Love Hurts director Jonathan “JoJo” Eusebio came to filmmaking from the world of martial arts: In the ’90s, he attended the Los Angeles-area Inosanto Academy of Martial Arts, where he met fellow practitioners David Leitch and Chad Stahelski. 

Feeling like a “little brother,” he says, he watched over the decades as they became stuntmen, stunt coordinators and directors. The two collaborated on John Wick before Stahelski went on to direct the Keanu Reeves franchise’s sequels and Leitch directed films including Deadpool 2, Bullet Train and The Fall Guy.

Eusebio followed them to Hollywood, racking up credits for movies including Collateral and Iron Man 2, as well as the Bourne and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises. He joined the stunt choreography team for 87North, the production company founded by Leitch and his wife, producer Kelly McCormack. 

Like Stahelski and Leitch, Eusebio rose from doing stunts to being a second unit director, the person on set who typically oversees action sequences that don’t require the main cast. 

“I’m very lucky that I can pick up the phone and call David or Chad for advice anytime,” Eusebio tells MovieMaker.McCormick, whose credits include Atomic Blonde and The Fall Guy, also guided Eusebio’s career, acting as his manager. He recalls her telling him, “You’ve got to start thinking about your future. You should think about directing.” 

One of the scripts she shared with him was the action-packed romance Love Hurts, about a mild-mannered real estate agent named Marvin (Ke Huy Quan) who is drawn back into his violent past life by an ex-partner in crime named Rose (Ariana DeBose). The film, Eusebio’s directorial debut, is in theaters now.

Love Hurts Director Jonathan ‘JoJo’ Eusebio on Patience

Marvin Gable (Ke Huy Quan) and Rose Carlisle (Ariana DeBose) in Love Hurts, directed by Jonathan “JoJo” Eusebio. Allen Fraser/Universal Pictures

Eusebio loved the premise and quirkiness of the characters of the Love Hurts script, written by Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore. Eusebio welcomed the chance to inject emotional intensity and kinetic action into the film. 

“When you’re second unit, you come into a world where the rules of the universe are already laid out for you, so I had to function within this box,” Eusebio tells MovieMaker. “But when you become a main unit director, you’ve got to make all the rules and decisions. The pressure increases exponentially.”

Eusebio and the film’s producers were discussing who could play Marvin at the same time Quan was mounting his awards campaign for Everything, Everywhere All at Once, which went on to win seven Oscars in 2023, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Quan. It marked a brilliant comeback for the former child star of The Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

“I was watching him on screen. Everyone loves him and I was a big fan of his growing up. I was like, ‘That’s the guy! We should get him,’” recalls Eusebio. ”I knew his background in action, so I knew he could do it. It was about letting the rest of the world know that he could do it.”

He was quickly struck by what an all-consuming responsibility it is to direct a film. 

“I wasn’t prepared for how much it would consume my mindset. I lived this movie in my head for two years, so by the time we were greenlit, I had already been living this story for quite some time.” 

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He realized that with directing, patience is key.

“When I talk about stunts and second-unit directing, the results are real-time, so I get the result I want pretty fast. With directing, it’s such a long process, you don’t really know how the movie’s going to turn out until the end of edit or even by the time we start showing in theaters. The part of the process I enjoy the most — seeing the movie and seeing how it makes people feel as an audience.”

The biggest challenge of directing a feature was time constraints, even with long shooting days.

“Sometimes they can go from twelve hours to fourteen hours to sixteen hours,” Eusebio says. “You’re trying to get as much as you can towards the end of a shoot. Those days can add up. There’s a lot of things you have to deal with at the end of a shoot and it can be exhausting but the payoff is big.” 

He notes that he “didn’t have a super-long shooting schedule. You need performers that can do the action repeatedly but in a short amount of time. I didn’t have the luxury of having a lot of time to finesse scenes or sequences.”

With all the new challenges of directing, Eusebio couldn’t coordinate the stunts on the film. Fortunately he had a trust cohort of fellow stunt professionals he had worked with for 10 years, including stunt designer and coordinator Can Aydin. 

“The team I was using when I was a stunt coordinator…. they’re with me on this. As I moved up to directing, they took over the roles that I did when I was a stunt coordinator or second-unit director,” Eusebio says. “There’s a shorthand I have with them that makes the action design easier.” 

But shooting stunt scenes wasn’t the biggest challenge of Love Hurts, he says.

“I come from a stunt background. I’m very comfortable with action regardless of the time constraints. I feel secure there. The hardest thing for me to navigate wasn’t the action, it was the romance: I’m a stuntman and I’m doing a romantic comedy! But I like those types of stories too, and I think a lot of people can relate to them.”

Love Hurts is now in theaters from Universal Pictures.

Main image: (L-R) Ke Huy Quan and director Jonathan “JoJo” Eusebio on the set of Love Hurts. Allen Fraser/Universal Pictures.