With Ballerina days away from release, director Len Wiseman talks exclusively to Film Stories about its year-long delay and reports of extensive reshoots.
Originally shot in 2022, and once scheduled for release in the summer of 2024, John Wick spin-off Ballerina was subsequently delayed for a year. Reports of reshoots soon emerged, with word going around that Chad Stahelski – who directed all four mainline John Wick entries to date – had stepped into film ‘most’ of the movie a second time.
Actor Ian McShane, who’s appeared in both Ballerina and the wider John Wick series to date, added fuel to the speculation last February, when he went on BBC’s The One Show and said of the ‘new shoots’, as he put it, “They’ve got to protect the franchise… they’ve looked at it and Chad’s come in… and they want to make it better…”
Ballerina is now days away from release, so when we got to speak to director Len Wiseman a few days ago, we naturally asked him about the reports of the film’s troubled production.
“They weren’t even reshoots,” Wiseman said, “it’s additional shooting. The studio saw what we cut together – we shot it for a certain budget and schedule and everything… There were things that we had to cut out of the original script.”
Read more: John Wick: Chapter 4 review | The Wickiest Wick in the West
Ballerina stars Ana de Armas as Eve Macarro, a trained assassin who decides to track down the cult-like group of people who murdered her father when she was a child. According to Wiseman, the original cut of the movie didn’t show what happened to Eve in her youth, and it was this backstory – with Victoria Comte playing a young Eve – that was added in during additional photography.
“I really wanted to do Eve’s origin story, Eve as a young girl,” the director said, “and we didn’t have the time or the money for it, and so we told it in a slightly different way. I always want to watch a story rather than tell a story. And so once we saw the film and they [Lionsgate] loved it, [we said] ‘let’s go back and do some of those scenes that we didn’t have the schedule and time to do.’”
This chimes with what Stahelski himself said of Ballerina in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in October 2024. He said at the time that “Len had really no money and time compared to what I had on John Wick: Chapter 4,” but added that what had been shot during the initial round of filming had “massive potential.”
“We went back in with my writing team that had done John Wick: Chapter 4, and my stunt team, and we just gave it a little shine together with Len and what he had already done,” Stahelski said. “It wasn’t that much… we just went in for a couple of weeks. We changed some of the action sequences and made up for some time that Len just didn’t have. He didn’t have enough time to do some of the bigger shots that it deserved.”
Wiseman also added, however, that a previously undisclosed health issue also forced him to take a step back from the production of Ballerina for a period. It’s here, according to Wiseman, that reports of Stahelski taking over the role of director first emerged.
Read more: John Wick | Its writing story is one of extraordinary tenacity
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“We went out to do that additional shooting and in terms of what’s the truth of just that, it’s quite personal for me… Chad and I were teaming up to do [additional photography], and fit in as much as we possibly could. ‘Let’s get everything we possibly can…’ I ended up having a health situation – [a] scare – and I had to go to the hospital for a little bit. And so I think they [the entertainment press] took that not knowing, because I’m not going to share my personal business.”
Rather than an effort to ‘protect’ the John Wick franchise, Wiseman suggests, Ballerina’s additional photography was intended to bring the story closer to what was originally written in the script.
“A lot of movies have reshoots. Movies also have additional photography that is exciting. That was awesome for me… I mean, [when] you watch the movie, [it would] be quite different without seeing [Eve’s] story… it’s so much better to see it.”
You can hear our full interview with Len Wiseman on the latest edition of the Film Stories Podcast.
From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina is out in UK cinemas on the 6th June.
