![]() “In ‘The Raid,’ there’s a lot of influence when it comes to gunplay from Peckinpah and Woo. Evans says he didn’t emulate those movies, because they now look dated compared to ones made during the same period in Hong Kong. Indonesia exported some action flicks in the 1980s and ’90s, making an international cult star of Dutch-Javan actor Barry Prima. And you know where all the attacks are going to come from.” You know where every corner of the room is. “I’ve always loved that, when you watch the action set pieces play out in a John Woo or a Sam Peckinpah movie, there’s a great deal of clarity and spatial awareness. The more fluid and coherent approach also echoes Evans’ directorial models, all but one of whom are Asian. If we’re going to spend all that time doing the work, why would we want to hide it in the final version of the film?” “I work very closely with the guys on the choreography,” he says. The action is kinetic, yet without the jittery editing of recent Hollywood action movies. In “The Raid: Redemption,” Uwais plays Rama, a rookie police officer who survives an assault on a high-rise tenement controlled by ruthless gangsters.īefore making “Merantau,” Evans says he studied silat for more than eight months, “just so I could have a better understanding of the choreography and the application of the moves we were going to use.”Įvans’ appreciation of the fighting style becomes evident in his latest movie. Evans soon enlisted Uwais to star in “Merantau,” the first feature the director made in Indonesia. While making the documentaries, Evans met Uwais, a silat master who was working as a delivery driver. I had that thing where I thought, ‘Okay, one lesson and I’ll become Jackie Chan.’ ” With his wife’s help, Evans got a gig in Jakarta directing a documentary series about silat, the martial-arts style featured in “The Raid: Redemption.” The filmmaker had studied karate and akido as a boy but admits, “I was always terrible at it. They were there about 10 months before both became restless. ![]() ![]() And my mum was making a kimono.”Įvans married a woman of Indonesian-Japanese heritage, also an exchange student, and the couple settled in his hometown, Hirwaun, in South Wales. Before I knew it, I had a cast and my script was translated into Japanese. ![]() When I showed it to her, she showed it to some of her friends. “I was learning Japanese with a Japanese student in Cardiff,” he says. “Monogatari” means “story” in Japanese, and the movie was shot entirely in that language. His first completed short, “Samurai Monogatari,” was a film-school project made in 2003. In the early ’90s, I was into Takeshi Kitano and discovering Japanese extreme cinema, with Takashi Miike.”Įvans started directing Asian movies before he left Wales. “Gradually, I started to get into other filmmakers from Asia. “When I was a kid, I was a huge fan of Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee and Jet Li,” Evans says by phone during a recent visit to the United State. While he’s lived in Indonesia only about four years, spiritually Evans arrived in Asia long ago. That might seem an odd background for Indonesian cinema’s new champion, but the Welsh filmmaker is at home with the role. ![]() Evans grew up far from the tropics, in Wales. The latter, as his name suggests, is not a product of Indonesia. The SWAT-team thriller, which opened nationwide Friday, is also the stateside debut of its star, Iko Uwais, and its writer-director, Gareth Huw Evans. For most American viewers, one reason to be exhilarated is that this will be first Indonesian movie they’ve ever seen. In this film image released by Sony Pictures Classics, Joe Taslim as Jaka, left, and Yayan Ruhian as Mad Dog are shown in a scene from "The Raid: Redemption." (Akhirwan Nurhaidir/AP)Įxuberant and ultraviolent, “ The Raid: Redemption” makes its martial-arts routines feel remarkably fresh. ![]()
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