Director Len Wiseman is no stranger to action franchises, having helmed the first two “Underworld” movies as well as the fourth entry in Bruce Willis‘ John McClane saga, “Live Free or Die Hard.” Stepping into the universe of “John Wick” to direct “Ballerina,” a film about a new character (neophyte assassin Eve Macarro, played by Ana de Armas), Wiseman knew he had a formidable tradition to live up to — and the best way of doing so was to take the action in an entirely new direction.

“I didn’t want to replicate what ‘John Wick‘ did in terms of the fighting style,” Wiseman told IndieWire. “I wanted Ana to have her own energy and voice.” To that end, Wiseman kept a close eye on de Armas’ progress while she was training with the 87eleven stunt designers who have been a key part of the “John Wick” franchise since the beginning.

“During rehearsal, I would be planning with my production designer, and I’d get updates saying things like, ‘Ana is really good at kicks,'” Wiseman said. “So we would build that into her language.” During prep, Wiseman began conceptualizing set pieces designed to capitalize on de Armas’ strengths and to convey that this is an assassin at a very different stage in her career from John Wick.

“She’s a new assassin, so it was much more survival action than attack action,” Wiseman said. “She’s jumping into a world where she’s up against a lot of very seasoned assassins.” Keeping this in mind, Wiseman and the 87eleven team went to work on action sequences in which Eve would improvise, using anything and everything around her to fight off the onslaught of trained killers.

That led to some extremely entertaining and original set pieces, like one where Eve fights off a series of attackers by wielding a pair of ice skates as weapons. Wiseman’s first draft of the sequence began in his garage, where he typically creates rough sketches of his action scenes using models and action figures that he shoots on his iPhone. “I have a very elaborate setup with different scales of cars and other things,” he said. “I work and search around for the scene and that gives me a pretty good idea going in of what the edit is going to be.”

For a sequence involving ice skates, Wiseman began with a pair he picked up from a sporting goods store. “I put blood all over them and shot a few moves in my garage where she would use them like gauntlets on her hands,” Wiseman said. He then shared his concept with the 87eleven team, who helped him build on top of the original moves to develop the set piece. “They took it to a place where she used the shoelaces and swung the skates like a mace.”

Because scenes like the ice-skate fight grew organically out of character, de Armas could act while fighting in a way that gives each action sequence in “Ballerina” added intensity and urgency. “Sometimes, the more complicated the action gets in terms of the choreography and how much there is to remember, the acting takes a back seat,” Wiseman said. “Ana just will not allow that to happen. There’s so much emotion and passion being performed during the action.”

One of the pleasures of “Ballerina” for audiences is the way that it tweaks action movie conventions. You may have seen flamethrowers in films before, but here there’s an out-and-out flamethrower gunfight between de Armas and a foe. Another sequence finds de Armas wiping out an entire team of assassins with grenades in an elaborately choregraphed series of exhilarating camera moves. “I thought, what about a snowball fight, but with grenades,” Wiseman said, adding that executing the idea was one of the movie’s biggest directorial challenges.

“I wanted to shoot that sequence in longer takes so you never get a chance to breathe, so we had a lot of trap doors and hidden sections of the set.” The action was carefully planned so that bad guys would fall out of frame just before the explosives were detonated, because Wiseman wanted the pyrotechnics to be practical and not added during post. “The timing of it was really challenging, but I like that. I don’t necessarily want to make a movie where there are no challenges, no pressure.”

Throughout the film, Wiseman looked to Ted Kotcheff’s original “First Blood” for inspiration. “This was my opportunity to pay a little bit of homage to the movie 15-year-old me loved,” he said. “As the series went on it got a little more superhero-esque, but in ‘First Blood,’ you felt for Rambo because he was having to search and survive and turn everything he could into a weapon. And that’s what I was picturing with Eve, who has no arsenal. She just has to live by her wits.”

Another highlight in “Ballerina” comes when Eve has to fight John Wick, and Wiseman synthesizes the two fighting styles — “John Wick” and “First Blood” — in one scene. “Working with Keanu Reeves and having John Wick come into the ‘Ballerina’ world was a really memorable moment for me,” Wiseman said. “Often, you fantasize about a scene and it doesn’t really come off, but the scene between them in the snow was exactly what I imagined, and it was something I had been picturing in my head for a long time.”

“Ballerina” marks Wiseman’s return to feature films after over 10 years working in the world of episodic television, though he stresses that while he might not look busy to the outside world, he’s never left movies behind him — he just got a little pickier, and some of the projects he chose didn’t come to fruition. “For four years I was working on what was supposed to be the last John McClane movie,” Wiseman said. “It was such a cool script and such a cool idea. Other movies would pop up, and I’d be like, ‘No, this is going. We’re close.’ There were four years where I thought that movie was happening and then it didn’t.”

The McClane project was shut down for good after Bruce Willis’ aphasia diagnosis, and Wiseman was thrilled to get back to big-screen action after a sojourn directing pilots for series as varied as “Hawaii Five-O,” “Lucifer,” and “Swamp Thing.” Those shows’ tighter schedules and budgets helped Wiseman hone his ability to think on his feet, but “Ballerina” reminded him of what he’d been missing.

“I had great collaborators on TV, but it’s just, get as much action as you can and move on,” Wiseman said. “I missed the time and respect you get when you’re making an action movie. It’s a whole different mentality. If audiences are leaving their house for it, it has to be good. It has to be at a certain level. And you need to take the time.”

“Ballerina” opens in theaters June 6.