Hollywood: Lights, Ink, Entertainment!

Chapter 411: [John Wick] Wrap

....

[John Wick] filming in its last week of production.

Seren, whose work as a Costume Designer, was almost completed, should have been relieved.

However, she phased hurriedly in a foul mood.

"Those two idiots." she said to her assistant, not breaking stride, handing over the afternoon’s remaining notes in a stack that communicated both the detail of her preparation and the completeness of her departure.

"If they ask, tell them I left, you can call me if something is actually urgent. Anything that isn’t actually urgent, handle it."

Her assistant took the notes, she knew better than to ask questions when Seren was walking at this particular pace.

She got to the exit, but stopped, and stood there for a moment with her hand on the door and the cold air outside coming through the gap.

Then she turned around and went back.

She didn’t say anything to anyone about this.

She found a position near the back of the set with a clear sightline to both the monitoring station and the main floor, crossed her arms, and watched.

....

The nightclub set had been built over three days.

Under different circumstances it would have been one of the better shooting environments they’d had.

The mood was off, and it wasn’t in dramatical manner.

The crew was professional and the professionalism was holding, but Seren knew this crew well enough now to read the difference between focused and strained, and what she was looking at was strained.

A few people moving with the slightly overcorrected efficiency of people trying to compensate for something, and others faces that were checking the monitor when they didn’t strictly need to, looking for confirmation rather than information.

Regal was with the stunt director, which in itself wasn’t unusual.

"He fires seventeen rounds in the sequence." Regal said, his voice doing the focused thing it did when he was working through a specific problem. "The magazine is empty by the time he reaches the pillar. But the next cut has him firing again and there’s no reload in between, not even a partial. We’ve been meticulous about this across the entire film."

The stunt director was already working backward through the choreography in his head. "We can pull the reload into the sequence before the pillar. Give him three, four seconds in cover. It’s realistic, doesn’t interrupt the momentum, and it fixes the count."

"Or we recount the shots before the pillar." Regal offered. "If we trim two exchanges in the middle, he’s not empty when he gets there."

The stunt director nodded, already thinking.

Around them, others in earshot were also thinking; everyone finding their angle on the solution simultaneously.

"I will adjust the sequence." the stunt director said.

Regal paused. "Take whatever time you need."

He said it the way it was always said, the standard production courtesy, and immediately registered that it had come out wrong.

He didn’t comment on this.

....

The reason the mood was off, if you stood back far enough to see the full picture, was visible in two places simultaneously.

Regal at the monitoring station.

However, everything about his body, posture, and colour of his skin were wrong.

He was fully covered in a long full sleeved jacket, and a scarf. His breathing is nowhere normal. And most importantly, his body temperature is thirty-four-point-four degrees.

It had been the same since the previous morning and he had been working through it with the specific determination of someone who understood that the alternative was worse.

And Keanu, further back, in costume, who looked composed in the way that actors look composed when composure is an act of will rather than a state of being.

His temperature was worse than Regal’s.

Thirty-nine-point-four.

His body had been making very strong suggestions since the previous evening about what he should be doing, and what he should be doing was not this.

He had already shot a sequence earlier in the day that required complex choreography on a tight timeline, he memorised, executed, and then vomited between takes, and then went back and did the next take.

Nobody had made anything of this because making something of it would have cost time, and time was the specific problem.

The nightclub venue had a three-week gap in its availability after today.

Three weeks was not acceptable given where they were in the schedule.

So they were here, today, both of them, and the crew around them understood this without it needing to be stated.

And which was why the efficiency was running slightly hotter than normal, the small acts of consideration happening quietly; equipment positioned to minimise how far Keanu needed to move between setups, water appearing near Regal without being offered, the pace of the reset calibrated carefully without drawing attention to the calibration.

Regal looked across the set at Keanu, and he also looked back at him, this lasted for a second.

It contained the full accounting of the situation; what it was costing, what was still required, the mutual acknowledgment that both of them were going to finish the day regardless.

And most of all, the specific quality of trust between two people who had known each other long enough to not need to say any of that.

Keanu gave him the smallest possible nod, and Regal turned back to the monitor.

From her position at the back, Seren watched this exchange happen.

Even though it had only been a couple of years since she started off as Costume Designer in Hollywood, she had probably worked in more films than her brother and boyfriend combined.

And no one.

No one; even an indie film production with tight budgets, pushes themselves as much as the both individuals are doing.

And worse, she couldn’t stop them.

She stayed until the day’s shoot was finished.

....

.

[A Week Later]

Finally they are done with the filming of [John Wick].

The production team didn’t hold back in throwing a wrap party for all the cast and crew lavishly.

The wrap party ran late into the night, which was the correct outcome for a production that had earned it for all the work they had put in the last six months.

Especially, the last line crew members were finally having a breather, and are now eating good food and telling the stories that accumulate on any production, the ones that are only funny in retrospect and are very funny indeed in retrospect.

Regal had left early, which surprised nobody who knew him.

He had said what he needed to say to the people he needed to say it to, made sure the room had what it needed, and gone.

However, Keanu made sure he stayed until the end.

This was not a decision he made so much as a natural expression of how he understood his responsibility on a production.

The crew had poured months of themselves into this film; the stunt team alone had given the project something that would not be fully visible to audiences until the film existed, and even then the full cost of it would be incomprehensible to people who hadn’t been there for it.

The wrap party was theirs, his job tonight was to be present for it, which he was, genuinely and without performance.

He had brought gifts for the full crew, and he gave them one by one, while giving them as many photos as they wanted.

He even talked to the families of a few of the crew members, which seemed to make them more happy than the gifts he gave.

In the end, once the party was also finished; he was one of the last people out the door.

....

Back at the hotel, freshened up, the city quiet outside the window, Keanu called Regal.

The call connected to the second ring.

Immediately, from the background sound itself he could tell that Regal was not at home. It had been more than six hours since he had left the party, mind you.

"Where are you, dude." he said.

["Testing the final prototype."] Regal said.

"At this hour."

["Yeh, it had some sensor issues. Luckily, everything was solved now."]

Keanu sat back. "You’re testing the Batmobile."

Honestly, even he was excited.

He would have normally bashed Regal, accusing him for working his team into late night. But the automobile lover in him took over.

["Right~ Wanna have a look at it tomorrow?"]

"...I will be there...."

Right. Tomorrow is the start of the filming of [Batman].

"Ahem." Keanu got back to the topic. "The wrap party ended twenty minutes ago."

["I know. How was it?"]

"It was good, the crew was happy. You should have stayed longer."

["Dont you want to see the batmobile?"]

"That’s not the same thing."

["Haha."] Regal laughed.

"Goodnight, Regal."

["Goodnight."]

Keanu ended the call and sat with the phone in his hand for a moment, smiling at the middle distance.

Six years of knowing this person, of watching someone work with a pace and focus he had never seen matched by anyone, in any industry.

The wrap party had barely finished and Regal was already on another project.

How does he have so much in him, Keanu thought. Not for the first time. He still didn’t have an answer.

....

He opened Twitter, because he had been thinking about what to post for about two hours into the wrap party, thinking about the film they had just finished making, and watched his own rushes during production.

He knew what was on that footage and what they had built.

The action sequences, which were going to reframe what audiences expected from the genre in ways that would become visible only after the film existed and people had a reference point to think back to.

The character work, which was the part the action existed in service of, the grief and the determination and the particular quality of a man who had been returned to himself against his will and was moving through the world in the full weight of that.

He had been part of it.

Which was also the reason he had hesitated to say what he was about to say; it felt like it could read as self-interest, as a man talking up his own work.

But the wrap party was finished and the film was made and the honest thing was the honest thing.

He typed it.

===

@Keanu_Reeves: It’s a warp for [John Wick]

And, Regal is gonna redefine action movies.

[-image attached-]

===

He read it back once, picked the best pic they had taken at the warp party; which had the stunt guy as the stunt choreographer.

Then, he published it and put his phone face down on the table.

He had thought about hedging it.

Maybe it comes off as too cocky; and, softening the edges would have been a good choice.

It wasn’t because he doubted the film’s success, commercially or critically. If anything, he was certain they had a blockbuster in their hands.

And it wasn’t because he was part of it either, but because of what Regal had built around, beneath, and through every frame, the choreography with its own internal logic, the character work that gave the action meaning, and a world that felt as though it existed long before the camera arrived and would continue long after it left.

Audiences were going to watch this film and understand, after the fact, that things had changed.

That was how it worked with the things that actually mattered; you couldn’t always see the shift while it was happening.

You looked back and found that a line had been crossed somewhere and the landscape on the other side was different from the one before.

He was going to get an earful from Seren for posting this, probably.

She had views about people who talked up their own productions and would note, not incorrectly, that the optics of an actor promoting his own film required a certain degree of self-awareness about the source.

He smiled at the thought of it and he had taken an earful, then he turned the light off and let the quiet city outside do what it did.

....

.

[To be continued...]

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