If you were trawling around internet message boards in the early aughts, there was major grumbling about Constantine. In the wake of Spider-Man and X-Men, Hollywood was starting to adapt more comic books, but while there were some welcome surprises including American Splendor and Ghost World, there was just as much risk as getting a bastardization like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Catwoman. So perhaps it’s no surprise that fans were skeptical when they heard there would be a Hellblazer movie except it wouldn’t be called Hellblazer. It would be called Constantine, after its protagonist, John Constantine. And it wouldn’t star a blonde British man like in the comics. It would star Keanu Reeves.

While fidelity to the source material is a central tenet of today’s film adaptations (or “respecting the fans,” to put it in studio-speak), director Francis Lawrence had more latitude handling Constantine even though it was his debut feature after a career helming music videos and commercials. The comics functioned as a launch point about a cynical loner who reluctantly keeps a balance between Heaven and Hell by sending demons back to the inferno in an attempt to buy his way into paradise before his lung cancer kills him. In the course of his duties, he crosses paths with Angela (Rachel Weisz), a detective whose twin sister recently committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. The two team up to investigate and discover that the delicate balance that keeps our world safe is about to tip and bring about Hell on Earth.

Although Constantine performed adequately at the box office, critics upon release were lukewarm. Between the negative reviews and jaded fans, you’d think the film would have faded into obscurity. Instead, its popularity has only grown over the past two decades. Constantine sits comfortably at a 3.4 average rating on Letterboxd with praising how the film didn’t need to ape the comic to be a success. AgentBlasto shares a common sentiment, writing, “Not comics Constantine, but great nonetheless.” also celebrate Lawrence’s imaginative casting, such as Pilot cheering, “ten stars for Tilda as a non-binary angel,” and George appreciating Peter Stormare’s turn as the devil by noting, “Lucifer moves with smirking elegance. It's lovely. Almost casual cruelty.”

With Constantine turning twenty and celebrating the occasion with its 4K Blu-ray debut, I had the chance to speak to Francis Lawrence about the film’s enduring appeal, the thinking behind his unique vision of Hell, what he hopes to do with Constantine 2, and more.

When this movie was happening, we hadn’t really entered the age of social media. There were online communities, but nothing as vocal. And now today, it feels like studios are far more tuned into what the fans want. Do you think it would’ve been harder today to cast anyone other than a blonde, British man as Constantine?
Yeah, for sure. I think the whole group of us, I think Keanu, I think Akiva [Goldsman] who did most of the writing, me, I mean, we were all really fascinated by the character, but we had our own version of it. And we weren’t going to sort of force Keanu into an English accent and make him blonde and all of that just to serve a Hellblazer fan base. I think now, it would be much harder.

I mean, you see the fan base for Star Wars, or for Batman, or whatever, and just how vocal these communities are. And look, even at the time, we had a lot of backlash from Hellblazer fans saying, “Wait, his coat’s the wrong color, his hair’s the wrong color, he is not English. What?” It was pretty heavy at the time, but the truth was, again, that fan base up against the movie we were making for the entire world is still pretty small. They were still relatively vocal, just not as vocal as they can be now.

Well, I also think it’s a good example that sometimes the fans don’t know what they want. And, I think no one really expected it. You don’t imagine what a great job Keanu ended up doing. You don’t trust the actor, trust the film to give you something you didn’t know you wanted.
I will also say, more so than anything I’ve ever done, that the perception of the movie has seemed to change over time. We did okay financially. We would’ve obviously done better if it was PG-13,—if there would’ve been more tickets sold if a younger audience would’ve been able to go. But, the fan base has just grown. And, I think part of it is people have kind of gotten over that. People have discovered it somehow. People have just fallen for the movie in a way over time who wouldn’t have liked it back then because a lot of people would’ve just rejected Keanu as Constantine at the time. I think that the perception of Keanu has changed over time. I think he was truly not as beloved in 2003 when we made this movie as he is now. Now, he’s everybody’s favorite guy, one of everybody’s favorite actors. Everybody loves to love Keanu. I love him too. He’s the greatest. But, it’s just amazing how time changes the perception of all things, and so part of I think the Constantine love is perception of the movie and perception of Keanu over time.

So I had to sort of go back to the drawing boards and you think, how many times have we seen Satan over the years? The child in The Omen or De Niro in Angel Heart with the long nails and the egg or the beast with the horns, and okay, we’ve seen this a million different ways. What’s the new way of doing this? And, that sequence was one of the last things we shot. So we had a bunch of time, and I started thinking about Satan as kind of Fagin from Oliver Twist, and then I was thinking about actors and thought of Peter Stormare, and built the character out from the combination of him and Fagin. So then the white suit came out, and the oily feet came out, and the strange haircut and the tattoos, and we built it all together. He brought what he does to it, and came up with something that was, I think, pretty new and fresh for a characterization of Satan.

How did you decide on the look for Hell? The rules of entering and exiting, the dead girl with the cat and the holy water. How are you sort of unfolding all of this? Because it is a key scene in the film, not only for what’s at stake, but also to move the plot along and understand where Isabel is.
There’s a few things in play there. In the first draft that I read, Hell was not described in that way. I think it was originally described as a black void, sort of oily ground and piles of bones. It just felt a little random to me. I didn’t know why it looks like this, or what it means, or why that’s painful, or why it’s bad, or anything. So, I kind of started with trying to find rules and a sense of geography to it.

The idea came to me that wherever you are at any given moment, there’s sort of a Hell version and there’s a Heaven version, so that if you were able to cross over, it just suddenly gave us a geography. So if you’re in the middle of Hollywood on the US 101 freeway, which is where he is in that sequence, that’s what Hell looks like. So instantly, you have a freeway, you’ve got the husks of cars, you’ve got the Capitol building, you’ve got all of that stuff. And then on top of that, you start to do the design. There was some kind of organic growth that was on everything, and of course everything’s rusted out and burned. The atmosphere was based on nuclear test footage. So this intense heat, and embers flying off of the palm trees, and burning. It just feels like a painful, violent, awful place, but it has this kind of recognizable, almost grounded geography and architecture. Somehow that rule really helped us.

I specifically really love this idea of what we say is “the world behind the world.” There’s fun to the idea that if you live in LA or you live in New York or you live in London, that there’s always that weird door. You’ve always wondered what’s behind there, and that this could be around us at any given moment. We just can’t see it. That’s part of the fun of Constantine--Constantine can. So the idea of household items, you can just fill a pot with water, put your feet in it, grab a dead girl’s cat and know how to stare into its eyes, using that water as a vessel. It’s a weird set of rules, but somehow it felt grounded. We really had fun messing with that stuff, which then led to the bathtub sequence with Rachel where he’s drowning her in the tub so that she could cross over. It all kind of starts from there, the tapping of the world behind the world, while also giving a geography to Hell so it didn’t just feel like some sort of abstract painting.

Is there anything when you look back at Constantine now where you wish you could have done something different, whether you had more time or resources, or just anything you’d like to change?
Every single thing that I do I look back at and want to change. I hadn’t looked at it in a long time, and then I looked at it numerous times in the remastering of it all in of color, and the sound, and all that. Quite honestly, the two biggest things that I think looking at it now, is one, I probably would’ve added more humor to it. I feel like we could have had a little more of Constantine’s sarcastic humor. The other thing that I really try and avoid like the plague in almost anything I do now is what I call the sort supernatural gobbledygook, which is ideally these stories, even if they take place in a world that doesn’t operate in the way we’re used to, when you get to the rules of these things, you don’t want too much of this sort of X-Files dump—supernatural gobbledygook of psychics, vessels, demons crossing over, all this kind of stuff.

Because, I think for the average audience, none of it absorbs, and the movies have to work on a very intuitive level. So, I look at that side of it and I’m like, “I wish we could have really figured it out and made some of it a little more intuitive and taken some of that what I call gobbledygook out of it.” Look, almost anything I’ve done, I would change and tweak, but there’s a lot I’m super fond of, Especially the cast, and a lot of the way the movie looks and a lot of the sequences I’m really happy with. But, there’s probably not a scene in any movie that I’ve done that I couldn’t go back into, and try and tweak and improve upon.

What was the sense you got as the film was released and the reaction to it, and then how have you personally seen its legacy unfold over the past twenty years?
We came out to very mixed reviews—I’d say, even slightly negative. So critically, we weren’t that appealing it seemed. I want to say that we came out number two to Hitch. We did okay, but because of the R rating we all knew we had left some money on the table. But were were doing okay for what the movie was projected to make. Plus worldwide. Plus, this was back when you had the ancillary markets, and you knew you were going to be doubling your box office with DVD sales and all of that.

But the critical response stung a bit. The coolest thing about this movie is just how it’s kind of hung around. So over time, I would travel around the world doing junkets for my other movies, and everybody would have Constantine DVDs and everybody would want to talk about Constantine and ask if there was going to be a sequel? That just kept building and building and building, and the fan base seemed to grow. And then, I forget how many years ago, there were suddenly articles on movies that Rotten Tomatoes got wrong, and Constantine was one of the key movies there.

So you go, “Wow, well, this is nice. Where was all this love in 2005 when the movie came out?” But, it’s been very nice. So, it was a very weird thing. It kickstarted my feature career, so I’m very grateful for that, and it created a relationship with Keanu and Akiva and Warner Brothers. I did my second movie there too and that was great, and it ended up being successful and we’re probably most likely making a sequel very soon, which is great. That’s all good, but it’s been really nice to see the love change for it over time.

I appreciate that it’s very much itself. It never felt like a film that was trying to smooth itself out to be as broad as possible. It’s very much horror. It’s very much noir, and the world-building is specific.
The only thing, and this is another regret I have, but again, I was a little handcuffed. We followed the rules to a tee to make a PG-13 movie. And again, Constantine should always be an R, right? It should not be held back. We followed those rules. We got slapped with an R. I wish we had been able to be as genuine and as authentic to the material as possible and just gone for the R. Instead we got an R, even though we really just made a PG-13 movie.

Now you are working on Constantine 2, and the marketplace has changed so much where a film like Deadpool & Wolverine can be rated R and have massive box office. Does that make you excited for what you can do?
As soon as we started to come up with ideas for a sequel, we were like, “Okay, well if we’re going to get an R, let’s really do an R-rated version.” That doesn’t mean gore, graphicness, a bunch of nudity, or anything like that, but intensity, scariness, all of that, yes. I think we’ve always been honest since wanting to come up with a sequel that it’s going to be an R-rated version. I do think the landscape has changed, which is great, and I think that helps us convince the people with the money to let us make it. But the truth is, landscapes are constantly changing—when R-rated movies work and when they don’t work, and when comic book movies are working, and when people think they’re not working anymore. All you can do is love a story and have ion for it, and try and go for it.

This is a bit in the weeds, but for my personal curiosity, for the sequel, is this something where James Gunn and Peter Safran will have oversight because Hellblazer is a DC character?
We’re doing it under the DC banner, but I wouldn’t really say oversight. We are doing our version of a Constantine sequel. This has been one of the hurdles because many people have had the rights to the Constantine name over the years, right? Now, it’s back with DC, but we’ve always just wanted to do our thing with it. It’s our version: me, Akiva, Keanu, something that’s in the world of what we made—it’s not part of another world, it’s not attached to these other characters. That’s what we’re going to be making.

It’s been twenty years, so for the generation who missed Constantine in theaters and now have a chance to see it on 4K, what do you hope they’ll take away from it?
I just hope, quite honestly, if they’re new to it, that they enjoy the character, that they enjoy the personal story. That’s one of the things that always kind of drew me to it was the fact that it’s not just a “save the world” kind of comic book movie, but it’s actually a very personal story for the character, even if it’s a bit of a selfish one because that’s who he is. And I hope that they can appreciate the kind of unique hybrid blend of what it is and the cast that’s involved. So, maybe it’s a movie for a new generation.