Legendary filmmaker John Woo, master of Hong Kong action and Hollywood blockbuster excess, has finally returned to the States with a new, holiday-themed movie, Silent Night. This is his first American feature film in two decades, but even so, you won’t be hearing much English in it. In fact, you won’t be hearing any dialogue at all.
Written by Robert Archer Lynn, Silent Night (2023) follows the tragedy of Brian Godlock (Joel Kinnaman), a loving and devoted father and husband whose life is sent spiraling downward when his young son is caught in a gang’s crossfire and is unexpectedly killed on Christmas Eve. Silenced by a gunshot wound to the throat, Brian steadily devotes himself to a punishing training regimen to achieve his new life’s mission: avenging his son’s death.
John Woo takes an extremely simple and familiar revenge plot and makes it all his own, pushing his signature action style to the forefront by removing dialogue from his latest film altogether. The result is a wildly kinetic and intense vigilante flick with some of the best action set pieces of the year, and Joel Kinnaman is more than up to the task of being at the center of it all.
Having starred in films like the 2014 RoboCop reboot and The Suicide Squad as well as various television series including For All Mankind, The Killing, and Altered Carbon, Joel Kinnaman is no stranger to onscreen action. The Swedish actor trains with Chad Stahelski (John Wick) and his team at 87eleven and has had years of stunt and fight choreography experience, all of which he feels has culminated in portraying the mute punisher seeking vengeance in John Woo’s Silent Night.
We sat down with Joel Kinnaman to discuss his experience working with an iconic filmmaker like John Woo, the challenges of making a film with zero dialogue, and how the action of Silent Night pushed things just a little further.
Exclusive Interview with Joel Kinnaman for John Woo’s Silent Night
I had a ton of fun with Silent Night, which might be funny to say because this is a pretty brutal film here.
Joel Kinnaman: (Chuckles) Yeah, it is, indeed.
I guess the obvious question would be, what was it like to work with John Woo?
Joel Kinnaman: It was an epic experience. You know, a dream come true. I was very honored that John wanted to do this film with me. I learned so much. He is the master of the camera and to see him at work – just that level of visual storytelling that he brings and how he tells the story of each scene by moving the camera in a certain way, it was fascinating.
Have you ever done a role that’s quite like this, with minimal or no dialogue?
Joel Kinnaman: I don’t think it’s ever been done before. Out of like, big feature films, there are not many. I know that there was one released on Hulu this year that had very little dialogue [No One Will Save You]. But if you can point to a commercial feature film with zero lines of dialogue, I don’t think that it’s been done before, without it being a silent film.
So this was a big experiment in a way and some people were wondering, “But aren’t people going to get bored since there’s no dialogue?” But I think what John saw, and what we all hoped was that, like, in a lot of your favorite films, there are these long sequences, 20-minute sequences where there’s no dialogue, but those are still the parts of the film where you’re sitting at the edge of your seat. He wanted to make a whole film with that feeling. I think we got pretty close.
You’ve done tons of physically demanding roles and you’ve done a lot of different training in stunts, martial arts, knife training, guns, all of it. That all comes into play in Silent Night as well. Was there anything new to discover or challenge you on this project?
Joel Kinnaman: With the action, it was definitely taking everything a little further. And it was sort of a culmination of all these years of training that I’ve done with the same guys. I train with the same stunt crew in LA called 87eleven and they all train under Chad Stahelski, who is the director of John Wick, but he’s also a high-level martial artist that has like seven black belts. He’s a real-life assassin. Silent Night is sort of the culmination of my work with them and taking it to the next level, and also having me do a lot more of the dirtier aspects of the stunt work, like falling downstairs and so forth.
We also created this language in the fight sequences where we wanted it to feel more messy and ugly. We wanted them to feel like real fights and not so choreographed, like this move leads to that move. So we created these choreographed anchor points in the fights but then in between them, we had real scrambles where it would be improvised and there would be real struggles pulling and some punching. Mostly in the body, you know, we weren’t improvising so much with punches in the face because that can have dire consequences. So we were able to raise the intensity a little bit in some of these fight sequences.
