by James Mottram in Malta
“I’m a genre guy: action, sci-fi, thriller, horror,” says Derek Kolstad, as he sits down in the plush Phoenicia Hotel in Valletta for a chat with FilmInk. Succinctly put, you might say.
To date, the 52-year-old writer-producer has almost single-handedly reinvented the action-thriller genre, giving Keanu Reeves another franchise to add to Speed, The Matrix and Bill and Ted, when he created his assassin John Wick. Following that, he did the same for Bob Odenkirk, turning the Better Call Saul star into a late-career action star in Nobody.
Right now, Kolstad is in Malta to participate in the fourth edition of the Mediterrane Film Festival, which is screening his latest film Normal, again starring Odenkirk, this time as an interim sheriff who arrives in the titular Midwest town to discover something rotten at its core. “I’m very proud of that movie,” says Kolstad. Not least that they snagged Ben Wheatley, the British director behind Free Fire and Kill List. “What I really like about Ben is… he has this bingo card of his cinematic life, and this was his western.”
Normal is not a strict western, given its set in the present, but then Kolstad has always been smart at bending genre to his will, as well as giving actors the roles of a lifetime. Just as he did with Odenkirk, he’s currently working with Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage on a script called The Reckoner, about an accountant for the mob. “Those projects are just a joy, because you don’t quite see these guys in these roles. But within the first 30 seconds, you’re like, ‘Fuck yeah, I see this’.”
Other projects in development include Canyon with Don Cheadle, in which the Ocean’s 11 actor plays a part-time jazz musician and full-time assassin, set to be directed by Colin Tilley (Eye for an Eye). And then there’s Proxy with Sebastian Stan, a postmodern western “with a little bit more humour”. Before that he has Painter, which he scripted, starring Prey’s Amber Midthunder, who plays a woman living in the Ozarks who is seeking her missing father. “It’s the ultimate father-daughter movie,” he says.
Due to be released on streaming in November, Painter is likely to gain major attention, given it co-stars The White Lotus’ Walton Goggins. “The cool thing about Walton is that he took Amber under his wing as an uncle figure, and everyone on set absolutely loved him. And when we had to do ADR, which is the bane of everyone’s existence, he was just warm and encouraging. That guy, there’s a reason he’s had the career he has… he’s just a gentleman, man. He’s a great dude.”
Needless to say, this avalanche of new work is helping ensure that Kolstad isn’t just known as ‘the guy that wrote John Wick’. Raised in Madison, Wisconsin, he had no connections in the industry growing up – just a love of movies. “The thought of doing this for a living… it felt easier to swim to Mars, but I always loved reading, and I always loved writing.” The first movie he ever saw where he paid attention to the screenwriter was Lethal Weapon, scripted by Shane Black “because his name was so cool”. It was, as they say, a lightbulb moment. “I was like, ‘Oh, you can do this for a living’.”
After he began writing scripts, with the encouragement of his mother, Kolstad eventually plucked up the courage, around 1999, to move to Los Angeles, sleeping on a friend’s couch and trying to find a way – any way – into the industry. “Ultimately, you get into it through attrition,” he says, recalling that he got his break when he was asked to rewrite a script that paid him $2300 for a weekend’s worth of work. “That’s two months of rent.”
After dog-sitting one time, the notion for John Wick came to him. Named after his grandfather, it told the story of a former hitman, with a strict moral code, who goes on a rampage, pulled back into his old murderous ways after the death of his wife and the canine that she gave him. In Kolstad’s eyes, it was never a story about vengeance, though. “What I like about most westerns is that it’s not a revenge story. We call it that, but it’s a justice story.” Written in January 2013, the production was underway by October that year.
“When we had initially been out with the script before Keanu, my agent said, ‘Look, we got a bunch of offers and they’re pretty substantial, but I think we should take the least amount of money because they want to make it now’. The next step was getting a call from Keanu’s team, saying he wants to meet, and then meeting with [co-directors] Chad [Stahelski] and Dave [Leitch], and it was an ungodly amount of work that snowballed into this thing. To use a baseball idiom, we singled, right? But then when it went to VOD and DVD, it was a grand slam, and so that really started the career.”
If Reeves’ The Matrix rebooted sci-fi in 1999, John Wick did the same for action cinema, with the intricately coordinated gunplay (or ‘gun-fu’) stunning audiences, thanks to the work of former stunt coordinators Stahelski and Leitch. “They came in… everyone’s got their hidden notebook, their metaphysical notebook of things they’ve always wanted to do, and that gun-fu that they perpetrated there… they have been talking about it and trying to convince other people to do it for years, and so they were ready and raring to go.”
While Kolstad went onto script John Wick: Chapter 2 and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, he feels it wasn’t that franchise that truly made him. “To be honest, the one that really established the career was Nobody,” he says, alluding to the 2021 film with Bob Odenkirk as a hitman now living a mundane suburban life. “To Hollywood and the audience, it was like, ‘Oh, you can do it again’, but two, it’s a different movie, it’s a more humour, and it’s with Bob. He had just finished the first season of Better Call Saul when we were introduced. We’re still friends. I love that guy.”
Wisely, Kolstad also started producing with Normal, a way to exercise greater control over his work. “My grandpa always said, ‘You never want to be the smartest man in the room. And if you don’t know – listen’.” Time in production meetings was time well spent, as he learnt the ins and outs of the business that go far beyond dreaming up stories. “I was surrounded by numbers that you just begin to absorb,” he says.
Ever since, Kolstad has been building his own brand as a writer-producer. “I fucking love what I do, man. I get to write for a living, and now that you shift into producing gear, it’s a better chance of getting things made. I don’t want to get rich in development, I want to build wealth and actually make cool shit with cool people. Lance Reddick [the late actor, who played Charon in the John Wick franchise] was a good friend of our family, and he would always say that… and it’s true.”
Normal will be released in Australia this year.
