It's not hard to see how much the cinematic landscape has changed in the last 15 years. Record-breaking comic book movies dominate the box office, punctuated by the occasional Fast and Furious film. Keanu Reeves' John Wick is a huge property now, but it took a Fantastic Fest viewing to get executives excited about a small, low-budget action film with spartan VFX and a dense mythology, according to co-director David Leitch in an interview with Deadline.

"For [co-director Chad Stahelski] and I, [John Wick] was a struggle financially," Leitch said. "We were first-time directors, co-directing, but we were very cohesive in our vision of what we wanted. I think that we just knew with all the restrictions we had, we wanted to get real good material every day and stay true to the character and get the great performance out of Keanu, and just keep focused on that. Because at that financial level, for all the things that we wanted to do in our minds, we'd had second unit budgets that were bigger than this production’s budget and so our appetite was always to pushing the box out. We got the movie cut and edited, and we had a great editor who helped us carve out the story."

"We presented that movie to the buyers and..." Leitch began.

It's not hard to see how much the cinematic landscape has changed in the last 15 years. Record-breaking comic book movies dominate the box office, punctuated by the occasional Fast and Furious film. Keanu Reeves' John Wick is a huge property now, but it took a Fantastic Fest viewing to get executives excited about a small, low-budget action film with spartan VFX and a dense mythology, according to co-director David Leitch in an interview with Deadline.

"For [co-director Chad Stahelski] and I, [John Wick] was a struggle financially," Leitch said. "We were first-time directors, co-directing, but we were very cohesive in our vision of what we wanted. I think that we just knew with all the restrictions we had, we wanted to get real good material every day and stay true to the character and get the great performance out of Keanu, and just keep focused on that. Because at that financial level, for all the things that we wanted to do in our minds, we'd had second unit budgets that were bigger than this production’s budget and so our appetite was always to pushing the box out. We got the movie cut and edited, and we had a great editor who helped us carve out the story."

"We presented that movie to the buyers and..." Leitch began.