The money was enough to stage a boggling, seven-minute car chase through the streets of Jakarta, if not to persuade the police to protect the crew from the wrath of the city's drivers.
I just think at least I didn't take studio money to do it, so it's not their cash I'm burning."īy the standards of Hollywood, the film cost only a few peanuts more than its predecessor (Evans puts the budget at £4.5 million to The Raid's £1m). The weight of anticipation is worn lightly. Now, with the sequel about to come out, Evans is in the curious position of being admired equally by film snobs and fanboys. At the screening I went to, journalists broke into stunned applause. It was also just spectacularly good fun – an adrenal series of hectic set pieces based on the Indonesian martial art pencak silat, in which limbs, hands, feet and faces collide so swiftly and gracefully you're convinced that what you're seeing must be impossible. Critics with faultlessly high brows lined up to lavish it with praise, noting its place in an action cinema line of descent stretching back to The Battleship Potemkin.
But Evans' film – in which a band of vastly outnumbered Jakarta cops are trapped in a tower block seething with gangsters – wowed viewers in cultural corners the martial arts movie doesn't often reach. That the original Raid, released in 2012, created a stir among action fans was not so newsworthy. Once he's done in London there will be a brief trip home, long enough to show his family the new film.
But occasionally, there's a trace of something else – the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, where he's lived since 2006, and where he's become the most achingly credible director of action movies on the planet. At 33, his accent is mostly still pure Hirwaun, the south Wales village on the edge of the Brecon Beacons where he grew up. If his work suggests a wildman, the reality is a chipper, semi-bearded figure in a hoodie, ambling back into the splendour after a fag. The nicer the place, the more I want to destroy it." "In hotels I do always look at what you could rip out to use as a prop.
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