After the fateful end of the character of Keanu Reeves’ popular assassin character, John Wick in John Wick: Chapter 4 movie, the franchise is all set for a few spinoffs. Other than the projects which will be released on the big screen like Ballerina, the Lionsgate Studio is also working on a prequel series of the John Wick franchise which will cover the story of Winston Scott and how he reached the position of proprietor of the New York branch of “The Continental” chain of hotels back in the 70s.
In a recent interview, the lead director and producer of The Continental: From the World of John Wick opened up more details about the series and revealed that they have tried to make the details as realistic as possible.
The lead director of The Continental series talks about action in the upcoming prequel of Keanu Reeves’s movies
John Wick will go down in history as one of the best action thriller movie series in Hollywood. Keanu Reeves who plays the titular character in the movies has done great justice to the role of the iconic assassin. Although The Continental is going to be a prequel series of movies, Albert Hughes, the lead director of the series recently opened up in an interview and revealed that they tried to ‘tone down‘ the action from the movies in the series. He said,
“My goal was actually to tone it down just a bit because we aren’t John Wick. And don’t get into action fatigue because we are in multiple episodes and you have to delve into these characters and storylines, which in a two-hour movie, you have to keep it moving.”
Although they tried to tone it down it is still the prequel of John Wick after all so even if they don’t cast Keanu Reeves, they still can’t take out the action from the franchise. Hughes further added that the 3rd episode of the series will allegedly be “57 minutes of action“.
Albert Hughes reveals details about the backdrop and props used in the series
Albert Hughes further talked about the use of props and designs they used in The Continental to make the 70s of series look as realistic as possible. The director even revealed that they copied the exact taxi design from Martin Scorsese’s 1976 psychological thriller movie, Taxi Driver. He said,
“Everything from our favorite ’70s cars, from TV shows like Starsky and Hutch to the movie Warriors…We copied the exact taxi from Taxi Driver. Then there’s commercials that we love. And of course, the biggest thing was the music. John Wick the film series has its very cool techno-driven score that’s very unique. And we found this guy, Raffertie, who’s very talented, who created kind of a riff on it, but very more kind of grounded in a way because techno wasn’t really big in the ’70s. It was disco. It’s where it all came from. So, we dabbled in disco, classic rock, punk, pop, funk, all the stuff from my childhood.”
The Continental is all set to be released later this year in September. Colin Woodell will be playing the lead role in the series and will portray the role of Winston Scott who was portrayed by Ian McShane in the movies.
Source: IGN
