Screenwriter Derek Kolstad wrote around 50 scripts before he finally broke through with the spec screenplay that became John Wick.
It’s an odd profession, screenwriting. There are some who’ve spent years trying to break into it, only to have their work changed to such a degree that their original idea has effectively vanished by the time it reaches the screen. There are others who get paid handsomely by studios to write screenplays that then wind up on a shelf, unused. For every celebrated screenwriter with millions in the bank and awards on their shelves, there are countless others who are behind on their rent and remain largely unknown.
Screenwriter Derek Kolstad, meanwhile, is something of an inspiration. He toiled away for years in the hope of making a career out of writing, and almost gave up when some of the low-budget movies he worked on didn’t bring in much of a salary. He finally made his mark with the huge success of John Wick in 2014 – by which point Kolstad was almost 40 years old.
John Wick is one of those movies that could have gone in a dozen different directions over the course of its development. In one alternate universe, it might have become a straight-to-streaming, low-budget genre piece starring someone like Dolph Lundgren; in another, it could have been an urban western with an older actor such as Clint Eastwood in the lead. There’s even a parallel reality where the financing fell apart and John Wick never happened at all.
It’s fascinating to wind the clock back and see where Derek Kolstad’s career was around 2012, just a couple of years before John Wick came out. At that point, he’d already spent over a decade in Los Angeles trying to make his mark as a screenwriter, having moved there from Madison, Wisconsin when he was in his mid-20s. A script he’d written in the 2000s, a sci-fi horror piece called The Wayfarer (“The Matrix by way of The Shining”), had earned him a few promising-sounding meetings but little else.
Then, in 2012, Kolstad landed some writing work on a pair of straight-to-DVD action films: One In The Chamber and The Package, both starring Dolph Lundgdren (paired with Cuba Gooding Jr in the former and Steve Austin in the latter). Kolstad later described working on those movies as “ungodly challenging”, however, and almost considered giving up on screenwriting altogether.
“They were hard,” Kolstad told Indie Film Hustle in 2023. “[With] The Package, they had 12 days to shoot. They had very little money, and you have people who don’t care because they pocket their pay cheque, and people who did care because it’s a movie they were a part of. After those two, I was close to quitting again because to pay the bills, even with those, I was doing a lot of non-profit stuff – videos and websites for NGOs and the like.”
Kolstad’s wife, Sonia, however, was impressed by another screenplay he’d written, a thriller called Acolyte, and encouraged him to keep going. That script ultimately sold to Voltage Pictures – the company behind The Hurt Locker and Dallas Buyers Club – in 2012. The small sum of money he got as part of the deal gave him the breathing space to sit down and keep writing for a few more months.
It was around this point that Kolstad watched a pair of somewhat obscure revenge thrillers: Faster (2010), a vehicle for Dwayne Johnson, and Harry Brown (2009), which starred a late-career Michael Caine. They weren’t classics, exactly, but they triggered something in Kolstad’s mind – not least the violent revenge flicks of the 1970s, such as Death Wish.
Inspired, Kolstad began writing a screenplay called Scorn, the first draft of which he completed in around a month. It was about a retired assassin in his early 60s who bursts violently back to life after a group of Russian gangsters kills his beloved dog and drives off in his 1969 Ford Mustang. In what could have been a straight revenge yarn, Kolstad injected a vital bit of soul and humanity; the dog, named Moose, was its protagonist’s connection to his late wife, who’d left it to him as a companion shortly before she passed.
When website The Action Elite caught up with Kolstad in 2012, he’d just finished Scorn and was about to send it out to studios on spec. Bringing the subject of the script up, the writer mentioned a number of actors who he had in mind when he came up with his protagonist – among them were Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, Denzel Washington and Lee Marvin. “They each share moments of brutal solemnity in their work,” he said, “and I love that.”
Via Kolstad’s agent, the Scorn script went out to several producers, among them Basil Iwanyk at Thunder Road Films, which had previously made such thrillers as Sicario and The Town. By the spring of 2013, the script came to the attention of star Keanu Reeves, who’d heard about it via his talent agent. One day that April, he’d called up Basil Iwanyk and asked whether he could read the script; a copy was couriered over to the star, and three hours later, he called back to say he wanted to make it.
“I grew up with [Reeves] – I was excited,” Kolstad recalled. “The first time I went over his house, I walked past his den. And on his desk were, like, 200 screenplays. This guy’s hobby was reading screenplays. And in that moment, it was the most humbling I’ve ever known; I thought, ‘Holy shit, he picked it.’”
From the first time Kolstad met Reeves, he noticed something else: the actor never called the script Scorn. He always referred to it by the name of its protagonist, John Wick. “It just stuck,” Kolstad said.
Production moved rapidly. Once Reeves signed on, he brought in Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, the stunt coordinators he’d previously collaborated with on The Matrix franchise, as directors. Shooting began in October 2013, by which point the script’s bodycount had risen considerably from around a dozen to over 80. The dialogue had also been pared back and re-written to better suit Reeves’ screen persona. All the same, the foundations of Kolstad’s story remained firmly in place, from the death of Wick’s dog – something several directors and producers had suggested he change – to its protagonist’s status as a legendary assassin feared by the criminal underworld.
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When John Wick emerged in 2014, there was no guarantee that it would be a hit. Although Reeves was still a star, his action films from the previous year – 47 Ronin and Man Of Tai Chi – were financial failures. Kolstad had seen John Wick with appreciative audiences at early screenings, but when The Action Elite spoke to him shortly before the film’s release, he seemed uncertain about what might happen next.
“I’m at a strange point in my career,” Kolstad said. “It’s kind of like being between gears, I suppose. Everyone’s waiting with baited breath to see how the flick does – including me – and once it drops, we’ll see where I go from here […] In my head, though, I’ve got five [sequels] in mind, but I doubt that would ever happen.”
John Wick was, of course, a hit. It added a new character to Keanu Reeves’ list of signature roles. It triggered a franchise which is still going a decade later, with sequels and spin-offs yet to come. Its close-quarters, heightened violence, masterminded by Stahelski and Leitch (the latter of whom went uncredited as co-director due to a stand-off with the DGA) changed the look of action movies. As Leitch told The Hollywood Reporter on the film’s 10th anniversary, “Everybody wants their own John Wick.”
As for Derek Kolstad, his career was well and truly established in the wake of John Wick’s multi-million dollar success. Having written or co-written two of the three sequels released to date, his other post-Wick credits include the action thriller Nobody, a vehicle for Bob Odenkirk, and Marvel’s The Falcon And The Winter Soldier. Nobody 2 and a crime thriller called Normal, directed by Ben Wheatley and also starring Bob Odenkirk, are also on the way.
For a writer who wrote dozens of scripts before he finally broke through, Kolstad’s story is an inspiring lesson in tenacity. As he told Pasadena Magazine in 2020, “[Some] people say, ‘You’re an overnight sensation.’ Yeah, but it took 20 years. I was living my life and getting better at my craft.”
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