Yes, celebrated auteur, Stanley Kubrick played a tiny role in the direction of “John Wick: Chapter 4.” Back when the “2001: A Space Odyssey” director was working on his 1975 period drama, “Barry Lyndon,” he planned to shoot it, according to The Telegraph, so as to not, “reproduce the set-bound, artificially lit look of other costume dramas from that time.” Along with his cinematographer John Alcott, Kubrick attempted to shoot, “as many sequences as possible without recourse to electrical light,” which meant using daylight and candles to illuminate his carefully constructed scenes. All of this lent the film a kind of painterly look, or as The Telegraph put it, “the day-lit interiors owe a lot to [18th Century English painter William] Hogarth.”
Though it might seem unlikely, Kubrick and Alcott’s approach had an effect on Chad Stahelski, who told Collider that he was a “big fan” of the way “Barry Lyndon” was shot. In the “John Wick: Chapter 4” trailer, there’s a particularly impressive-looking scene where Wick meets Bill Skarsgård’s Marquis de Gramont — a member of the High Table group of crime bosses — at a table in the Place du Trocadéro in the shadow of the Eiffel tower. And Stahelski found himself reminded of Kubrick when it came time to shoot the grand scene:
“You do all these read-throughs in these studio rooms beforehand, and you do your little acting rehearsals. But when you really see it, that was like my ‘Barry Lyndon’ set where, I don’t know if you remember ‘Barry Lyndon,’ but big fan of the Kubrickian way he did that. So, we placed everybody in this really, really renaissance kind of way.”
