Keanu Reeves gets honest about film-making: 'Very tough'

Keanu Reeves has starred in over a dozen films but admits filmmaking is a tough business.

Appearing at Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival, the John Wick star was promoting his novel The Book of Elsewhere, which he co-wrote with China Miéville.

During the conversation, he was asked whether he would play the lead character in his book—an immortal warrior named B—in a film.

The Toy Story 4 star response was that the character is “very personal” to him and that he would “love to play the character.”

However, the questions did not stop there. The journalist Samira Ahmed, who was moderating the session, probed further, asking whether a movie was being made.

Answering yes, Keanu noted the hurdles in the filmmaking business, saying that “movies are tough to get made.”

Explaining the likely movie ideas further, he said, “One of the ideas for me, from the very beginning, was to take this character and this world and have other mediums and other artists tell these stories. In the comics, we’ve had different writers and different artists work on them, and in the novel, we worked with China.”

“With the film, we are working with a writer called Mattson Tomlin and we have a director’s draft."

"So, I’m interested in letting other artists play with the material and see what we can create. Hopefully, some cool stuff can come out of it," Keanu concluded.