In the mood for some extreme hyperbole? Take a look at the Rotten Tomatoes page for The Raid 2, writer-director Gareth Huw Evans’ sequel to 2011’s instant cult phenomenon The Raid: Redemption. That first film was immediately hailed as one of the best action movies ever made (even by us), but this new one? Well, here’s a sampling of just how enthusiastic critics are about Evans’ latest work:
“The new center of the arse-kicking universe,” says The Popcorn Junkie’s Cameron Williams.
“The action scenes are simply unreal,” writes the Examiner’s Travis Hopson.
“Sumptuously shot, perfectly paced and flat-out exhilarating, The Raid 2 cements Evans as the best action director working today,” praises Total Film’s Matt Risley.
“Electrifying both in its ambition and its action sequences, this is the best action-thriller since The Dark Knight, and also the best sequel since then,” says Paste Magazine’s Tim Grierson.
“Only viewers with zero appreciation for the genre will leave unimpressed; devotees should add approximately six stars to the [four-star] rating above,” writers Time Out New York’s Joshua Rothkopf.
And, simply, “Wow!” per Fearnet’s Scott Weinberg.
That’s barely scratching the critical surface. When The Raid 2 premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the film Twitterati covering the Park City, Utah, fest started typing things like “best,” “greatest,” and “holy shit” with the frequency of “the,” “of,” and, well, “and.”
The, er, best part about it, though, is that they were all telling the truth. Nearly two-and-a-half-hours’ worth of adrenaline, dizzyingly choreographed fights, and more brutal nihilism than Rust Cohle with two six packs in him, The Raid 2 pushes the action genre to levels other filmmakers never attempt, and with a smaller budget.
Like its predecessor, Evans’ follow-up is an aesthetics first, narrative second attraction, but the filmmaker is definitely maturing as a storyteller. Picking up immediately after The Raid: Redemption, this film sends rookie cop Rama (Iko Uwais, who deserves to be a worldwide, A-list action star by now) undercover in prison to infiltrate a powerful, ruthless crime ring, and, further echoing its Internal Affairs/The Departed influences, he gets in way too deep.
A sprawling crime saga with numerous key characters, twists, and complicated relationships, The Raid 2 shows that Evans has the desire to be seen as more than a grandmaster of eye-bashing action. But the Welsh filmmaker isn’t delusional. He’d be the first person to tell you that The Raid 2’s biggest and strongest hook is what’s on its bloody, bruised-up surface. He’s confident enough in that to sanction an “Internet only” trailer that sells The Raid 2 better than any reviews, essays, or other written fawning could ever do.
See for yourselves:
Insane, right? Indeed, consult Fandango right now to see if The Raid 2 will screen anywhere near you tomorrow, when the film begins its limited theatrical release before expanding in the coming weeks.
Before doing so, though, get the best action movie of the year’s backstory from Evans himself. Here, the forthcoming and jovial filmmaker explains where his intense love for cinema comes from, how he went from making no-budget student films in Wales to blowing international audiences’ minds, and what it takes to shoot scenes that leave critics saying you’ve made “the perfect action movie.”
Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)
RELATED: The 50 Best Action Movies of All Time
RELATED: The Best Movies Complex Saw at SXSW
RELATED: Where Have All the Midnight Movies Gone?
Ultimate Fighting: On "The Raid 2," a New Action Movie Classic
In the mood for some extreme hyperbole? Take a look at the Rotten Tomatoes page for The Raid 2, writer-director Gareth Huw Evans’ sequel to 2011’s instant cult phenomenon The Raid: Redemption. That first film was immediately hailed as one of the best action movies ever made (even by us), but this new one? Well, here’s a sampling of just how enthusiastic critics are about Evans’ latest work:
“The new center of the arse-kicking universe,” says The Popcorn Junkie’s Cameron Williams.
“The action scenes are simply unreal,” writes the Examiner’s Travis Hopson.
“Sumptuously shot, perfectly paced and flat-out exhilarating, The Raid 2 cements Evans as the best action director working today,” praises Total Film’s Matt Risley.
“Electrifying both in its ambition and its action sequences, this is the best action-thriller since The Dark Knight, and also the best sequel since then,” says Paste Magazine’s Tim Grierson.
“Only viewers with zero appreciation for the genre will leave unimpressed; devotees should add approximately six stars to the [four-star] rating above,” writers Time Out New York’s Joshua Rothkopf.
And, simply, “Wow!” per Fearnet’s Scott Weinberg.
That’s barely scratching the critical surface. When The Raid 2 premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the film Twitterati covering the Park City, Utah, fest started typing things like “best,” “greatest,” and “holy shit” with the frequency of “the,” “of,” and, well, “and.”
The, er, best part about it, though, is that they were all telling the truth. Nearly two-and-a-half-hours’ worth of adrenaline, dizzyingly choreographed fights, and more brutal nihilism than Rust Cohle with two six packs in him, The Raid 2 pushes the action genre to levels other filmmakers never attempt, and with a smaller budget.
Like its predecessor, Evans’ follow-up is an aesthetics first, narrative second attraction, but the filmmaker is definitely maturing as a storyteller. Picking up immediately after The Raid: Redemption, this film sends rookie cop Rama (Iko Uwais, who deserves to be a worldwide, A-list action star by now) undercover in prison to infiltrate a powerful, ruthless crime ring, and, further echoing its Internal Affairs/The Departed influences, he gets in way too deep.
A sprawling crime saga with numerous key characters, twists, and complicated relationships, The Raid 2 shows that Evans has the desire to be seen as more than a grandmaster of eye-bashing action. But the Welsh filmmaker isn’t delusional. He’d be the first person to tell you that The Raid 2’s biggest and strongest hook is what’s on its bloody, bruised-up surface. He’s confident enough in that to sanction an “Internet only” trailer that sells The Raid 2 better than any reviews, essays, or other written fawning could ever do.
See for yourselves:
Insane, right? Indeed, consult Fandango right now to see if The Raid 2 will screen anywhere near you tomorrow, when the film begins its limited theatrical release before expanding in the coming weeks.
Before doing so, though, get the best action movie of the year’s backstory from Evans himself. Here, the forthcoming and jovial filmmaker explains where his intense love for cinema comes from, how he went from making no-budget student films in Wales to blowing international audiences’ minds, and what it takes to shoot scenes that leave critics saying you’ve made “the perfect action movie.”
Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)
RELATED: The 50 Best Action Movies of All Time
RELATED: The Best Movies Complex Saw at SXSW
RELATED: Where Have All the Midnight Movies Gone?
Father Knows Best (About Movies)
Gareth Evans, 34, was born in the small village of Hirwaun, in South Wales. Even though Wales isn’t exactly a breeding ground for prolific filmmakers, Evans became legitimate cinephile at a very early age, thanks to the man of his house.
Evans: When I was a kid, watching movies was a weekly thing. Every Saturday night, my dad and I would get back home from watching a rugby match, or doing whatever we did that day, and he’d already have a film rented for us. My dad's a big film fan, and he would pick different movies from different backgrounds. It was never just Hollywood movies—sometimes it’d be movies from Hong Kong, other times France.
He had this unique way of dealing with violence in movies. If he picked out a movie he’d never seen before and wasn’t sure about, he would watch it first to make sure it was OK for me, being so young, to watch. Or he would stop the movie halfway through, kick me and my brother out, and we’d have to sit outside in the hallway or the kitchen and wait until he got to see the rest of it. [Laughs.] And then he’d call us back in. If we did see anything that strong, he would sit us down at the end of the movie and talk us through the morals, the themes, and the implications of what we’d just seen.
To me, it was the perfect upbringing.
One of the people he introduced me to was Jackie Chan. He knew I was into martial arts films, because he saw how excited I got about certain Bruce Lee films. He figured that I would also like Jackie Chan’s films. After that, he introduced me to a bunch of American gangster films. When I was a bit older, we watched Scarface together, and Once Upon a Time in America. But then it was the same thing again—as soon as the chainsaw came out in Scarface, I got kicked out of the room. [Laughs.] I could hear the roar of the engine and the screams, and then, two minutes later, he’d yell out, "OK, you can come back in now."
Around that same time, I saw a TV special about John Woo’s Hard Boiled. That was how I first came to know about John Woo. The first day that Hard Boiled was available on video, I pleaded with my dad for us to watch it together, but he was concerned; he wanted to watch it first. I remember one day when I got home about 30 minutes before him and I tried watching the film. I got through the first 30 or so minutes of it before he got back. I got as far as the big warehouse shoot-out, but then I had to stop and wait to re-watch the whole thing again after he’d seen it first. [Laughs.] I was on pins and needles the entire time waiting for him to tell me if I could watch it or not.
Then I started to get into anime. We had a video store in the UK, where they sold all kinds of Japanese animation films, like Akira and Crying Freeman. Through that, I started learning about filmmakers like Takashi Miike. I started to seek out those extreme Asian films, and it was kind of cool because I was then able to tell my dad about movies he’d never seen before. I’d tell him how incredible The Yellow Sea is, and then we’d sit down to watch it. Everything came full circle.
Getting Hammered With the Coen Brothers
Thanks to Papa Evans, the teenage Gareth knew he wanted to become a filmmaker. The only problem: his hometown of Hirwaun wasn’t Hollywood, and his native country didn’t have much in the way of prestigious film schools. Determined to make movies for a living, though, Evans spent his time at the University of Glamorgan reaching that goal. Fortunately, he met someone else there who shared the same dreams.
Evans: Initially, I wanted to be an actor. [Laughs.] But that dream went away pretty quickly because I can’t act for shit. So then I became interested in writing, and eventually the control freak side of me said, "Well, if I’m going to write this thing, I should just direct it, too."
When I went to university, the core study there was media technology. There were only one or two modules that were about filmmaking—the rest of it was about computer programming. But the benefit was that, since I took those few filmmaking modules, I had access to cameras and editing equipment. I borrowed cameras and started shooting my own shorts and started cutting new trailers for existing films I loved already.
After finishing those university courses, I went off to do a script-writing course for film and television, for my Masters degree. That’s when I learned more about how to properly structure stories and screenplays. Before that, I had the worst approach to writing scripts. I would jump right into page one and have everyone talking the entire plot out. [Laughs.]
But still, after that course, I hadn’t really done anything. I’d tried my luck on some shorts, with my friend and current DP [director of photography], Matt Flannery, and we finished a bunch, but most of the ones we did finish, I wasn’t too keen on showing them.
Matt Flannery: We got introduced through a mutual friend and hit it off through our shared movie geekery. We’d sit and watch action films, martial arts films. We'd go buy a case of beer and do Coen Brothers marathons, with four or five movies at a time. Straight away, we got the sense that we liked the same kinds of movies for the same reasons. While everyone else was doing their dissertations, or going out and partying, we’d be sitting in the house with some beers, getting hammered and watching movie after movie.
We started out with really small shorts, just messing around with a little Handycam and our friends who were actors. We were trying out a lot of low-budget tricks. It was quite nice, because even when we’re doing The Raid or The Raid 2, we’re still using those low-budget tricks to make it seem like we have more money and resources than we actually do.
Evans: After I graduated from university, I was working for a computer programming company. Matt and I were sharing a house together with some other people, and then suddenly we got sick of our day jobs. We decided to take a risk and shoot a feature film together and figure out where we’d go from there.
We took a month off from work and shot this low-budget film called Footsteps in the UK. It was one of those moments where the actual act of not being in the office, and being out in the streets all day and all night was a big moment for us. That made us realize filmmaking was what we wanted to do with our lives. That’s what pushed me into wanting to establish a career in film.
A Welshman Walks Into a Fight in Indonesia...
Making weird shorts and features hardly anyone saw was cool and all, but Evans needed something to call his own. In 2007, while living in Indonesia, he found that inspiration in the form of silat, a Southeast Asian style of martial arts that, at that time, had tons of untapped cinematic potential.
Evans: Footsteps was finished, but I didn’t really push hard enough to make a presence in the UK. I made the film and then backed off. The saving grace for me was when I got hired to make a documentary in Indonesia. We went out there to shoot that, and at the time I had no ambitions to ever make a martial arts film. I loved watching them, but Welsh directors don’t have a tendency to make martial arts films. [Laughs.]
In Indonesia, though, I met Iko, who’s been the lead actor in all of my films now, and some of the other cast, crew, and choreographers I’ve worked with every time since. I was just blown away by their skills and the beauty of what I see in silat. The choreography they do is aggressive as hell, but there’s this fluidity to it, a ballet aspect to the ways they move. I said to myself, "Nobody else is using this style of martial arts in movies—maybe I can try it. Maybe I can give a little bit of credibility to silat." Up until then, the only ways it was being treated in Indonesia on TV was through terrible TV shows where the characters fly and jump through the air and turn into dragons and shit. It was so misrepresented in the media there, it was unreal.
Learning How to Make a Movie By Defending a Stripper
The budding writer-director’s biggest challenge came with Merantau, his initial foray bringing silat to the big screen. Released in June 2009, Merantau has a narrative familiar to anyone who’s seen more than one martial arts flick: A teenager heads to Jakarta, Indonesia, to become a kick-and-punch master, but while there he falls in love with a beautiful stripper and becomes her protector against an evil human trafficker. You know, that old tale.
Much smaller in scale than either of the Raid movies, Merantau feels like a trial run for what’s to come. It’s key importance, though, is that it began Evans’ working relationship with real-life silat practitioner turned actor, and Raid hero, Iko Uwais.
Evans: Our original goal was to make Merantau to establish Iko as the guy who could fill that void as an Indonesian action hero. We wanted to stake a claim for the real silat and the people who really practice it.
When I first met Iko, he was a driver for a film company. Silat was his weekend hobby… Well, it was bigger than a hobby, but it wasn’t something that paid the bills. The first movie, Merantau, was a learning curve for him—but for all of us, too. It was my first time dealing with anything on that budget level; it was my first time dealing with a professional shoot. On Merantau, we had about 100 people in the crew. We were changing lens all the time and I didn’t want to show my inexperience to the camera guys, who’d been doing this for years. I had to learn how to do all of that stuff on the job, on the move, without making it seem like I was learning the whole time. I had to be slick and sneaky.
Flannery: Indonesia’s got an amazing amount of talent and great crews working there, but, really, there’s not an action movie industry there. So a lot of the crew were learning alongside us. There were a lot of times where Gareth and I would tell people these ideas we had for Merantau and they’d look at us like we’re crazy. That film was kind of us showing them that, yes, we can do these things with the limited resources we have.
Evans: Merantau was a very show-and-tell experience for the actors. Iko was in tune with the idea of relying on his photographic memory, treating his performance like choreography in a way. We’d show him a run-through of his performance and then he’d repeat what he’d just seen. Now, the progression between the space of three movies has been so vast that we’re able to sit down and talk about the psychology of his character in detail.
A large part of that has to do with the fact that he’s gone through a lot since we shot Merantau. He became a dad recently, so he was able to channel that real-life experience into Berandal, where his character’s wife is expecting their first child. He’s had an opportunity to grow up and mature, and he can bring much more to the table now, in terms of performance.
The Origins of The Raid
Action movie fans had no idea what was awaiting them at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.
As part of TIFF’s storied Midnight Madness program, Evans’ follow-up to Merantau, titled The Raid, had its world premiere before an audience ill-prepared for its onslaught of head-spinning fight choreography and breakneck action sensibilities. Far as story goes, it was lean, playing like a video game about a young cop who has to ass-kick his way up to the top of a Jakarta apartment building overrun by a criminal boss and his endless silat-master minions. But, man, did those elaborately staged and brutal fight sequences blindside everyone in Toronto.
Glowing reviews started popping up online immediately after The Raid’s September 2011 premiere, creating a heavy buzz that led to Sony Pictures Classics picking up its distribution rights and releasing it in stateside theaters as The Raid: Redemption in March 2012.
Evans: After Merantau, I wanted to make a film that was just called Berandal, which is the Indonesian title for The Raid 2. Berandal was a standalone film at that point, about this ordinary guy who’s put into extraordinary circumstances. He gets locked up in prison and becomes the close ally for a guy who’s the son of a mob boss. So all that stuff was in there already. The stuff that we didn’t have was the undercover cop element.
We struggled for about two years to get the budget in place, and when we realized that we weren’t getting the budget we needed, I decided that I couldn’t sit in the office anymore and wait for that opportunity to come. I didn’t want to bring in Berandal on a low budget, because I didn’t think it could work that way. So I went off and wrote The Raid.
As I was writing The Raid, though, I started to realize that my biggest problem with the original Berandal script was that I didn’t understand the main character’s motivation. I didn’t get why he would stay in that environment if he’s this ordinary guy. The idea of combining the stories together, making Berandal the sequel to The Raid, and making the main character this guy whose motivation is he’s a cop who’s undercover—he can’t leave. He has to stick it out.
It was a big save on my original script. Also, in all honesty, myself as a director, I don’t think I would have been ready to do that original Berandal film back then. I think I needed to do The Raid first in order to do Berandal.
No Pressure or Expectations, Just Prison Yard Fights
Before The Raid: Redemption ever screened, Gareth Evans was an unknown filmmaker—aside from the few action movie fans who’d seen Merantau, people didn’t have any expectations. Once The Raid hit it big within the festival circuit, Evans’ ability to deliver visceral, bone-crunching action cinema became a brand of its own. And when he started talking about a sequel, one that would pick up immediately after the first Raid ends? His overnight fan-base started counting down the seconds before they could see more.
You’d think the pressure to step his game up and appease The Raid’s fans would have been overwhelming, but not for Evans. And based on the ecstatic and hyperbolic reactions that came out of Sundance when The Raid 2 premiered in January, his relative ease has paid off.
Evans: It was a weird thing. The success of The Raid did boost our confidence. With the first film, none of us really knew what we were doing and we didn’t know what we’d end up with, so for us it was just like, "Wow, people are into this movie. People dig it." Something we did was right, though it was hard for us to pinpoint what made the first Raid work so well for audiences.
So, when working on the sequel, we decided to stick to what we did for the first one. Meaning, let’s keep the same creative space and keep the same approach. Obviously, in terms of storyline and scale, it couldn’t be more different from the first one, but we wanted to maintain the sense of ignoring the pressures of expectations. We relied on our gut instincts about what would work best for the film and make it play strong.
The Raid was born out of frustration; I was just throwing around a bunch of different ideas that were in my head and seeing if they would stick. I wanted to explore a lot of genres and fuse everything together. Because of that, The Raid had elements of survival horror, thrillers, action, martial arts, gunplay, and so forth. The fact that it stuck together as well as it did was an eye-opener for us, like, "OK, we know we can do this now, and we know where to go for the next one." Certain things that worked, we kept those in, and things that didn’t work, we made sure to not do those again.
It wasn’t just The Raid, though. I did a short film ["Safe Haven"] for the horror anthology V/H/S/2 (2013), co-directed by my good friend Timo Tjahjanto.
I liked everybody involved with that project, but one of the main reasons I took that project was I knew I could experiment again and try to figure a different shooting style and editing style I could then maybe bring to Berandal. It was finding little things like when to prolong certain scenes to make them seem like one-shots when they’re really five or six shots.
There’s a a long prison yard fight sequence in The Raid 2 that comes directly from working on V/H/S/2. Shooting that prison yard sequence was so fucking hard. It wasn’t just the ambition of the camera movements and the elaborate fight choreography—we also had to contend with the mud, which was slippery as fuck. [Laughs.] In the finished film, it seems like one continuous shot, but it’s actually composed of seven or eight different shots.
When we shot V/H/S/2, our location—the compound—was composed of three different locations in three different parts of the city. All we had was one character’s camera perspective, since it’s found-footage, and I didn’t want to cheat with cuts between the different shooting locations that the viewer could notice. Figuring out how to hide those location changes and make it all seem like one continuous sequence was a huge learning curve for what we were able to pull off in The Raid 2.
Just Having Fun, Smashing Faces With Hammers
Have you ever felt secondhand pain watching a Steven Seagal movie? Or cringed during a Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee fight scene? Probably not, since, although those action stars’ films are definitely impressive, they’re clearly movies.
In Evans’ Raid films, however, fists obliterate the distinction. Devoid of digital effects or any other visual trickery, Evans’ fight sequences look and feel authentic. When someone gets their head smashed into a brick wall, or Iko Uwais administers multiple roundhouse kicks to a dude’s face, the impact carries through the screen.
In The Raid 2, there’s a new character named Hammer Girl who decimates a subway cart full of well-dressed goons using one measly hammer. Seen in a badass montage, Hammer Girl’s destruction is intercut with her colleague, let’s call him Bat Man, who bashes people’s heads in with a metal baseball bat and self-hits balls into their faces. Every hammer strike wrinklers your eyes; each crack of the bat is excruciating to watch.
Viewer screwfaces are inevitable while watching a Gareth Evans film. “Oh, shit!” exclamations are standard.
Evans: On our side, as filmmakers, we’ve always had one agreement: we won’t bend the rules of physics or reality. We went a little far in this one, but we generally try not to take it too far away from logic, and that applies to our fight scenes. That’s why nobody in any of my fights will ever do a somersault or a twist-kick. Every punch and every kick feels like it’s real, so if you were to ever go off and try to learn these martial arts, in time you could do the exact same thing you see in our films. You could reach that stage, that skill set.
In terms of the punches and how they connect, we work hard to make them look a lot more dangerous and painful than they actually are. I get asked all the time about how we do our stunts, and people will say, "Man, we couldn’t do those things in Hollywood," and I keep thinking that if people saw how we execute these stunts and fights, they could absolutely do them in Hollywood, and probably a lot better. The way we design, we're selling the illusion to the audience that what they’re seeing is ridiculously dangerous and painful. The real version of the shoot, though, is a lot safer. We put a lot of elements in there that we can remove in post-production, whether it’s a crash mat or a wire or something. That helps us sell the illusion that what you’re seeing is incredibly dangerous and visceral.
Flannery: We don’t want to hide anything. If a character is hitting a guy, we want the audience to see that hit. There can’t be a trick edit where we cut away right before the impact, because we have these amazingly skilled martial artists. We want to show that, to show how good they are. They all trust each other so much, too, that they’re really hitting each other. For me, it would hurt like hell, but these guys are trained to take those hits and know how to hit someone with less than 100% power and make it look like it’s 100% power.
Evans: We approach the fight sequences with detailed rehearsals, too. For the first three months of the project, it’s really soft pre-production. The crew isn’t there—it’s just me, Iko, and Yayan [Ruhian], the choreography team. We just go through the script and figure out the fight sequences. It all comes down to the psychology of the character and the situation of the fight. So, if it’s a one-on-one, we can go way more complex with the choreography from the get-go; if it’s a mass attack with multiple fighters, then we strip that complexity away a bit and make it more raw and brutal. I tend to shoot video storyboards for all the fight scenes, so, that way, I know where all the edits are beforehand.
The initial reason for doing that wasn’t that we weren’t confident in what we were trying to achieve; we just wanted to make it so that when we’re on set and shooting, everyone would have everything they need to make it all work. Those video storyboards tell us who’s involved, what stage of the fight is it, how to monitor effects and know where we are in the chronology, to make sure the blood, cuts, and visible marks are consistent. We can make it like a map, then, in terms of the characters.
Flannery: The way we approach it, the camera is almost like an extra fighter. You’re choreographing the martial artists but then you’re also choreographing the camera’s movements. You don’t want static angles and cutting back-and-forth between the characters, so it’s handheld cameras and a lot of running around, especially for the prison riot sequence. You’ve got six or seven inches of wet, slippery mud. There were two or three medic stations on that set, and all through the day there’d be several crew members waiting for medics, with cuts and bruises on their feet. We tried wearing diving shoots and boots, but the problem was you’d run around in the mud and loses your shoes. Towards the end of that shoot, everyone was running around with bare feet, so all the gravel beneath the mud was cutting everyone’s feet up. It was pretty dicey for the old feet. [Laughs.]
Evans: We’re only on our third film—we’re still learning. The video storyboards become safety nets. Plus, it allows us to cut and edit the fight scenes as we’re shooting them. That way, I get to immediately see what’s working as it happens, and it’s also a morale booster. Your crew works hard everyday and then goes home to see their families, but this way they get to see what they’ve made first and can go home with that confidence and excitement. They don’t have to ask themselves, ‘All of this hard work we’re doing—what is it going towards?’ After they see the footage, they then can’t wait to come back the next day and shoot some more.
The Linkin Park (?!) Connection
A stickler for realism, Gareth Evans could just let his CGI-free, actual-fists-on-actual-faces fight scenes do all the talking for he and his Raid movies. But why let audiences sit in awed silence when you can energize them to the point of tearing shit up in theaters?
That’s where Joe Trapanese comes into the picture. Outside of the Raid films, the New Jersey native has worked with Daft Punk on the TRON: Legacy soundtrack (2010) and M83 for the music accompanying Tom Cruise’s futuristic adventure in last year’s Oblivion. For those projects, Trapanese’s ears were attuned to spacey techno sounds; when he’s working with Gareth Evans, though, the spaciness is gone. In its place, a sonic intensity that makes people feel like they’re watching a darker, harder-edged version of the old video game Streets of Rage 2 come to life.
Joe Trapanese: We worked really hard on [The Raid 2]. I remember the first time I saw it, in its finished form. Gareth brought some of us the studio, and I could say was, “Oh my god!” [Laughs.] I can’t believe he was able to up the ante from the first one.
It’s funny, I hate to use the word “groundbreaking,” because we’ve seen some of this stuff before, though this is certainly more brutal than anything we’ve ever seen before. But, really, this film is like a return to the roots of where action films come from. What is an action film? What is violence in film? The Raid 2 is this very pure kind of adrenaline-based action film that many filmmakers seem to have lost touch with.
It feels great to be a part of this whole Raid thing. It all started with [Linkin Park’s] Mike Shinoda for me. Mike had seen TRON: Legacy while he was on tour. He was in Australia and able to take a peek at the movie, and, according to him, he said, “OK, Daft Punk is awesome and brilliant, but who helped them make this actually work for the film?” I had worked for two years with Daft Punk on TRON: Legacy, arranging and orchestrating the score. Mike found me. And, vice versa, I had some friends at Sony and Sony had bought the first Raid. They and Mike were looking for someone to work on a new score. That was how I got involved with the first one.
Once Mike and I started going on the festival circuit with The Raid, to Sundance and SXSW, we started hanging out with Gareth a lot and we all hit it off immediately. It was a reverse introduction; we didn’t have much interaction while we were scoring the first one, though Mike did chat with him on Skype often. It was nothing like what we had on the second film, though. Gareth came to Los Angeles and literally lived a few blocks from my house and was involved in the score every step of the way. He’d come over to my house everyday to work on it.
With the first film, Gareth gave us some references of artists he liked and scores he liked, but once he gave us that, he got out of our way because, in his mind, he’d already done the score with his original composing partners. They poured blood, sweat, and tears into the Indonesian score; he saw our score as an interesting new take and just let us do our thing. The result of that was a combination of the Indonesian score and our stuff. That’s why when the sequel came along, Gareth thought it’d be good to combine the two scenes; unfortunately, Mike was too busy in the studio with Linkin Park, so he wasn’t able to join us. But Gareth brought his two Indonesian composers, Aria [Prayogi] and Fajar [Yuskemal], to work with me on the sequel’s music. It brought the two styles together so Gareth could get exactly what he wanted this time.
Our goal musically is to take the emotion and intensity and try to make it even more visceral and engaging for the audience. That’s what a music score can do for a film, especially a film as adrenalized as this one. It heightens everything. To get yourself into the right headspace to score a film like The Raid, you have to distance yourself from the brutality. Watching the scenes over and over again can mess with your head. [Laughs.] For me, I tend to look at it like a beautiful ballet. These moves, fights, and techniques are all highly and tightly choreographed and highly rhythmic. What I try to do is tune into the rhythm and headspace that the filmmakers and actors are in while they’re doing this. How is edited? What kind of rhythm are Iko and his counterpart in while fighting? How fast or slow is this particular fight?
For the sequel, Gareth approached it traditionally. He shot the film first and then started thinking about its music later. I’ve had the great pleasure of working with a lot of different filmmakers, and sometimes the music is such an integral part of the film that we’re putting the music together beforehand. But I think what’s important to keep in mind about something like The Raid is that there’s so much discovery going on during the actual fights. I think preexisting music for The Raid might be more hurtful than helpful. You don’t want the actors and choreographers to use music like a crutch. You don’t want it to feel too much like a ballet or a choreographed dance, where they’re obviously moving along to the music. You want something more pure. If these were actual fights, there wouldn’t be this originally composed music going on with them.
Check out the "Motor Chase" track from The Raid 2's soundtrack, released exclusively by The Playlist:
Only the Greatest Car Chase Sequence Ever, NBD
A one-sentence review of The Raid 2 could read, “148 minutes’ worth of incredible, how-the-hell-did-they-do-that? action.” There’s real narrative ambition at work, too, but Evans and company repeatedly top themselves visually, starting the madness with a one-versus-dozens brawl inside a dirty men’s bathroom stall and building up to a staggering, 10-minute long duel on a massive kitchen set.
Proving he’s more than a fisticuffs orchestrator, Evans throws in a show-stopping car chase, and, no surprise, it puts all other recent big-screen car chases to shame. Mostly shot from inside the two primary vehicles, it’s high-speed, ridiculously violent, and a crazy feat of fearless camerawork.
Note: “Fearless” is shorthand for: Evans’ insane camera crew actually passes the camera off to each other from one speeding car to the other the entire time.
Evans: At one point, we were contemplating doing a lot of green-screen work on the car chase; then, we were contemplating using a flat-bed truck to pull the two cars, so we could control everything easier. We had all these different approaches in mind but they all would have made it seem fake. So we ended up doing was saying, "Fuck it, let’s just do it for real."
We were on a camera car following the main fight car, pulling the camera out and passing it back and forth from one car window to the other while at high speeds. One director of photography would be in the one car and he’s pass the camera to the other DOP. It was all practical and all real. It was a hard shot to get done, but once we got it done, there was this ridiculous sense of satisfaction.
Flannery: In Merantau, we were doing a lot of stuff where we’d pass the camera from one operator to another, and then we did that a lot in The Raid, where we follow Iko as he falls through the hole in the floor down to another floor below that. For The Raid 2, we thought, OK, let’s do the same thing but with moving cars! [Laughs.] It seemed like a logical progression, even though people probably thought we were crazy.
Evans: It was my first time doing anything with cars, so I had no concept of how long anything would take to shoot. We brought on this amazing stunt team from Hong Kong to help us execute that car chase. We had a working, schematic version of it at first, but then we wanted to be able to play around with it and improvise a little in the moment.
The whole thing of trying to compete with a car chase on a much bigger budget level, it was the realization that in those bigger movies, no one really focuses on the people inside the cars that much. We see them driving a little bit, in close-up shots, but when the car crashes, we never see them—it’s almost always about the glass and the metal. I wanted to make sure we had one or two shots where it’s all focused on the people inside the car as it crashes. You get the smash, but we wanted to make it feel like, "Holy shit, what am I watching here?"
It’s this uninterrupted take where you have the smash but then there’s a body flying out and you see what’s happening to the person inside. It becomes almost this gonzo shot where you’re not sure where it’s a visual effects moment and where did we go crazy and try to do it practically.
Flannery: It was pretty insane to shoot that, to be honest. That was something where, we’d done the martial arts before in Merantau and The Raid, and we’d done some gun-fighting in The Raid, but we’d never done a—nothing even close to one. In Indonesia, nothing on that scale has ever been done before. Everyone was pushing themselves. We just don’t want to do the same stuff that we did in the previous films. It was a massive challenge, but we can now look back on that and say, "OK, so we were able to shoot a pretty decent car chase."
Initially, it was supposed to be just under two weeks to shoot that sequence, but with us trying to close roads in Jakarta, it ended up being 60-70% longer than that. If you were shooting that in the U.S., you’d get the permit, they’d close the road, and you’d get help with security, and you can shoot from 8 o’clock in the morning to 5 o’clock at night, but in Jakarta, you’d start shooting and then they want to reopen the roads because traffic’s gotten too bad, and you have no choice but to comply and wait until they say you can close them again. That made it a long shoot. You’d have to convince me to shoot another car chase in Indonesia ever again. [Laughs.]
Evans: The films I didn’t respond to and always had problems with are the films that blow their loads within the first five minutes. The first set-piece is huge and gets your attention, and then there’s never anything else even remotely close to that. I’ve seen so many films recently, as well—and, no, I’m not going to name them—where it’s like, they set up the hero and the villain, and then the fight against the villain is only 90 seconds long. There’s no satisfaction there. You can do all this character work and set-up, but if you don’t give them enough to do at the end, it just feels like an anticlimax, or a cop-out.
We made sure to address that in The Raid 2’s final fight. There’s a moment in the final fight where 99% of other movies would end, but in ours, it’s like, ‘OK, that was just the first third.’ [Laughs.] "Now let’s see the other two-thirds." Some people think it's overkill and some people think it’s me being indulgent, but, fuck it, it is overkill and I am being indulgent! These are the films that I love watching. I grew up watching Jackie Chan in The Young Master where he’s fighting someone for what feels like ten minutes and you can’t take your eyes off the screen. It feels perfectly placed and perfectly performed. I hark back to those films, and hopefully what we do can exist in the same world as those films.
