Pulling off a hall of mirrors is logistically a nightmare on film, though. You need to ensure that the camera crew isn’t in the shot, while also finding clear, readable action for the audience. It was very difficult back in 1973, when “Enter The Dragon” set its final conflict in a hall of mirrors. And that film directly inspired the same scene in “John Wick: Chapter 2”.
“[The mirror-room fight] is one of the first ideas I wrote down,” director Chad Stahelski told The Verge. “Didn’t even have a story yet, but I just went, ‘Yeah we’re going to re-do ‘Enter the Dragon.’ We’re going to do Bruce Lee and Mr. Han in the mirror room.’ That’s where it all came from. So, I was like, ‘How can I make a mirror room better?'”
Stahelski said the money folks behind the film tried to get him to go in another direction. Such a shoot would’ve eaten into the budget and been logistically difficult to pull off. Stahelski countered that the production of “John Wick” film is never about doing things the easy way.
“It’s like when you tell them you want to do a scene in the rain,” he added. “Everybody tries to talk you out of it, because it’s more expensive, it’s slower, everyone’s miserable. It’s like, ‘No, I think I want to do it.’ Why do it the easy way, right? That’s not the John Wick way.”
