How John Wick's Sound Was Made: Luke Gibleon Q&A

If you've sat through the flamethrower sequence in Ballerina — the one most audiences didn't see coming, the one that ends in a fire-hose duel — you've sat through one of the most meticulously designed pieces of sound in recent action cinema. The flames themselves were real. The fire hose was real. The sound wasn't. It was built, layer by layer, by a team that understood something most people miss about cinema audio: fire recorded straight to tape sounds flat, washy, and uncinematic. Every scream in that scene, every hiss, every texture — the whole feeling that the screen might singe you if you touched it — was engineered.

Luke Gibleon was the sound supervisor on Ballerina and, before that, on The Continental. He was an apprentice on John Wick chapters 1 and 2, an editor on chapter 3, and a designer on chapter 4. In a conversation with Zebra Home Cinema, he walked through the craft of building action audio, the specific style the John Wick franchise has made its own, and why the jump from a standard cinema to a Dolby Atmos room isn't a marketing upsell — it's a change in the audience's actual relationship to the film.

The Path to John Wick — Wushu, Student Debt, and One Mentor

Gibleon trained in martial arts before he trained in film. Wushu kung fu (the traditional, competition-oriented form), tai chi, and a little sanshou kickboxing. He competed in men's advanced forms in Boston, taught entry-level classes for free, and kept at it through college. The discipline he's most drawn to is the most visually fantastical one — and it's the exact lineage that has most shaped contemporary martial-arts cinema.

"Wushu kung fu is a very beautiful and artistic form. It's just kind of fantastical to watch. And a lot of the inspiration for movie and TV shows we see is from more wushu-based artistic martial arts."

He moved to Los Angeles in 2007, which he calls almost the worst possible timing: he arrived with the writers' strike of 2007–08 about to collapse the industry. Years of near-homelessness followed. Massive student loans. A stretch working as an asset manager at a company that shut down, then a rejected relocation offer to Colorado, then a peritonsil abscess that put him in the ER for eight hours without health insurance.

What changed the trajectory was a relationship with Mark Steckinger, whom Gibleon had assisted on the Ben Affleck film Gone Baby Gone while still in college in Boston. When Formosa Group — one of the most influential post-sound houses in LA — was starting up, Steckinger opened the door. The first union film Gibleon worked on through that door was John Wick.

Four Films and Two Spin-offs — Growing Inside the John Wick World

Gibleon has a credit on every piece of the John Wick franchise. The role has evolved at roughly one step per film, which is an unusually clean arc for modern feature post-production.

The pattern matters because the John Wick universe is unusually coherent across films and spin-offs. Having one post-sound lineage — working with directors Chad Stahelski and Len Wiseman, designers like Casey (on the flamethrowers) and Andy (on music), and mentors like Mark Steckinger and Alan Rankin — means the sound of Wick is built inside a continuous craft conversation rather than reconstructed from scratch every release.

Gibleon's favourite sequence in the entire franchise, when pressed, is the museum knife fight in John Wick: Chapter 3 — where the case-glass-shattering sequence evolves into thrown axes, and then into a horse-stable chase. In Chapter 4 he handled the Japan section. Continental let him work in a more stylised, 70s-throwback register that Albert Hughes brought to the series. Ballerina, with fewer guns and more improvised weapons, let him design a broader palette of impact and prop sounds than any prior Wick film.

"Precision Violence" — The John Wick Sound-Design Philosophy

Most action filmmaking defaults to chaos — dense mixes, overlapping impacts, rumble as a primary emotion. The John Wick house style does almost the opposite.

"The style in which we work is called — I like to call it — precision violence. There could be a frame where we're just focusing really on one single element. And then on the next frame, we're focusing on another different element, and the other things are kind of getting pulled away from that. It's all to create dynamics and let everything breathe."

The craft is microscope-like. On one frame the mix brings up a single gunshot. On the next, a footstep. On the next, the clatter of a weapon against tile. The audience's attention is directed the way a camera directs the eye — by putting the sound element in focus and pulling the rest back.

This approach only works if the audio chain preserves the dynamic range. It's why John Wick mixes sound so different in a properly calibrated cinema than they do streamed at a compressed bitrate on a phone: dynamic range is the whole point. Compress the range and precision violence collapses back into wall-to-wall loudness.

How to Build a Flamethrower Sequence

The flamethrower duel in Ballerina is the production's most ambitious sound-design set piece. The sequence pairs an actual flamethrower (wielded by one performer) against an actual fire hose (wielded by another). Both are practical. Both were shot with real stunt performers and a safety choreography that Gibleon described in pure admiration.

The sound brief: make the audience feel the flames would burn them if they touched the screen.

That's a specific engineering problem. Fire recorded flat to a microphone sounds, as Gibleon put it, "washy really fast." It's high-frequency, relatively undifferentiated noise. By itself, no amount of volume makes it feel dangerous. To make a flamethrower feel like it's moving across the screen and threatening the audience, the mix has to build what the camera is seeing:

• ▪Texture layers. Crackle, pop, organic scream material — much of it captured and processed separately, then layered to fill the frequency range the raw flame can't.
• ▪Dynamics. Constantly shifting level so the sequence doesn't flatline into a wash of constant high-end.
• ▪Phase work. Gibleon referenced designer Casey's use of phase manipulation and even kid voices as a texture source — layered in subliminally to create harmonic complexity no recording of flame alone could deliver.
• ▪Music counterpoint. Music supervisor Andy pushed, pulled, EQ'd and filtered the score around the flame work so both had real estate to breathe.

The result is the rare action set-piece that survives repeat viewing at reference volume. At cinema volume in a room with calibrated immersive audio, it feels like being near something actually dangerous. That feeling is not an accident — it is the output of a deliberate, multi-disciplinary build.

Why Object-Based Audio Actually Matters

The question any home-cinema specifier hears at least once a week: is Dolby Atmos worth it? Gibleon's answer is the cleanest one we've heard.

"It makes it immersive — much more immersive than what you're going to get in a smaller, less channel-based format. And by doing so, it brings you closer to the screen. It brings you inside the world all that much more."

The technical explanation, in Gibleon's words: in a mix with a lot happening simultaneously, the sound team has to decide what the audience's attention should land on. Dialogue almost always has to live in the centre channel, on-screen. But any action scene carries many more elements than the centre channel can hold cleanly — music, effects, ambience, individual impacts.

In a 5.1 or 7.1 system, those elements pile up on a small number of fixed speaker positions. In a system with height channels and discrete object placement, the mixer can move specific elements off the screen, up into the room, across the listener's head — giving each element space to be heard without competing with the others.

"You can pull the music off the screen. You can pull other effects, especially as they move off the screen. Even the things that are happening, you can pull them slightly off-centre and slightly into the room. You're giving everything space to have its own place in the environment and therefore be heard."

A well-mixed Atmos track isn't showing off directional gimmicks. It's giving every element in the frame its own address in the room so that clarity — not volume — carries the story.

What Goes Wrong When Filmmakers Rely on Loudness

One of the quiet frustrations of any veteran sound designer is the audience belief that great action audio equals loud, rumbly, bass-heavy audio. Gibleon is direct on this point.

"Dynamics and space are huge factors in the work we do. Because if you don't have dynamics, everything just feels flat. And part of dynamics is your levels, but it's also silence. Sometimes it's when you can suck the things out, you can play sounds very subtly — it's not silent, but then the way we can use those sounds, we can focus on a single sound at any given time."

Precision violence is, in this sense, dynamic range violence. The shots that matter are loud because the surrounding frame is quiet. The impacts feel heavy because the moments before them were still. Whenever a home cinema or a multiplex leans on constant bass and constant volume, it is by definition destroying the contrast that makes the next moment impactful.

This is the technical argument for spending money on acoustic treatment, calibrated subwoofers, and a system with meaningful dynamic headroom. You are not buying the ability to play louder. You are buying the ability to play properly soft and then, for one frame, properly loud.

Martial-Arts Cinema Canon — What Sound Designers Actually Watch

Pressed on what he watches, Gibleon is unashamed about his canon:

• ▪Jet Li, especially Fist of Legend. Gibleon called the choreography "unmatched even today in some respects."
• ▪Gordon Liu. The Shaw Brothers lineage — especially the 36th/11th-chamber films.
• ▪Bruce Lee. The origin of martial-arts cinema as a global category.
• ▪Jackie Chan. Physical-comedy-through-combat — still the canon.
• ▪Tony Jaa in Ong-Bak. The Muay Thai mainstreaming that reshaped action choreography.
• ▪The Matrix. Gibleon singled it out as "one of the best sounding films altogether."
• ▪The Bourne Ultimatum. Specifically for how its fight sequences were cut and scored — he described picking up technique from it frame-by-frame.
• ▪The Raid and The Raid 2 (Gareth Evans). The Indonesian pencak-silat-led action style now leaking into Western blockbusters.

The through-line: all of these films are felt as much as heard. The sound work isn't about proving what the system can do. It's about pulling the viewer into the physical body of the action.

Gibleon specifically credited Chad Stahelski and David Leitch (the two former stuntmen who co-directed the first John Wick and have since branched out into Atomic Blonde, Bullet Train, Deadpool 2, and more) and their 87eleven stunt company for the fact that so much of this international influence has arrived inside mainstream Hollywood action over the last decade.

What's Next — Airbender, Highlander, and Nobody 2

Gibleon is currently working on Netflix's live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender — seasons two and three. Season two recently wrapped filming; season three has just started shooting.

Separately, Chad Stahelski is directing a reboot of Highlander, which Stahelski has been developing for years as a personal passion project. Gibleon was clear this isn't a generic franchise assignment:

"This isn't just some movie he's jumping on to. It's something that's been a passion project of his for years. He's been doing tons of pre-production work on it. Whenever that drops, it's going to be awesome."

Nobody 2 has also been shot and mixed — completed in Vancouver, with Mark Steckinger supervising. Expected release in the coming months.

Key Takeaways

• ▪Luke Gibleon has worked on every John Wick title from the first film to Ballerina and The Continental, rising from apprentice to sound supervisor over roughly a decade at Formosa Group in LA.
• ▪The John Wick sound-design style — Gibleon calls it precision violence — isolates single sonic elements frame-by-frame and lets dynamics (not loudness) carry the scene. This is a direct contrast to the wall-to-wall chaos most action audio defaults to.
• ▪The Ballerina flamethrower sequence is the team's most ambitious recent set piece. It pairs practical flame and fire-hose performances on screen with a densely engineered mix of crackle, texture layers, phase work, and layered voice material.
• ▪Dolby Atmos and object-based audio are not a marketing upsell. They give mixers the spatial real estate to separate dialogue, music, and effects so each element carries its own place in the room — clarity, not volume, carries the story.
• ▪Dynamic range is the fundamental currency of cinematic sound. A home cinema worth specifying isn't the one that plays loudest — it's the one that plays quietly with detail, then delivers one frame of properly loud impact.
• ▪The global canon of martial-arts cinema — Jet Li, Gordon Liu, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Tony Jaa, The Matrix, The Raid — is the lineage shaping mainstream Hollywood action today, carried into the West largely by the 87eleven stunt lineage around Chad Stahelski and David Leitch.
• ▪Upcoming: Avatar: The Last Airbender seasons 2 and 3 (Netflix), Chad Stahelski's Highlander reboot, and Nobody 2 (already mixed, imminent release).

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the sound designer on John Wick and Ballerina?

Luke Gibleon is the sound supervisor on Ballerina and The Continental. He has worked on every John Wick entry — as apprentice on Chapters 1 and 2, as editor on Chapter 3, as designer on Chapter 4, and as supervisor on the two subsequent spin-offs. He works out of Formosa Group in Los Angeles, having been mentored into the role by Mark Steckinger.

What is "precision violence" in John Wick's sound design?

It's Gibleon's term for the franchise's signature sound-design approach: isolating a single sonic element (one gunshot, one footstep, one impact) per frame and letting the surrounding audio recede so the isolated element carries the moment. The result is an action mix that reads as clean and choreographed rather than chaotic and muddy.

How was the Ballerina flamethrower sequence designed?

Both the flamethrower and the fire hose in the sequence are practical — real flame and real water on stunt performers. The sound, however, was built in layers: crackle and pop textures, phase-manipulated elements, processed voice material, and constantly shifting dynamics, with the music pushed and pulled around the effects so both could breathe. The brief was to make the audience feel the flames would burn them if they touched the screen.

Why does Dolby Atmos make a real difference in a home cinema?

Because object-based audio gives the mixer space. Dialogue has to live in the centre, on screen. Music, effects, ambience and individual impacts can be placed elsewhere in the room — above, behind, to the sides — so each element has its own address and isn't competing for clarity with everything else. In a 5.1 system, all those elements pile up on a handful of speakers and muddy each other. In a properly specified Atmos room, they don't.

What's the single most underrated factor in cinema-grade audio?

Dynamic range. The ability to play soft with detail, then briefly loud, is what makes an action sequence feel powerful. Systems that run loud all the time destroy the contrast that gives impact its weight. This is why Gibleon values acoustic treatment and calibrated dynamics over raw volume or bass.

What films inform the John Wick sound team's craft?

Jet Li (especially Fist of Legend), Gordon Liu and the Shaw Brothers tradition, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Tony Jaa's Ong-Bak, The Matrix, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Gareth Evans's The Raid films. The common thread is action that is felt as much as heard — choreography where sound, cut, and image all carry their share of the storytelling.

Is there a Nobody 2? When is it out?

Yes. Nobody 2 has been shot and mixed in Vancouver, with Mark Steckinger supervising. A theatrical release is expected soon.