Before Chad Stahelski evolved into America’s foremost gun-fu filmmaker — the director/producer-primary creative force behind the billion-dollar-grossing John Wick franchise — he was a journeyman action coordinator and stunt performer: enacting and organizing mayhem on the Matrix trilogy, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Expendables and various Hunger Games titles among a mile-long list of credits. With his Wick I co-director David Leitch, Stahelski founded the renowned Hollywood action-design company 87Eleven (Jurassic World, Captain America: Civil War, The Mechanic, Atomic Blonde) and can be fairly credited with helping establish a modern stunt vernacular on Hollywood’s splashiest action since the turn of the millennium.
Reached at a Los Angeles editing bay Thursday where, as a producer, he was overseeing a color-correcting session for the upcoming, Ana de Armas-starring John Wick spinoff Ballerina, Stahelski seemed happy yet somewhat wary at news of the Academy’s newly announced Stunt Design Oscar. The competitive category is set for the 100th annual awards ceremony in 2027 honoring stuntdom’s “technical and creative artists” — but whose category rules and eligibility has yet to be announced.
Like many in the action-choreography community, Stahelski feels such recognition has been a long time coming. But he wants you to know “the door swung in both directions”: Oscar probably needs stunts more than stunts need an Oscar. Stahelski talked Vulture through why the time is finally right for the industry to get a golden stunt statuette — and what the Academy will need to do to make sure the award has integrity.
Every stunt performer, every fight coordinator, fight choreographer, action director and second unit director as well as stunt performers in general have pushed a lot for this. It makes you smile. You’re like, Okay, cool. Everybody’s been trying to impress the world and each other with what we do. So to have an Academy Award, that’s great. But I think most stunt performers would agree that that’s never a priority with us. It’s the stunt performer way, if you will, to live within our community.
Given the bureaucracy and the politics and all the paperwork, it’s kind of a big thing. The Academy may seem slow to a lot of us — or a lot of people — but in the end, they wanted to do it right. So thank you to them for listening and really taking the time to explore the stunt community, to educate themselves. And not only did they come back with an award, they came back with what I think is probably the fairest way of doing it, by calling it Stunt Design.
You can’t just give the award to one person. We’re a very collaborative department. Again, if I asked you right now, what do stunt people really do? How does it start? You wouldn’t know. You just wouldn’t know. And the answer is, it’s different on every show. If you ask me who designs the action on my movies, on John Wick, I do.
Thank you so much to the Academy. So appreciated. I love your efforts. But we’re not done yet.
But how do I design it? Well, I have a team of 10 guys that help me choreograph. I have three other fight choreographers that are coming from Japan, China, France. I have two stunt riggers that design how I do the wild gags. My idea is the gag. Their idea is how to do it safely. Camera guys shoot it. My editor helps me edit it. VFX helped me erase the wires. That’s pretty fucking collaborative. It’s not as simple as a wardrobe supervisor or a costume designer. We’re a lot of different moving parts.
On any great action sequence that I could see being nominated — if you want to talk about one stunt, yes, there’s the individual performing it. But if you’re talking about action design, you’re talking about a team within the stunt department. On a Jackie Chan movie, who would you give that one to? The lead actor? The director? Do you give it to the fight choreographer? Do you give it to the guy that made sure the actor was safe? The guy that saved his life, the underwater team that made sure he was okay?
My next point would be, Okay, thank you very much for the award. Now who’s going to decide who should get it? You need an educated electorate! You need an educated panel of people that know it’s a little trickier than you think. It’s a collaborative effort, so maybe let action design and the stunt department along with the Academy decide who gets it. I think that’s a very fair way of doing it. So, thank you so much to the Academy. So appreciated. I love your efforts. But we’re not done yet.
When I started stunts, there was no promise of awards or accolades. You did your job. You went home. You made sure everybody was safe. If you could inspire and make a great shot, when you saw yourself up on that trailer, you’re like, “Fuck it. That was great!”
Chad Stahelski on the set of John Wick 3. Photo: Niko Tavernise/Lionsgate
Until the internet came along, how many people knew about us? Part of the magic of movies is making you think it’s real. We were Hollywood’s best kept secret for a very long time. The idea was to let the world think your lead actors did all the stunts, letting ’em think that we did put people in very dangerous situations. So the magic that we create, it’s sleight of hand stuff. Maybe we did too good of a job for the first 50 years. But now, not only are we well recognized, we’re part of the mythology of filmmaking. It’s cool to know about how they did the stunts. It’s cool to see the doubles; stunt doubles are accepted. Digital doubles are accepted. Wire work is accepted.
I think that’s why you’ve seen the push over the last five years to really get Academy recognition. There’s always been a very vocal part of our community that thinks we deserve an Academy Award. That thinks it’s only fair. And that’s been going on for decades. What I think has changed in the last five years is we’ve kind of hit an apex behind the scenes. It’s a cultural thing, but also — don’t underestimate this — the Academy came to us. When John Wick 4 was still in post, I had some people from the Academy contact me. “Hey, we’re here, you’re doing this. We love your stuff. What can we do?” It started very small and then ballooned very fast. I think the Academy was kind of going, “Hey, this could be good marketing.”
Everyone I talked to seemed very, very game to learn a lot more. They wanted to be educated. They wanted to see why, all these years, they had the same question, Why don’t stunts get an award? And it was kind of like two people talking about the same thing. They just never talked about it together.
