JoJo (Jonathan) Eusebio is making his feature film directing debut with Love Hurts. As a veteran stunt coordinator and fight coordinator, his film credits include some of the greatest action movies of the past decade including Black Panther, The Avengers, the John Wick films, and The Matrix Resurrections. He also served as the second-unit director on Deadpool 2, Violent Night, and Birds of Prey.
Hey Jonathan, my name is Neil. I’m with Dorkaholics. We believe that there’s a dork in everyone, and our job is to bring that dork out into the world.
Jonathan Eusebio: That’s the best. Nice to meet you, buddy. I was a dork growing up, so it’s okay.
Beautiful. That’s the question I love to ask. What made you a dork growing up?
Jonathan Eusebio: You know what? I just kind of followed my dream. It’s funny. I grew up watching martial art movies, reading comics, and watching anime. So my buddies after school, they’re playing football and baseball and I would always run home like, you know, we’ll hang out till, you know, till the sun went down, but I would always go home to watch martial art movies, read, comics and watch anime. So they always kind of made fun of me that way.
But now you’re living the dream you’ve worked on the John Wick films, you’re blending both dorky interests as well as martial arts and filmmaking.
Jonathan Eusebio: I mean, again, that’s what I’m saying. I’m doing the stuff that I grew up with. So I think that’s the important thing. That sensibility has always kind of been there.
I know people have been saying that Love Hurts is this perfect blend of like East meets West and the filmmaking as well as the arts. Um, what can you say about being, this being your directorial debut and how that kind of manifested? Whether it was like, where in the filmmaking process?
Jonathan Eusebio: Well, I’ll say this. I grew up really watching a lot of Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest movies. I was in love with those kinds of 80s Hong Kong action movies. So that’s all it would do all day is watch those movies and, and copy and emulate it. So again, my sensibility for action is from those movies. And then when I became a stuntman, when I was choreographing kind of action scenes or choreographing fight scenes, you know, that influence has always been there always. I’ve always wanted to combine Eastern action cinema with Western storytelling.
I mean, that definitely shows throughout this film. So the film was called Love Hurts. So I gotta ask, what did you love the most about making this film? And what hurt you the most, whether in your head, in your heart, your body?
Jonathan Eusebio: I grew up in the action background. That’s like a safety zone for me and I’m used to it. But you know, the stuff that I really enjoyed was doing the emotional scenes with the actors. I feel it allows me to spread my wings and it’s just a different zone for me in terms of how I became a filmmaker, like what I experienced as a person in film.
Talk about that, that process of going from someone very focused on like the action scenes film to now having to incorporate like the character arcs, the emotional journeys, these characters undergo, how, how did you start to approach that from, from, from actually background?
Jonathan Eusebio: I was like telling people for me as a second unit director you’re operating under a group of rules of the universe that are given to you. But when you become the main unit director you have to create all of that stuff and make decisions that kind of go. Keep the ball rolling per se. And I would say as an action director, it’s different too. So when you (work as) a main unit director that’s a whole different process. You have to let your cast do their process and really get to the emotional journey of the character and me as a director, I can guide it to a certain way that it oversees the whole story, but what they emote and how they feel is really inside of them. Do you know what I mean? So I just have to know the processes to make the performance feel authentic.
Catch Love Hurts in theaters now.
