When Chad Stahelski, best known as the driving force behind the “John Wick” franchise, was in high school he volunteered with his local fire department. Over the years the images from that experience stuck in his head, and the former stuntman started to dream up an action sequence involving lots and lots of fire.
“I’m like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I combined fire and water, and we had a flamethrower fight?” Stahelski, a producer of “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina,” said in a video interview. “Two guys with flamethrowers and they are going to shoot each other.” Watching an early cut of “Ballerina” he realized he had the ideal vehicle for his fire dreams: It would be a showstopper for the star assassin, Eve, played by Ana de Armas.
“How do I make her look smart? How do I make her look badass? It wasn’t about fighting more guys,” he said. “It’s like, OK, let’s give her something that really shows a skill set. And that’s when we went to fire.”
The result is a bravura third-act set piece in which Eve torches her enemies in an Alpine village, going flamethrower to flamethrower with a massive villainous henchman named Dex (Robert Maaser). Instead of using digital flames, “Ballerina,” directed by Len Wiseman, mostly went for the real thing. According to Stahelski, 90 to 95 percent of the fires onscreen are “unenhanced real burns.”
To accomplish this, Stahelski called in an expert in the world of movie fire, the stuntman Jayson Dumenigo, who developed a long-lasting protective burn gel for stunt performers that recently won him an honor from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Even Dumenigo was skeptical they could accomplish what Stahelski had in mind when he first heard the pitch.
“I’ve been doing fire for a really long time and some of these ideas, we didn’t think they would be able to be done in real life,” he said. “A lot of them would maybe have to be done in the computer.”
But once Dumenigo and the assembled team got to the shooting location of Budapest they started to figure out the materials at their disposal. Stahelski described the process as like a “physics experiment.”
“Military grade flamethrowers almost fire in napalm,” Stahelski said. “It’s meant that the gel sticks to you so it can kill you. We wanted stuff that doesn’t kill you. We wanted a certain kind of fuel and pressure that looked violent, sounded violent but as soon as the fuel hits it burns super fast.”
A typical propane flamethrower was “not that spectacular,” Dumenigo said, so the production mostly used a type of flamethrower they called “the dragon,” with 80 percent gasoline and 20 percent isopropyl alcohol. It burned at 4000 degrees.
“It held up to its name,” Dumenigo said.
They also occasionally used a flamethrower with dry spores as its fuel source, which made it more manageable on costumes than liquid or hot gas.
Stahelski explained they also tested at what range they could hit the stuntmen and the special wardrobe to use. The costumes were rendered in Nomex, a fabric that wouldn’t melt. In the film, Eve puts on a jacket to protect herself. It was “heavily treated with fire retardant material,” Stahelski said.
It was only after the period of preparation that de Armas entered the picture, and although she had already undergone training for the movie’s many fights, the flamethrower proved a new challenge.
“No one just picks up a flamethrower and lights a human on fire and doesn’t feel weird,” Stahelski said. “So the first time we had Ana light somebody up, it shocked her.”
Wiseman said at one point de Armas had to take a break because she was crying. Eventually she got the hang of it.
“Her energy went from a nervousness when testing it out and just feeling comfortable with it to the point where she was just bringing excitement,” Wiseman said. “After the take she’s laughing, going, ‘This is amazing.’ There’s an adrenaline that she definitely got.”
There were also safety precautions on set, with ambulances and a burn unit at the ready, as well as protective gear for those behind the scenes.
“It looks like a SWAT team of cameramen with their shields and everything,” Wiseman said.
The one thing the team couldn’t keep safe all the time? The cameras. In one instance, Dumenigo had to take on the role of the cameraman for a P.O.V. shot in a tunnel they called the “crematorium.” They did the best they could to protect the equipment, but it was futile.
“The poor camera,” Dumenigo said. “Imagine eight people in a little mine shaft and this beast that is just billowing fire at us and I’m holding the camera, and it burned up the camera.”
He isn’t sure whether the shot made it or not.
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