Chad Stahelski

Chad Stahelski (born 1968) spent the 1990s as a stunt performer — doubling Brandon Lee on The Crow and Keanu Reeves across the Matrix trilogy — before co-founding the action-design house 87Eleven with David Leitch and co-directing John Wick in 2014. He went on to direct all four John Wick sequels, turning the franchise into the reference point for long-take, wide-lens, do-it-for-real action choreography, and is now directing a Highlander reboot.

Keeping technology in check

Because his films are built on human bodies taking real punishment, Stahelski is often cast as an opponent of digital shortcuts. He rejects the framing. Interviewed alongside Keanu Reeves by WIRED in February 2023, weeks before John Wick: Chapter 4 opened, he drew the line at intent rather than at technology.

Asked in the same conversation about ChatGPT writing scripts, he volunteered that his own production had already used generative AI — junior staff had made AI-produced digital art used as background dressing in John Wick — and framed his position as being about authorship, not abstinence: he is all for the tools so long as the crew controls the choice behind them. That makes him one of the few marquee action directors on record admitting generative work shipped in a tentpole release.

He was less relaxed four months later. Appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience on 7 June 2023, in the middle of the writers’ strike, Stahelski said the WGA was right to force AI into the negotiation and that people dismissed the issue too easily. He told Rogan he was not worried about live-action filmmaking being automated yet, but that animation, video-game cinematics, trailers and short-form computer-generated work were genuinely on the horizon — and predicted audiences would eventually come to prize things made by human hands the way they prize a handmade table.