndieWire and during the conversation revealed that the first cut came in at near four hours long. Stahelski says he was well aware they couldn’t release a film at that length.
That resulted in a bunch of work to compress the movie down as much as possible to something closer to the previous entries:
“To be really honest with you, zero was planned out. Our first cut was three hours and 45 minutes, and it felt like three hours and 45 minutes. We were like, ‘we’re so screwed’. You just compress, compress, compress. 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.”
Part of that involved having to rewatch the movie over and over as Stahelski explains that part of the difficulty was that every single time they trimmed something from the cut, they would watch the whole film again to make sure it wasn’t jarring:
“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. 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.”
No word as yet on what Sahelski will do with that near hour of cut footage and whether we’ll see either an extended edition or just plenty of deleted/alternate scenes on the home video release.
“John Wick: Chapter 4” hits cinemas from tonight.
