Gareth Evans and I are hunched over my iPhone in a swish Soho hotel. I have a blurry photo, taken 13 years ago, of him receiving an award from Dublin Film Critics Circle. “I’ve still got it,” he says.
The director, an endlessly amiable Welshman, was then still reeling from the unexpected success of his third feature. The Raid, an absurdly kinetic action film shot and set in Indonesia, enjoyed an uproarious reception at Toronto International Film Festival in 2011 before going on to raves everywhere (and an award from us).
“I was totally underprepared,” he says, still staggered. “We really had no idea how it was going to play. We didn’t know what we had. We had no idea, because we made that film completely in a vacuum.”
I imagine the big studios were suddenly circling with awful ideas for his next film. He chortles.
“When the film came out, and then did what it did, it got me my manager, my agent, my representation,” he says. “So then opportunities started flooding in. I got offered a ton of stuff where it’s, like, ‘It’s The Raid, but it’s on a train.’ ‘It’s The Raid, but it’s on a bus.’ Ha ha!”
We will come back to the aftermath of that success, but tales of early furore may help those only casually interested in action cinema to understand why – stay with me – the real star of Netflix’s latest thriller may be Evans rather than Tom Hardy.
The gruff English actor is great in Havoc, but what sets the film apart from the everyday streaming dross is the extended fist fights, car chases and gun battles. The poetic mayhem speaks of a creator raised on Asian greats. It’s a kind of profane ballet.
“I’ve always been a disciple of the John Woo school of film-making,” Evans says. “And the martial-arts stuff by the likes of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung. I’ve always taken a huge amount of influence from the stuff of the past. Nineteen-eighties golden-era Hong Kong action – through to the 1990s – has always been my frame of reference.”
And now he has brought all that knowledge back to south Wales. Havoc stars Hardy as a troubled cop, in hock to undesirables, who sets out to track down a politician’s errant son before the lad is gutted by Asian gangsters. Forest Whitaker and Jessie Mei Li costar in a film that, though set in an imaginary composite US city, was filmed in and about Cardiff.
As long ago as 2021 Hardy was snapped preparing for the shoot in the glamorous environs of Barry Island Pleasure Park. So is it now straightforward to create an amalgam of Pittsburgh and Chicago in the valleys? You just push a few buttons?
“Oh no. It was an absolute challenge,” Evans says. “When we were starting to make it we were still in the grip of Covid. I personally had a lot of anxieties about being away from home for an extended period of time on a project. So, obviously, the idea of being able to shoot within driving distance was appealing in itself.”
It looks utterly convincing, but I imagine Evans can see the Welsh locations showing through the computer-generated backgrounds like a palimpsest.
“I can. Mainly, though, because I will have seen every iteration of the effects shots,” he says. “I get to see every little incremental step. So I will know, ‘Oh, that is the [Swansea] university buildings in Fabian Way.’ ‘This is the Brangwyn Hall in Swansea,’ or ‘This is Bute Street in Cardiff Bay.’ Hopefully the audience won’t feel that. I love building worlds in the films I’ve done. And that helps.”
I wonder if this sort of hard-edged action cinema is going out of fashion in the United States. There are exceptions. The John Wick films certainly borrow much from the Asian cinema that Evans so much admires. But, as the enormous success of A Minecraft Movie confirms, Hollywood is now reliant on family entertainment to pay the bills. The crunch and munch of Havoc is not for kiddies.
“There are always exceptions to the rule,” he says. “You look at Longlegs last year. That was a stroke of genius in terms of its marketing and its release. And it did amazing numbers at the box office. And that was a mature film that was aimed at a mature audience. But you need five or six of those for the industry to take notice.”
Evans, now in his mid-40s, was born and raised in Cynon Valley. He studied screenwriting at the University of Glamorgan and, after graduation, set to work on a variety of modestly budgeted productions. While directing a documentary about pencak silat, the Indonesian martial art, he encountered Iko Uwais, a proponent of that discipline, then working as a deliveryman, and, fired by his passion for action, decided to direct the young man in a low-budget feature.
By the end of the movie there was just this insane euphoric experience. And I’ll never ever forget that screening
— Gareth Evans
One of the odder operations in world cinema developed. Then resident in Indonesia – he moved back with his family in 2015 – Evans, with the inexhaustible Uwais, shot first Merantau and then The Raid thousands of kilometres from the land of his fathers.
“I felt a lot of pressure on the first film, because I was dealing with traditions that were steeped in Asian culture,” he says. “It was about the Minangkabau culture. Also, the first film was an opportunity to reclaim pencak silat within the confines of a film. Before then it had not been presented in a good light on television.”
Merantau landed quietly enough in 2009, but The Raid, detailing a police assault on an apartment block in Jakarta, threw up huge waves after that screening at Toronto. Evans really had no idea what was coming. The film was made under guerrilla conditions. He laughs as he says that he flew all the way to Singapore to find an internet connection good enough to send DVD files to Canada. The prize was getting selected. The cult acclaim was a huge bonus.
“I’d never been to a midnight screening before,” he says. “I’d not experienced the sort of the pure genre euphoria of watching a film like that play out at midnight at a festival. I remember being backstage, nervous, and then going out and introducing the film, saying that I hoped everyone had a good time.”
He needn’t have worried.
“By the end of the movie there was just this insane euphoric experience. And I’ll never ever forget that screening. I’ll never forget the night after that. We spent the whole night searching Twitter and seeing what the comments were as people filed out of the cinema.”
Evans wasn’t prepared to direct copycat versions of his hit. He was keen on making a formal sequel that worked through some of the more ambitious plans he was unable to realise first time out. The Raid 2 emerged to further acclaim in 2014. He has been cautious not to snap at every carrot waved in his face. In 2018 he directed the decent horror Apostle, with Dan Stevens. Two years later he delivered the first season of the hit geezer romp Gangs of London to Netflix and, in 2021, signed an exclusive deal with the streamer to direct features. Havoc is the first product of that arrangement.
[ Gangs of London: They bump off Colm Meaney in minutes. It’s a national disgraceOpens in new window ]
Does he have any concerns about his epic entertainments now rarely getting anywhere near the big screen?
“Not really, because the opportunity to make this film came about only because Netflix wanted to make it,” he remarks, not unreasonably. “It doesn’t change how we make it either. Because we want it to be an experience that can be enjoyed in the biggest way possible. It doesn’t alter the parameters of how we make the film.”
But he does get it.
“Nothing can really compete with the idea of being in a dark room with a bunch of strangers all having a collective experience,” he says. “But I grew up in the 1980s. So an awful lot of the films I fell in love with I saw for the first time on VHS. Pan-and-scan with a tin speaker on the side of the television. Ha ha!”
Glory days.
Havoc is on Netflix from Friday, April 25th
