In one scene in “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina,” there may be too many assassins in the kitchen.
The film’s title character, the trained killer Eve (Ana de Armas), has made her way to an alpine village in Austria as part of a mission to root out a cult. But violent townspeople keep getting in her way. In a restaurant, Eve encounters a cook who aims to do more with her knife than julienne.
What follows is a brisk action scene in which kitchen utensils are wielded violently and plates are smashed frantically.
Narrating the scene, the director Len Wiseman said that during rehearsal, the goal was to “explore and use everything in a diner that could be used as a possible weapon.”
That included pans, a meat tenderizer and a pile of plates that became the centerpiece of the sequence, as the two performers are seen in an overhead shot smashing dishes over each other’s heads.
“This was one of the hardest things to do,” Wiseman said during an interview in New York, “because the plates are breakaway plates. They have one job. They break.” This meant that the actors had to be really careful picking up the plates, but also had to make the action look forceful.
In the end, Wiseman and his team just wanted to have a little fun with this sequence. “What I was going for,” he said, “is let’s have this one be violent, but also make people laugh.”
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