Keanu Reeves’ violent BRZRKR comic could be a ‘metaphor for his whole life’

There is little room to read between the lines BRZRKR, John wick and Matrix Actor Keanu Reeves’ first stab in a comic. Divide time between the past, where a half god child is born into a tribe of prehistoric people only to become a murderous and unkillable savior, and 80,000 years later in the present, where “B” exists as a hitman for The US government, the book is a high-impact blood-soaked character study with graphic ambition. Writer Matt Kindt (MIND MGMT) and artist Ron Garney (Ghost Rider) suggest that their Hollywood collaborator intertwined B’s story with his own personal story, but what the trio have literally put on the page is viscerally satisfying: If B isn’t tearing people apart in an old battle zone, he’s getting getting into a violent tale of her own making, frustrated by the answers offered by the mortal plane. Reeves, Kindt and Garney package each painting in detail.

BRZRKR struck a chord with discerning comic book fans after its debut in February earlier this year. After raising $ 1.5 million on Kickstarter, the book became BOOM! Studios is the biggest title ever and one of the best-selling and best-selling comics in years. The rights were quickly seized by Netflix, which intends to turn it into a movie and an anime series. One can imagine with two timelines and 80,000 years of potential history to cover, there is a lot for me. And since B was drawn to look like Reeves, casting a live-action version of the character shouldn’t be too difficult either.

With BRZRKR Vol. 1 now on the shelves, compiling the first four issues of the monthly publication (and BRZRKR # 5 out now), Polygon spoke to Reeves, Kindt, and Garney via video call to reminisce about the initial conception of the book, how love for Wolverine and awkward questions about violence helped them tell a story suitable for the comics, and where B’s story is heading in the future.

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Keanu, I know BRZRKR came about because BOOM! He approached you to make a comic, but was this an idea that you had in your head for a long time?

Keanu Reeves: Yes, about three or four years ago I met BOOM! Studies for general meeting. They were taking part of their comic book IP and trying to do some live action. So I went to meet them and they said, “What’s going on?” I said I had this idea of ​​a character, Berserker, those kinds of chest punches, ripping arms, etc. And they said, “Great, we like that. Do you want to make a comic? Have you ever thought about making a comic? “And I said,” No. “And they said,” Would you like it? “And I said,” Yeah, that would be great. “So they started trying to team up to create it. And here we are.

Action is key to the character: B is a murderer, and the spectacle of his brutality really weighs on him. How did they come together to choreograph and design the series’ fights?

Reeves: When we talk about sequences, we think about them, we invent them, we create them. Matt writes it down and we turn it over to Mr. Garney. And then his creative genius comes into play.

Matt Kindt: Violence is often dictated by the environment, such as where we are and what we are doing. Are there horses? Or are they tanks? Are we in a museum? Are we in another place? So a lot of times it’s about context, and then I’ll try, but then we’ll go back and forth. Keanu has acted things before, where he says “This!” Or that! “He’s got the physical part down. I’m just writing about it. It’s a good matchup.

Keanu, I’m a huge fan of a documentary you directed years ago called Side to side, which delved into the cinematographic image and the nuance between cinema and digital processes. You’re doing a comic now, so I wonder if you’re thinking about what makes the medium unique when you’re imagining pieces. Is the team coming up with scenes that could only be done by a comic?

Kindt: Do you remember the music scene at number five or six? But it’s like B is talking about music and why people make it. It is this whole sequence that we talked about for a long time. Where does the music come from? And why do people do it and like that, the meaning and purpose of music. But then the way it’s drawn and laid out and like with the words on top, that’s something that will be difficult to do in anything other than the comics.

Reeves: I’d go back and say maybe that’s montage, right?

Ron Garney: It would be interesting to try to get the piece out with the music. [in a film]. I used the edges of the panel to put the actual musical score of the Etta James song there. I was able to see how you can do something like that and have it run and dissolve in the background or something.

Kindt: There’s another sequence where we show the different relationships he’s had with women, different people, and then the timelines are side by side. And then some of them stop and some of them continue.

Reeves: I’d say it doesn’t really become an image problem. It becomes a narrative aspect. With comics, you can hold more balls in the air at the same time. You can play with different perspectives in a way that in the cinema can be disorienting or become a work of art in a museum and not a popular work.

Kindt: The great thing about comics is that you can see them all at once. And you can see the spatial relationships between different images, whereas in the movies, it is a line that continues forward. This allows readers to explore it and look around.

Garney: Ang Lee tried to experiment with that in Helmetand it was quite successful.

Image: Rob Garney / Boom Studios

The gore in BRZRKR it is excessive and showy. How do you walk the line to keep it witty?

Reeves: It is impressionistic. But yeah, we just set the table and Ron Garney goes and creates a meal.

Garney: That seems to be the only thing that catches everyone’s attention: everyone is shocked by the violence. I’m a bit surprised I guess, considering the super violent weather in movies and video games and things like that. But I think the difference, which points to what we just said about the difference between video games and movies, is that in a comic you have to pause. [the violence], it’s there. You just sit back and it installs. Whereas when you’re watching it happen in John Wick, for example, it moves very fast, so you don’t have the mind that doesn’t settle on the picture for an extended period of time. weather.

Reeves: So when we were working on that, I would say that the momentum or the foundation is the context and the emotion that is happening there. And at the same time, it is a comment.

Kindt: People are not used to seeing comics with such violence. That’s part of what we needed to have because the other part is B’s reaction, his way of dealing with this violence. We need readers to feel it and see it, so that we can see it struggling with the same things that we, as consumers of violence, should feel as well. Why do we love it? I love violent movies, but …

Garney: What they did, which was really good, was a moment when he gave himself up. He leaves town, behind his mother. But then you break down the fourth wall and he just looks at us. Just let it happen to him and it’s immensely sad. It’s kind of a balance to all the violence we’ve witnessed with him. Sadness is so much like that.

I couldn’t help but think a lot about Wolverine, who is basically unkillable but capable of dealing with so much violence. B has so much to do, and having been around for thousands of years, his struggle is even more dense. Keanu, were you considering the character of Wolverine when conceiving BRZRKR?

Reeves: I mean, for me, he’s one of my favorite characters. It has a great influence on me, it has impacted me. But we’re also getting into werewolves and vampires, so we’re trying to embrace other legacy and traditional fable myth characters that we have, and put their own spin on it. We spend a lot of time with this character and try to get people to understand how he thinks and feels and what happened to him in a detailed way that we don’t usually experience except for a few novelizations, but even then the monster is always on the side.

Now I’m just thinking that you would have been a good Wolverine.

Reeves: Oh man, I would have loved to play Wolverine.

What’s behind the decision to make B look like you?

Reeves: [Laughs] I cannot say that I am innocent of any ego there. It was a discussion: how much do you want him to look like you? Or do you want me to? And I said, “Yes, yes.”

Kindt: The funny thing is, yeah, there is a superficial part where he looks like you, but there are a lot of you in this book that I don’t think people know about. There are more of you in this than I have seen in anything else.

Garney: I made that same comment to Keanu recently. I said, “Look, I’m doing this 12 hours a day, so I have Keanu in my brain 12 hours a day.” And it has been revealing itself to me as a metaphor for his entire life actually.

Keanu, is BRZRKR a metaphor for your whole life?

Reeves: No man, it’s a work of art!

First BRZRKR The collection is the themes that set the stage for the premise. What’s Next?

Reeves: So the first arc is an origin story from the past and an origin story from the present. And in the second arc, we’re going to look more at the present, but we’ll also see more of what’s inside the character, talking about love and pain, but then we’ll also explore some of the new aspects of the character. Maybe go to something in the world of the gods.

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