Director Gareth Evans vaults into big leagues with The Raid

Enlarge Image

SUPPLIED PHOTO Gareth Evans: building a reputation.

SAM Peckinpah. John Woo. Quentin Tarantino. Gareth Evans.

If this was a game of One of These Things Is Not Like the Other, you would likely peg that last name as the interloper.

Not so fast, pal.

Gareth Evans may be an unknown today. But with his first internationally released feature The Raid: Redemption, the Welsh-born director may have just vaulted into the pantheon of filmmakers with a reputation for transposing violence onto a movie screen with cutting-edge style.

Like Tarantino, the 31-year-old Evans is a self-described movie fanboy, with particular emphasis on the martial-arts films he and his dad used to eagerly consume by the dozens in his hometown of Hirwaun, Wales. After studying screenwriting at the University of Glamorgan, Evans and his Indonesian-Japanese wife moved to Indonesia. There, Evans found himself working on a documentary on Pencak Silat, the Indonesian variant of silat, a martial art practised in different forms throughout southeast Asia and the Philippines.

Evans saw the cinematic possibilities of silat even as that particular martial art had been translated in frivolous ways in Indonesia.

"When we told people we were going to make a silat film, everyone was kind of laughing at us because the way silat was represented on TV at that time was a joke," Evans says on the phone from his home in Jakarta. "It was seen as something where people would jump up and turn into panthers and shoot fireballs out of their ass. And so people didn't take it seriously. People thought that's what silat was.

"What they didn't know, and what I planned all along when we discussed it with the (silat) masters that we had on board as a choreography team was that we wanted to reclaim silat and we wanted to do something to make them feel proud of it."

Shooting the documentary also introduced Evans to Iwo Ukais, a silat practitioner with star quality whom Evans would cast in his first feature, a cult film titled Merantau.

"I had no idea that he could carry an entire film, but I believed in his screen presence, because he has that in abundance," Evans says. "When we saw him doing a practice session, he immediately stood out.

"The whole idea of a westerner making a silat film in Indonesia aroused some suspicion in Jakarta's more nationalist circles. There is an extremely nationalist newspaper that didn't like the idea of a white guy coming in and (messing) with their culture. But the vast majority of people were happy about what we were doing."

So are film fans, including the ones in Toronto who raised the roof when the film premièred at the Toronto International film festival in 2011 in the Midnight Madness program. (It subsequently won the The Cadillac People's Choice Midnight Madness Award at the fest.)

"It was my first time at a midnight screening of anything," Evans recalls. "People were telling me: 'The audience is going to love this, they're going to flip for it.' And I didn't really believe them, because I came away from post-production in a state where I couldn't sit back and objectively watch my film anymore. So I hated it when we were finished.

"When it came to that screening, I was filled with anxiety about how people would respond, but the audience, beat for beat, they got it. They understood every little facet of it. They understood the moments I wanted them to laugh, they understood the moments I wanted them to be quiet, they understood the moments when the reaction is: 'What the f***?

"It was a great communal atmosphere where I got to see my film play perfectly to an audience. It was such a humbling experience."

The Raid: Redemption is currently playing at Polo Park Silver City.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 7, 2012 G8