Ballerina: Choreographing Ana De Armas’ Entry Into the World of John Wick

Director Len Wiseman sees Ballerina as almost the inverse of John Wick: Ana de Armas' Eve joins the John Wick assasin-verse an aspiring hitwoman rising through the Ruska Roma ranks to acquire the skills required to kill the man who murdered her father.

“There are a lot of assassin characters and stories we see which are from the perspective of that assassin trying to get out — and this one is a character looking to get into the world,” says Wiseman, an action auteur returning to films after years in television.

“I thought that part was fascinating, because what really drives a person to say, ‘I want to become an assassin and a killer?’”

The last film Wiseman directed was the 2012 Total Recall remake, but he’s perhaps best known for directing and producing films in the Underworld franchise as well as directing one of the better Die Hard sequels, Live Free or Die Hard. 

“Film is my love,” he tells MovieMaker, but he’s worked in TV for the last decade largely because he’s “so incredibly picky.” He co-created Sleepy Hollow, which aired 2013-17 on Fox, and then served as executive producer on APB, Lucifer, The Gifted and Swamp Thing.

“And then Ballerina came up,” he explains. “It’s the kind of movie that I go out to see on opening weekend, and I always want to direct what I would go see opening day.

“Then on the John Wick side of it, it also gives a little bit of a window. The Ruska Roma is the same place where John Wick trained. And so, at the same time we’re seeing Eve’s journey, we can imagine this is what John Wick also went through on his rise to become John Wick.”

Wick apparently died at the end of John Wick: Chapter 4 last summer, but Ballerina is set within the timeline of Chapter 3 – Parabellum, so Reeves’ character remains in play. (Also, the fact that a John Wick: Chapter 5 is in the works suggests that maybe he wasn’t too inconvenienced by death.)

As much as the Ballerina trailers focus on de Armas, they also promise the return of other franchise favorites: Ian McShane is back as Continental manager Winston, and so is his trusted concierge Charon, played by the late Lance Reddick in one of his final roles.

And Anjelica Huston returns as the Director of the Ruska Roma’s academy for the criminally gifted. She plays a bigger role this, time as Wiseman’s lens dives deeper into the secret society of assassins. 

The familiar faces and parallel plots help Ballerina pull off a delightful and delicate dance between spinoff, sequel, prequel and origin story, which feels fated to carry the franchise forward — even if Wick is, allegedly, resting in peace under a gravestone marked “Loving Husband.” 

John Wick Producers on Ballerina

Whatever comes next for Wick, franchise producer Erica Lee and her Thunder Road Films producing partner, Basil Iwanyk, are confident that their latest killer can also catch fire with fans.

He notes that the film reunites Wick and de Armas, who first appeared together in Eli Roth’s 2015 horror thriller Knock Knock.

“The first time I saw Ana was Knock Knock with Keanu, which he did right after John Wick. And I remember going, ‘God, she’s really interesting.’ Like, there’s something about her that was just really cool and edgy, just different than a lot of things that I’ve seen before,” Iwanyk says. 

“I think she has a great ability to toggle between softness and vulnerability and relatability, with brutal action and toughness and ferocity.”

Lee adds: “What we didn’t want to do is sort of just make an ice-cold heroine or a character that you could tell was written for a man, and then just sort of gender flipped. We wanted [the character] to feel specific to a woman, and I think Len really intuitively understood how to do that.”

Ballerina started as an unrelated spec script by Shay Hatten, whose agent passed it to Thunder Road seven years ago. The producers brought it to Lionsgate to be folded into the Wick universe and subsequently hired Hatten to work on the screenplays for Parabellum and Chapter 4. Wiseman came on board four years ago to shepherd the development process. 

“I’ve always been a fan of his,” says Iwanyk. “What got us excited about it was our meeting with him and his take, because if you’re going to work with someone on a film that’s in the universe of a pre-existing film, oftentimes a new director will come in and say, ‘I want to change it up, I want everything to be different.’

"And Len came in and said, ‘Here’s what I love about the franchise and here’s what needs to be continued, and here’s what I would do differently.’ He just had a great handle on the material and who Eve was.”

Ballerina Director Len Wiseman on Eve's Props

Thanks to a global pandemic, the writers strike and the actors strike strangling the entire industry, the movie has been in Wiseman’s life longer than any other in his career. 

And Ballerina may be better for it, because the downtime allowed Wiseman to devote long hours to conceptualizing and testing a lot of the craziest kills and action sequences in the film.

“A lot of what I did during the pandemic is just build out weapons and props and shoot stuff in my garage,” says Wiseman, who began his career as a storyboard artist before he started mastering props in the art department on films including Stargate, Independence Day, Men in Black and Godzilla. 

“I’ve been directing for 22 years now, and every time someone yells, ‘Props!’ on set, I still get a little bit of an alert, ready to jump out of my chair,” he says.

In the wonderful world of Wick, the props on screen can be just as important as the people — because the props are so important in killing those people. If John Wick is the most seasoned and polished assassin of the bunch, Eve is greener and scrappier — a character trait reflected in how she fights, and what she uses to beat her opponents. 

One of the moments when the producers knew Wiseman was right for the job came when he detailed how he envisioned Eve using mundane objects as weapons of mass destruction.

“He brought all that kind of knowledge to us,” Lee recalls. “I remember one of his early pitches was, like, how to make an action sequence with ice skates. That was just so cool that immediately everyone was like, ‘We need that in the movie!’”

Ice skates and dinner plates prove to be just as deadly as guns in Ballerina.

Wiseman plotted out every battle with action figures and models before bringing the sequence to a storyboard artist or pitching it to studio execs.  

“I have quite a bit of nieces and nephews, and I’m like the coolest uncle, because I’ve got an entire room of toys,” he jokes. “That’s just how I go about it, how I’ve always done it. If it’s props that I can build, I need to see it before I present it. 

“Like when I was presenting the ice skate fight to Lionsgate early on, I had to buy it, shoot it and put it together. I believe it’s better to show something than to talk about it.” 

Wiseman does, however, enjoy talking about a recurring theme in the franchise: fate vs. free will. 

In the first John Wick, Wick has chosen to retire, but events outside of his control — including a nepo-baby gangster invading his home, killing his puppy and stealing his car — pull him right back into the violent life. As much as he believes in free will, his decisions can seem inevitable.  

The fate vs. free will debate continues in Ballerina when audiences meet a character named the Chancellor, played by Gabriel Byrne, an actor who is really good at being bad. And it continues in Eve’s character arc.

Part of the charm of the Wick films is that the hard-R action leaves just enough room for philosophy: What if free will is a necessary illusion to fuel fate into fruition?

“I think it is,” Wiseman says. “At least for me, if I fully got on to believing that everything is predestined, it would take away my passion for my choices.” 

But in context of the cinematic world of the Ballerina, he says, “every choice you make has a consequence, and so the choices that you make will lead to certain consequences. I do think it’s fated, but the characters themselves are battling that they really do have a choice.”

Iwanyk notes, “I firmly believe in free will.” But at the same time, he describes the characters in the Wick world as “cursed.” 

“Every character in the John Wick movies is a bad guy. There’s no true clean hero,” he says. “I feel like for many of the characters in Wick world, it is fate. They’re cursed. That makes it feel a little more mythological. These people are trapped.”

He adds: “It’s hard not to look at Ana’s character and go, okay, she was destined to end up where she does at the end of the movie. But she also makes some choices to get herself out of a path that could have been much darker and more morally broken.” 

Was John Wick, as a franchise, fated for five films and counting? 

“I think we were probably destined to make the first one,” Lee says, “but the movie gods and the world sort of made it so that we were able to make Ballerina and the subsequent movies.” 

A documentary about the making of the franchise is on the way, too, as is an animated prequel and a spinoff about Caine, the blind assassin played by Donnie Yen in Chapter 4.

“As an independent producer, you sort of never know,” Lee continues. “You read a script and it could be the next franchise, the next Oscar winner, or never get made. There’s so many stories that go either way, and I think there was something that pulled us to that first movie; a lot of decisions and a lot of hope and prayers and magic in a bottle that just worked. And that is not something I ever saw coming, or could have ever planned.”

Also Read: John Wick Creator Has Made Peace With Leaving the Franchise

The appeal of Ballerina, though, really does come down to a few key choices that Wiseman and the producers made early on. Not only does the movie introduce an exciting new faction of foes for Eve (and maybe Wick) to take on in more sequels, but it also establishes an entirely new kick-ass character who feels fresh and distinct instead of a female Baba Yaga.  

“That was very important to me,” Wiseman says. “I have no interest in seeing Ana de Armas doing what Keanu Reeves does. John Wick is the only John Wick.” 

Ballerina is now in theaters, from Lionsgate.

Main image: Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina. Lionsgate.