Early in the 2019 film “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum,” our hero enters what may be the world’s most peculiar dance studio. Part ballet academy, part dojo, the expansive space is also the Manhattan headquarters of the Ruska Roma, a Russian crime syndicate that first took in Wick when he was just a boy and taught him to kill. Onstage, a lithe danseuse is ordered by her instructor to perform pirouette after exhausting pirouette till she drops.
In “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina” (in theaters June 6), this small glimpse of the school is expanded tenfold. That spinning dancer, Eve, played by Ana De Armas, is now the star of the show. Over the course of the film, we get a closer look at the canvas of tattoos on her back and learn how she came to get them. We find out about the school’s traditions and initiations, as well as the Russian myths and legends that shape its mission.
Since this is a Wick film, we also get to watch Eve take out fearsome fighters with pots and pans, swords and knives, grenades and ice skates and flame throwers and car doors. There’s a lot to see. But with all that inventive mayhem going on, do viewers really need to know that, say, Eve’s spirit animal is the kikimora, a haglike creature from Slavic mythology?
For lovers of the franchise, the answer is a resounding yes, please. In online chats, fans debate such minutiae as exactly who is in the Ruska Roma (is Winston, the owner of the New York Continental Hotel, secretly a member?), while scholars debate the franchise’s folklore and economic systems in books like “The Worlds of John Wick: The Year’s Work at the Continental Hotel.”
“When we made the first Wick movie, we thought we were just making these background rules,” said Basil Iwanyk, one of the producers of “Ballerina.” “We had no idea the lore would become one of the above-the-title stars of the movies.”
With “Ballerina,” there’s even more lore, including new rites and mythological creatures and even a new rival clan. Audience demands for such things aside, there are practical reasons for constructing this fantastical world that Wick, and now Eve, inhabit, said Chad Stahelski, the director of the four Wick films and a producer of “Ballerina.”
“In what kind of action movie that’s grounded in reality can you kill 90 people in one scene?,” he said. At one point, Stahelski said, they were thinking of making the first John Wick movie a sci-fi picture to accommodate all of the fantastical stunts, “but we didn’t have the money for that. So we leaned more heavily into myth.”
The mythology begins with the Ruska Roma itself, a mix of the international networks of the Russian mafia, the nomadic traditions of the actual Ruska Roma, a subgroup of the Romani people; and, of all things, Oliver Twist. In the Wick version, the organization’s dance academy is like Fagin’s shoplifting school for wayward orphans, a training ground for ballerinas, bodyguards and assassins. “I love Oliver Twist,” Stahelski said.
In “Ballerina,” Eve is inducted into the Ruska Roma’s notoriously rigorous ballet school when she, like Wick, becomes orphaned as a child. The school shares a kinship with the 1977 Italian horror film “Suspiria” (in that film, the dance academy is actually a front for a coven of homicidal witches) and the Marvel superhero Black Widow, a former Russian superspy brainwashed into believing she trained at the Bolshoi Theater.
When Len Wiseman was called upon to direct “Ballerina” in 2019, he watched several documentaries about ballet to prepare. “You see the lovely, graceful performances, but the ballerinas are often performing in excruciating pain,” he said. “Their feet are bloody. So we thought that would be a good marriage of the kind of discipline you need for ballet transferring over to what you would need to be an assassin.”
The stand-in for the school’s campus is New York’s United Palace, a 1930s-era movie house reborn in Wick World as the Tarkovsky Theater. A nod to the Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky, the rebranding fits nicely into the film’s other Russian references and lore, from the Slavic folk tales to the smatterings of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” “Tarkovsky is one of my favorite directors,” Stahelski said. “The original ‘John Wick’ was actually based on a lot of Tarkovsky: ‘Stalker,’ ‘Mirror,’ all those films.”
As criminal training grounds go, the Tarkovsky is remarkably public facing, even to the point of having a theatrical marquee. Do ballet lovers walking along that stretch of Broadway ever wander in off the street? “I was wondering that myself,” said Wiseman.
There, Eve hears the legend of the kikimora, a figure from Slavic mythology that’s kind to the kindhearted, but a bane to scoundrels. The story is presented as something of a choice for Eve: Will she be a guardian angel, or a vengeful killer, or maybe something in between?
Sometimes appearing as an old woman with the beak of a chicken, the kikimora first came to Stahelski when he was working on the first “John Wick” movie. “In that film, we had John Wick being a kikimora, but we ended up not using it,” he said. “So we thought we’d bring it back for this one.”
A big part of the Ruska Roma lore are their tattoos, which signify all sorts of things, including rank, group membership (and, in some cases, banishment), who you are and who you’ve killed.
Eve has several, including one of a winged woman set against a crucifix in the middle of her back, and another across her shoulder blades that reads “Lux in Tenebris” (“light in darkness”), scripted in what looks like an ancient Roman calligraphy font, but isn’t. “We kind of made up that font,” Stahelski said. “We had our art department come up with something that sort of felt like ancient Roman, but was also kind of hip.”
The filmmakers also created a new rival crime organization for the film, a family-friendly cult of assassins who inhabit a gorgeous alpine village in Austria along with their spouses and kids.
Throughout the franchise, assassins have struggled mightily to juggle home and career, from Donnie Yen’s Caine to Halle Berry’s Sofia Al-Azwar to John Wick himself. Why can’t a killer have it all, the filmmakers wondered? “Here, you can be an assassin, but you can also fall in love, get married, have children,” Wiseman said. “You can have a full life.”
With at least one sequel in the works, the filmmakers are looking to further explore the lore behind the world of Wick.
“The mood boards that we put together for the films have everything from Maori face tattoos and etchings on knives to haircuts of Irish gangsters from the 1950s,” Iwanyk said. “It runs the gamut. So we’re looking at some of those things for months and months and ultimately we’re like, you know what? That’s really cool. Let’s put that into the movie.”
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