Up till about the time that “Ballerina” was coming out, it didn’t look as if the movie’s end-titles song, the Evanescence/K. Flay track “Fight Like a Girl,” would get its own music video. Fortunately, Evanescence frontwoman Amy Lee knows how to gently persuade like a girl as well as fight like one. She convinced the “John Wick” franchise’s overseer, Chad Stahelski, to direct his first music video for the song, and it’s out today. Both Lee and Stahelski talked with Variety about the making of the clip.

“I thought, I’m gonna do something different with my direction career,” says Stahelski, who directed the “Wick” movies and shot additional climactic footage for “Ballerina.” “I decided, I’m gonna go the other direction — start with features, and then move into music videos. No, I’m kidding.” Or is he? Once he was talked into doing it, he attacked the job with relish. “I grew up with MTV, from day one,” the filmmaker says — and when he got the chance to add some fire and rain, he was down for doing something that brought back his memories of “old-school MTV. Come on — like Whitesnake. Let’s go!”

Lee actually collaborated with other women on two tracks for the “Ballerina” soundtrack — “Hand That Feeds,” with Halsey, and then “Fight Like a Girl,” with rapper/singer K. Flay, whom she cold-called to hook up with her on the Tyler Bates-co-written tune. She didn’t want this song to go down without a fight, as far as fully exploiting its visual potential, and explains how she nudged Stahelski into being the one to get it across the finish line.

“I don’t take no for an answer — I’ve realized about myself in my 40s,” Lee says. “Not that he told me no, but I just got it in my head that it had to be Chad, once we started thinking towards the video, and he’s really busy. He is working on his next thing (‘Highlander’) and was out of the country at the time, and I just kept persisting and bugging him, in a friendly way. It was sweet, because we started talking concepts about what we would do, if we could do something. And he told me, ‘I haven’t directed a music video before’ — and I was like, ‘Well, it’ll be really easy compared to what you’re used to doing.’

She adds, “I just thought that if there’s any way that I could tie that up and bring it into the world of John Wick by getting Chad to do our video, I’m going all the way. I’m shooting for the moon. And, yeah, everything actually happened. Manifestation is real.“

Lee explains the song’s origin story: “I’ve known Tyler Bates (the movie’s composer) for a few years, and we always talked about working together on something but hadn’t had the reason. He called me in December and said, ‘Hey, I think I finally found our thing, if you’re into it. … It’d be cool, since this is a woman-kicking-ass film, and it’d be great for it to be not just any girl. Let’s do this together.’ So Tyler sent over the beginning of a track, and I came up with a melody idea faster than I usually do. I’m just feeling really creatively energized this year. I get into places in my life where I just need to make music — like, it is my lifeline. It’s the thing making everything make sense in a time when things aren’t making a lot of sense. So it was a beautiful thing that Tyler brought into my life and into the band’s life…

“And I should talk about K. Flay, who I’ve been a huge fan of for a long time,” Lee continues. “I wanted this to be a collab, because I feel like one of the things about women being strong, and what it means to fight like a girl… one of the biggest things about that to me is the way that we can come together and how we can unify and be stronger together, and the power of that. So we got to the part where we were working on the bridge and I was like, ‘What do I do here? Oh my God, what if K. Flay came in and did her aggressive rap thing over this part?’ I reached out and got ahold of her and we got to meet on the phone and she was super cool. We’re friends now. I love her so much.”

And it marks the first time that there’s been a rap on an Evanescence song since … what… “Bring Me to Life,” back in 2003? “Yeah, only our biggest one,” she points out, acknowledging the gap.

It was Lee who watched the movie and singled out the line in the script about “fighting like a girl” as the lyrical hook for a closing theme. The premiere was already nigh when she went to the filmmaker with the brash suggestion that he could make the video happen.

“I’ve been a fan of Evanescence for quite some time, really — since they came out, really,” says Stahelski. “After the movie, I called Amy to thank her, and she’s like, ‘Hey, you know, we want to do a music video, but the budget’s pretty tight and marketing doesn’t really want to cover the whole thing.’ So I was like, ‘Well, what do you wanna do?… I’ve never done a music video before, but I’ve got some ideas.’ She said, ‘Well, I’d really like it if you did it.’ I said, ‘Oh, well, that’s cool, but I’m prepping my next film right now. I’m back and forth between London and New York and L.A.’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s nice. I’d really like you to do it.’ I was like, ‘Well, I’m kind of busy.’ She’s like, ‘Mm-hmm. I’d really like you to do it.'” He laughs. “She’s very persistent. So I was like, ‘All right, fuck it. I tell you what, for the premiere of ‘Ballerina’ in L.A. I’ll be back in town for one weekend. Let me come up with some ideas and see what we can do, and if you and the band are good to come to L.A., I’ll pull in some favors from my crew and we’ll do it.’ My line producer put it all together literally in five days, and it was performance-based, but we wanted to have the same palate as a John Wick kind of project.

“And it was a blast. The funny thing is, I had to do a little quick study about how to edit, cut, shoot to verse. So I had a little bit of a plan. I’m kind of a prep freak, so just winging it on a music video didn’t really feel right. I’m sitting on the warehouse set in downtown L.A. and I’m sitting with Amy and K. Flay, the other vocalist on the track. I said, ‘Look, the Steadicam’s gonna do this thing, and you guys come up in right about here. Let’s just try it once.’ There was no music playing,but they both started humming the song, while it was just us talking. Then Amy started singing a little, then they sang a little louder, and then they’re just kind of singing loudly, with no playback. Me, the camera guys, the grips, everybody stopped — and all of a sudden they realized everything has stopped. I’m like, ‘I’m sorry. It’s my first music video, it’s my crew’s first music video, and just to hear you guys sing live is a really big deal.’ I was so taken aback by how excellent they sound in person that it was like, ‘OK, I made the right choice.’ … To hear this woman (Lee) sing in an empty warehouse with just her voice, it got me, and it just kinda made me go, ‘Oh, I’m still a fanboy.’ That one moment right there made it all worth it.”

Lee recounts: “It being Chad, I was like, ‘Hey, just take it away with whatever you wanna do. Special effects? Let’s go for this. Make it a movie, do what you would do.’ And he is like, ‘OK, I want to set a guy on fire.’ And I was like, ‘That sounds great. Let’s definitely set somebody on fire.'” (No actual drummers were harmed in the making of this mini-motion picture.)

Lee says her band is “in the middle” of making their next album. “We have three songs almost finished that we are working on, and then we have quite a few more songs that we need to finish up the recording, and we’re gonna be doing some of that in August. We’re just kind of recording as we go, and I feel like we’re gonna continue releasing as we go. That felt really good to do the last time around. Instead of waiting for the whole album to be done and and releasing it all at once, we got pushed into a situation where we were releasing as as we went because COVID happened and our plans were totally ruined. But we had four awesome finished songs that we didn’t want to just sit on forever, and who knew what was gonna happen, so we just started putting them out, as we finished our album. And it felt so good to have each song kind of have its moment.” So fans can expect more songs before the end of the year, and definitely before a full album comes in 2026.

For his part, Stahelski says, “For my first music video, I’m super proud of it, especially to be associated with Amy and Evanescence.”

And is it the first of many music videos? Maybe that could be a new side hustle?

“The first of many Amy Lee videos,” he answers. “How about that?”