Gun safety on set has become a major topic of conversation in the wake of the “Rust” tragedy, in which cinematographer Halyna Hutchins died after a prop gun misfired. And while such incidents are rare, Hutchins’ example was unfortunately not the first time someone was fatally injured by a prop gun during filming. Perhaps the most infamous example would be Brandon Lee, who in 1993 was killed while filming “The Raven” after being shot with a .44 caliber round that should have been a blank.
And there are many more examples of accidents on the set. In 2016, the Associated Press reported that 43 people have died on film sets in the US since 1990, with at least 150 more suffering “life-changing injuries.” The report doesn’t break out how many of those were firearms-related, but it does note that despite these alarming numbers, “accidents on set remain largely hidden and the consequences typically run into thousands of dollars in fines paid from billions of dollars.” budgets”.
But for Chad Stahelski, the issue of gun safety couldn’t be more important. The former stuntman was hired to double for Brandon Lee in “The Crow” following the actor’s untimely death and had been friends with Lee for five years before the incident. When Yahoo met with Stahelski in 2019, he talked about how many of the safety precautions in the John Wick movies “arise because of [Lee’s] accident,” and how “there’s nothing you can point fingers at, it was just a lot of silly little mistakes that shouldn’t have happened.” It seems like those mistakes ensured that Stahelski never forgot the importance of on-set safety, especially when it came to from the John Wick movies with lots of guns.
