John Wick franchise director Chad Stahelski offered his perspective on the financial lifeline given the original film by Eva Longoria.
Longoria recently acknowledged the $6 million investment for the first time, telling Business Insider she still gets checks for the 2014 film but regrets not investing in the entire series, which has grossed $1 billion.
Appearing on The Hollywood Reporter‘s It Happened in Hollywood podcast, Stahelski says he didn’t know his angel investor was the star of Desperate Housewives until after John Wick was completed and released.
“Funny enough, [co-director] Dave [Leitch] and I didn’t know anything about the situation till the movie had already come out,” Stahelski explains.
“About a week before we went to production, we had gap financing. We had an investor fall out for about $6 million. So when you’re [making an] $18 million movie, that kills you. And we didn’t have any money. So a lot of the crew left. We were losing locations. We were literally 24 hours away from failing. So between Basil [Iwanyk, the film’s producer], myself, Dave, Keanu, everybody deferred, wrote checks, everything we had put into it — and still it wasn’t nearly enough,” he continues.
“And then Basil came to us 48 hours before we had to roll, going, ‘Hey, I found an investor that’s going to cover the gap.’ And we didn’t think twice about it and went right into the movie, only to find out nearly a year later that it was Eva Longoria! Well, Dave and I found out, and we’re like, ‘Oh my god!’ We didn’t know. So we literally, next day, called her up and took her to lunch to say thank you at the Chateau Mamont and just couldn’t thank her enough,” he says.
Longoria and Stahelski have laughed about her good instincts over the years.
“She’s like, ‘It was an investment and I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know what it was. But it sounded kind of weird and cool,'” he says. “So I hope she got every penny back. I hope she made millions of dollars.”
For more about the making of John Wick, be sure to listen to the full episode of It Happened in Hollywood and subscribe for more movie history — from the people who made it.
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