The successful “Jack Ryan” TV series concluded its run on Prime Video in 2023, but John Krasinski and crew are back in their jump to feature-length format with “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War.” While the movie comes three years after the show ended, the team has been working on it pretty much since the show ended.
“It was born out of the end of the series,” director Andrew Bernstein – who directed several episodes of the series and makes his feature debut with “Ghost War” – told TheWrap.
“John loves Jack Ryan, he loves playing him, he loves the world of Jack Ryan, as we all do, and he was like, ‘I want to tell this in a different way and I have some ideas about story that fit more into a movie than a lengthy TV series,’” the filmmaker explained. So the show ended, and a movie was born.
Krasinski co-wrote and stars in “Ghost War,” which finds Ryan working a civilian job only to be pulled back into the CIA when James Greer asks his old friend for a favor.
Bernstein said it was exciting to take expand this iteration of the franchise to feature film format, joining the legion of classic Jack Ryan films starring Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford that launched the series back in the 1990s. One difference, though: “Ghost War” skipped theaters.
The filmmaker said the decision to forego a theatrical release was an Amazon one, and he and the team were “sad” about the decision, but he’s still happy to finally get this long-in-the-works feature film out there. Read our full interview below.
How did this come about? Because it felt rather quick after the series wrapped.
It’s been a long process. It hasn’t come about quickly at all. We’ve obviously been making this movie for about two years because it’s a huge movie, but it was born out of the end of the series. Everyone liked working together. We love the character, John loves Jack Ryan, he loves playing him, he loves the world of Jack Ryan, as we all do, and he was like, “I want to tell this in a different way and I have some ideas about story that fit more into a movie than a lengthy TV series. We thought the next extension was let’s see if we can turn this into a movie, which was an exciting thing for all of us to do. We did the TV show, we kind of ended it where we wanted to. Now, we needed to make sure we had an idea that worked in the film format that wasn’t just an extension of the TV series, which is what we really did not want to do. We love the TV series, we love what we did, but we wanted to figure out something that felt like a movie. So it’s been a long process.
So you wanted to make sure it didn’t feel like just a couple episodes strewn together, what did you guys come up with as like the do’s and don’ts of how do you practically do that?
It was many ways. One was just the pace of the storytelling needed to be a little bit more intensified. We’re trying to tell a big story in a lot less time. The character development we wanted to be more immediate and certainly, as exciting as the stunt sequences are, we wanted the audience to learn something about these people, specifically Jack. Then also the action sequences, we wanted to bust out a little bit bigger than we did on the series. We kind of wanted to hit the gas pedal from the beginning of the movie and just take it all the way through to the end. Then lastly, for me, I wanted the movie to look different than the series. My inspiration as a director for the movie was not the television series, it was the old Jack Ryan movies, a lot of ‘70s espionage movies that I love.
Was it exciting to finally make the leap with this Jack Ryan to join the pantheon of the franchise’s films?
Yeah I mean in prepping for this movie, I think I watched all of those like 1000 times again. There’s a sequence we shot where we have a car blow up in our movie that we shot at the exact same spot where the car blew up in “Patriot Games,” that was totally intentional. We’re geeks about all those movies.
Do you have a favorite of those from the past?
I mean, listen, I do like them all. Certainly for this, “Patriot Games” was kind of the one that we looked at the most, in terms of sort of just really understanding it, and talking about it, and seeing what they did with that, but “Hunt for Red October” is an amazing movie, “Clear and Present Danger” is great.
Was there a consideration of putting this in theaters?
Adam, you’re gonna make me sad right now. From the very beginning, this was always going to be a streaming movie, to be honest. There’s a lot of things that go into that, you’d have to ask the Amazon folks, but we shot this as a big theatrical movie, knowing it was going to be on streaming, but we shot it with a large canvas as if it were going to be in the theaters. It was never going to be in theaters, and I think a lot of us were sad about that fact, but we’re also super excited that we get to get it out to the wide Amazon audience, which is probably larger than any theater-going experience anyone could ever have, so the more people to see it the better.
You’ve worked on some of the best TV shows of all time, but what was it like to finally make the leap to feature films?
It was great. I grew up watching movies. It was my happy place, and still is. I’ve loved the TV I’ve done. I’ve been super lucky, as you said, to work on amazing television series. My film school early on in my career, even before I started directing, was to be on film sets with amazing directors and I got to watch George Miller and Scorsese and De Palma and Joel Schumacher and Barbra Streisand, and that was my film school. I learned from these people, and I worshiped at the altar of any information I could get from them, so to be able to be a part of that experience, to tell a story on that canvas is something I’ve always wanted to do, and I’m super lucky and proud that I got to do it on this movie. I don’t take it lightly. The movies are super important to me, and I treasure them.
Are you flattered that John took your cinematographer for “Quiet Place 3?”
Arnau Valls Colomer is amazing and was an incredible collaborator on this movie, and I hope we all get to work together on a lot more of these. One of the things about these movies is they’re super hard to make, but at the end of the day, they’re fun.
Have you had discussions about another movie?
I know John has publicly said recently that he would love to do another one, and is coming up with ideas on what that might be. He is Jack Ryan, so we take our lead from from him, and in that sense, I think we’d all love to jump back in. We had a great time making this, and we introduced Sienna Miller into the cast in this movie, and she was such a seamless fit. She’s an amazing talent, and as a viewer, I want to see more of them. I would love to see where that relationship goes and what adventures they get into. So, my hope is we get to do it again.
Your level of experience is tremendous. I was just curious if you have a story of one of the most challenging shows you’ve ever worked on.
They all present their challenges. “Mad Men” was a show that no one heard of when we started working on that, and it was a gamble. I remember Matthew Weiner telling me no one wanted it except AMC. “Foundation” was insanely huge and visually challenging. I always sort of point back to “The West Wing,” which is kind of where I got started as a director, not because it was necessarily the most challenging, but it’s your infancy as a director. That, to me, is where my foundation as a filmmaker, my foundation about how you operate on a film set, what it is to work with great actors — it all started there, and the lessons learned, and the bumps and bruises that come along with that. And “Welcome to Derry,” which I just finished for HBO, the makeup effects and the visual effects and the storytelling in that were incredibly challenging, and to up the game of what Andy Muschietti had already set up in the “It” movies and continue that going was a real challenge. That has its own craziness to it too, but they’re all good learning experiences,
What do you have coming up next?
I’m up in Vancouver now, working on this small television series called “The Last of Us.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it (laughs). I’m working with the super talented Craig Mazin. Then I’d love to jump into making another movie.
Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War is now streaming on Prime Video.