Imagine that life on earth exists in a state of détente, a balance between the forces of good and evil scrupulously maintained through the ages. Humans choose their own paths in this realm and, in doing so, seal their fates for the realm beyond; some bound for heaven and some for hell.
As part of this divine wager for all the souls in the world, both God and the devil are restricted from direct contact with the human race and its free will but are allowed a measure of influence through intermediaries. Neither fully angels nor demons, these earthbound influence peddlers are best described as half-breeds. "Suppose you were very good in life, or very bad. They wrap your soul up in human skin and send you back on missions," explains John Constantine, a man who has literally been to hell and back.
In ordinary bodies these half-breeds slip freely through the human population, doing their work. They share the roads, hold jobs, engage in myriad relationships with their human hosts and no one is the wiser. "They look just like us," says Constantine director Francis Lawrence. "You could live side by side with them, maybe even be married to one of them or be friends with them and never know it."
But John Constantine can see them.
Since childhood, he's had the unique ability - he would call it a curse - to recognize these beings for what they truly are beneath their fragile tissue of disguise. He sees their true faces, either beatific or demonic. Driven to suicide, in his youth, by this terrifying burden that no one understood, Constantine hoped for the peace it would bring but got instead a 2-minute tour of the depths of hell, a nightmare beyond imagination, before being resuscitated and snapped back into life.
Since that moment, he's known the hellish fate that awaits him when his life on earth is ended, and has been trying desperately to change it. Finding the traditional path to salvation closed to him, he resolves to earn entrance to heaven by waging war on the demon half-breeds on earth. An expert in demonology and black magic as well as an accomplished con man when he wants to be, Constantine uses sacred relics as weapons, along with his wits, his fists and anything else at his disposal to send countless hordes back to the underworld in shreds.
But he is an unlikely hero. Spurred not by any benevolent intention, he battles evil only to buy his way into a heaven that is closed to him, and grows increasingly cynical as these efforts have no effect.
Constantine's strange circumstances and embittered attitude are part of what attracted Keanu Reeves to the story and its title role. "It is one of the best scripts I've read," he says. "It has humour, intelligence, vitality, and I especially appreciated how everything was not obvious. There's mystery and contradiction. Constantine himself has a strong sense of morality yet his ethics are a little blurry. He's trying to right some wrongs but he doesn't always go about it in the nicest way. He's an anti-hero I've never seen before."

TRANSITION FROM COMIC BOOK TO FILM
Producer Lauren Shuler Donner was instrumental in helping John Constantine make his transition to the big screen from the pages of the DC Comics/Vertigo "Hellblazer" series of graphic novels. Shuler Donner, whose credits during her more than 20 years in the industry include the
international box-office phenomenon X-Men and X2, was captivated by the character's extraordinary circumstances and distinct attitude. She saw the property's dramatic potential as a feature film. "It was immensely appealing," she says. "Intelligent, thrilling, a good story with an anti-hero at its core; the kind of movie in which the completely unexpected happens."
After successfully pitching the project to Warner Bros. Pictures, for which she has produced a number of high-profile films including the Oliver Stone drama Any Given Sunday and the critically acclaimed romantic comedy Dave, Shuler Donner focused on developing a script for Constantine with screenwriter Kevin Brodbin (The Mindhunters) and producer Michael Uslan. Uslan, with partner Benjamin Melniker, also a producer on Constantine, have a long-standing collaborative association with premiere genre publisher DC Comics through which they previously helped bring the blockbuster Batman film franchise to life.
Brodbin, a huge fan of the source material (Vertigo's longest-running monthly series with over 200 issues and 15 graphic novels published) had long harboured a desire to write a script for the character and took the adaptation very seriously, emphasizing that, "the most important thing was to be true to Constantine's voice" - an essential point on which the filmmakers agreed, as did screenwriter Frank Cappello, who later joined the project and likewise drew heavily upon the character's origins for guidance.
Based on the originality of the developing concept Shuler Donner presented, producer/writer Akiva Goldsman next joined the Constantine filmmaking team.
A successful producer, Goldsman is equally renowned for his screenplays, among them The Client and A Beautiful Mind, so it's no surprise that it takes a strong story to capture his attention.
"It's impossible for me to work on something unless it's fun as well as creatively and imaginatively engaging," he admits. "Constantine presents an idea I've always found compelling and have wrestled with in my own work - that of the world behind the world, what might exist beyond what we can see."
John Constantine's identity and his attitude are inseparable from his situation; as the circumstances of his life compel him, he forges ahead with a single focus. "What I love about this character is that there's an inevitability to his failure and yet he's willing to keep pushing and trying to figure out another way," says Lorenzo di Bonaventura, for whom Constantine marks his debut as an independent producer following an impressive tenure as head of production at Warner Bros. Pictures. "It's not the kind of indomitable spirit that usually connotes a heroic venture; it's the indomitable spirit of a man who knows he's not going to win but plays as hard as he can anyway."
"This is a man who walks both sides, light and dark," Shuler Donner describes the complex title character. "He's not evil; the life he took, after all, was his own. But he's not all good either. Deep inside, I think he's just a guy who's had a very hard life and yet he's smart enough to have a sense of humour about it, which is one of the reasons we wanted Keanu Reeves because we knew he could pull that off. He can strike those balances and give us the sense of depth that defines Constantine."
"He's fighting the system," adds Erwin Stoff, Constantine producer and Reeves' long-time professional collaborator. "John Constantine clearly doesn't want to go to hell but he believes it's his actions that should decide his fate, not someone's technical reading of the rules. He's a guy who, above all, cannot tolerate unfairness and hypocrisy and it's the unfairness and hypocrisy he observed early in his life as well as his current situation that has hardened him to the degree that he is."
Stoff felt so strongly about the Constantine script that he forwarded it to Reeves while the actor was in Sydney on production for The Matrix Revolutions and his instincts proved correct. "He fell in love with the character," Stoff recalls. "He liked that fact that even though this had the potential to be a great, fun, epic-scale movie with amazing effects, at its center was a story about a man's struggle with hypocrisy, with good and evil, and with what's wrong in the world."
Adds Melniker, "This is a unique individual who defies description. There's an enduring mystery about him. It's not commonplace; it's not likely that people will say, 'I've seen this before.'"
Uslan, whose youthful passion for comic books led to an early job writing for genre fanzines and a lifetime of avid collecting, believes that familiarity with the graphic novels is not a prerequisite to enjoying the screen story or appreciating the punch of Constantine's personality for the first time. Having watched the character evolve for years in print he feels the film captures its essence in ways that count the most: namely, "mood, attitude and point of view. One of the great things about this story and these characters is that there is absolutely no black or white. As we learn to our horror, everything in life is grey. No matter how human someone appears there might be demons lurking within. When someone taps you on the shoulder you never know quite what you're going to see when you turn around."

FINDING THE RIGHT DIRECTOR
Francis Lawrence, known for his award-winning direction on videos for some of the most dynamic acts in the music industry, has developed an expertise for recognizing the vital elements of a story and gauging their visceral impact. A film noir devotee, he says, "it was the character of John Constantine, the anti-hero, and the tone of the story, that attracted me immediately. The world he inhabits is unique and the story moves into places that were entirely unexpected."
Intrigued, Lawrence researched the source material extensively, developed original sketches and ideas for the project and threw his hat into the ring as the production team was considering directors. He hit them like a bolt of lightning.
"If I could create one lie that I could tell for the rest of my career, I would say that it was entirely my decision to hire Francis," Goldsman candidly confesses. "This guy is the real thing - he's so good he's scary."
Contrary to the producers' expectations, considering Lawrence's background, he did not approach the material from a visual perspective. "His talent with visuals was certainly apparent but when we had our first meeting he talked for two hours about the script and the characters and never once mentioned the look," recalls di Bonaventura.
"Usually, when directors are making the transition from the video or commercial world they lean heavily on the visuals because it's what they've been doing, so this was already staggeringly different than anything I had experienced in more than 13 years at the studio. More than anything, we were impressed with his ability to analyse the fundamentals of a scene."
When it came to the imagery itself, Lawrence was more than prepared. "Francis arrived at our meeting with his drawings. In this business, of course, that means instead of coming in with your resume, in a suit and tie, you arrive in flip-flops with your 25 sketches of hell," Goldsman remembers. "I was immediately taken by his idea that heaven and hell coexist with our world, and that when you pass from this spot in our world you should be in this exact same room in hell. He was very specific about the geography. It was a brilliant idea, it gave the unimaginable a new imagining and completely captured what the movie was about."
Lawrence sought to present the landscape of the underworld in a new way. "I thought about the ways in which I'd seen it depicted in art, in the paintings of Bruegel and Bosch, or so often in an abstract way, like a black oily void. The images were nothing you could relate to. I wanted to give it a recognizable structure. So when Constantine is in Angela's apartment and he momentarily crosses over into hell, it's the hell version of her apartment that he's in; when he goes out into the street it's the hell version of Los Angeles. That makes it an environment that people can easily imagine touching and seeing."
He went on to provide detailed descriptions of the various demons and spirits that inhabit the story and offered casting choices that proved right on the mark. "What was interesting," says Stoff, "is that a tremendous number of the ideas Francis proposed in his very first meeting came to fruition."
The director's willingness to imagine things in a fresh way was the perfect approach for a story in which nothing is clearly black or white and the characters are anything but conventional: a hardened police detective looking for hope in the paranormal; an angel representing God on Earth while promoting a personal agenda; a priest unable to perform exorcisms; an entrepreneur who runs a nightclub for both sides….and in the middle of it all, a hero who doesn't want to be a hero. As screenwriter Frank Cappello describes, "Here's a guy who has his problems with God. Loathes the devil. He fights the most hideous demons and yet he cannot escape his own bad habits, like smoking, which is literally killing him. Ultimately he's a man trying to save himself, not the world."
"This is a movie where not everything is neatly explained," says Goldsman. "The attempt was not to create full comprehension in the mind of the audience but to give them an experience." Equally important, adds di Bonaventura, is that, "it doesn't preach or try to convince you of anything. It allows you to have a simple entertainment on one level and then, perhaps, an intellectual, emotional or philosophic conversation. Let us scare you first, and you can consider the more profound questions later."

CAST AND CHARACTERS
Cast as the anti-hero John Constantine, Keanu Reeves played a part in developing the screen character, as Goldsman relates. "He just became Constantine so fully during the development process and rehearsals that a lot of the lines that ended up in the film just emerged from him. He obviously loved the role." Director Lawrence notes the depth of darkness that "Keanu was able to pull up from deep within and bring to the forefront to play this role. The sarcasm is natural and believable, and indicative of how Constantine views the world. You really see how this man is haunted inside and out."
With Constantine, attitude is paramount, a concept Reeves fully embraced. "Attitude defines Constantine," says di Bonaventura. "Call it irreverence, fatalism, irony, bravado; it's unmistakable." Adds Reeves, "Constantine literally knows how the world works and he doesn't like it."
Clearly, what he does best is not a job he ever wanted, though it garners him a fair amount of pride, and that contradiction laid upon all the rest just adds to his trademark cynicism. Although, as Stoff remarks, "it's often true that the most hard-boiled cynics are people who were once incredibly romantic and idealistic and have had their hopes and ideals crushed."
Constantine is also abidingly rude and anti-social, which is part of the pleasure of portraying him, Reeves reveals. Describing the scene in which he turns Angela away when she comes for help, he says, "He's just not in the talking mood. Plus, he doesn't like people getting close to him because they tend to die so he's more comfortable keeping his distance." The fact that Constantine later catches sight of a demon pursuing the departing detective and rushes to her aid Reeves finds questionable and typical of his character's enigmatic nature. "Is his help self-serving, in whole or in part? Because it turns out, as Constantine suspects, this woman is somehow intricately involved in the recent escalation in demon activity and the larger plot behind it all that he's trying to figure out. Is he helping Angela, as any of us would, simply because she's in trouble, or is it just part of his big plan to save himself?"
Overall, "John Constantine is the most reluctant hero I'd ever come across," states Brodbin. "He's not doing things to be a nice guy or to be a hero. He doesn't want to care about people because all it does is bring him pain. If he could cut that part of him out he would."
"He definitely has an heroic arc," says Goldsman. "But he goes kicking and screaming about it."   Read more about the cast