A few years ago, a Welshman named Gareth Huw Evans moved to Jakarta and met a student of silat, Indonesia's martial art, and his teacher. They made a decent but unspectacular martial arts movie together called Merantau. Then they made a second movie together, The Raid: Redemption, about a squad of cops serving an arrest warrant on a drug lord holed up inside an apartment complex that serves as a hotel for thugs and miscreants, and it blew the doors off. Light years ahead of Merantau in terms of cinematography, storytelling, action choreography, and sheer filmmaking badassery, it rocked the Toronto Film Festival's Midnight Madness, played at Sundance, got scooped up for a remake and a sequel by Hollywood, just made a big chunk of change at the American box office, sold close to a million tickets in Indonesia, and made instant action-flick royalty out of director Evans, star Iko Uwais, and his teacher Yayan Ruhian. Below, we speak to Evans and break down the secrets of The Raid's bloody success.
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IKO UWAIS
The backbone of The Raid is Iko Uwais, a former cell phone service technician who is approximately the size of a small child. He is also one of cinema's most charismatic and brutal fighters and he's The Raid's best special effect. "Every fucking thing was horrible," Evans says. "It was a tough shoot. A month before shooting started, Iko was auditioning one of the fighters and he twisted his knee and was out for two weeks. Then, two weeks before the shoot, he got chicken pox. It kept getting worse and worse." The first week was spent shooting a savage hallways fight that sees Uwais take on one, then two, then a dozen thugs, armed with only a knife (useful for prying off kneecaps) and a baton (useful for shattering forearms). "At the end of the first day," Evans says, "Iko twisted his knee again." He was out for a week and when he returned they had to shoot around his injury. The scene will go down as a classic, as the baby faced Uwais leaves the hallway hip-deep in mangled bodies. How does such a pleasant guy become a human tank on screen? Music. "I asked him what he listened to to get in the mood for the action scenes." Evans says. "He told me he really likes to listen to Toni Braxton's 'Unbreak My Heart.'"
STUNTMEN
Evans and his team spent months choreographing the action before the shoot, and it shows. But the most surprising thing is the language spoken here. No wu shu, like Jet Li and a million imitators, no Jackie Chan style acrobatics. Instead it's silat, a street-level fighting style that has one goal: lay the dude out, fast and painful. It's like MMA jacked up on steroids and performed by jack rabbits. Assisted by Yayan Ruhian, a teacher of silat who also choreographed the film with Uwais, ace assistant director, Plenthonk, and an army of stuntmen with names like the Piranha Brothers, Evans turns the 15 story building into a jungle gym where bodies get brutalized fast. "It's all about trust, really," Evans says. "There's a guy that Iko throws over a balcony and they have a small fight in the corridor first. We were shooting at 2 a.m., everyone was tired, and I needed one last burst of energy. They talked it over and they just said, 'Let's go for it.' Iko was just throwing knees into his body and elbows into his back and those are real knees and real elbows and they're full speed and full power. They're just beating the crap out of each other because they've worked on a previous film together and they know their limits. It's one of those moments when you're watching it happen, and you're hearing the thuds of every hit landing and you think, 'At least the footage is good'."
INJURIES
Then there was the guy who got stabbed. "We had this one moment," Evans says, "when a character is crawling across the floor and he pulls his knife out and this stuntman grabs him and he stabs the stuntman in the chest five times. Obviously we used a retractable blade knife, but the stuntman getting stabbed had padding on his chest, and the padding had rolled down, and the actor was so hepped up and emotional that he stabbed him hard enough to crack his ribcage. We were all so focused on the actor and I look across and see this stunt guy on the floor clutching his chest, he could barely breathe. He was in a bad way. He had all these bruises and cut marks on his chest. It was really horrible. But then he had a cup of tea and he was okay."
But that's nothing compared to the stuntman who flips over a wall in a balcony-lined, multi-story concrete atrium and shatters his back on a lower balcony. He was on wires, crash mats were laid out, but the stuntmen pulling the wire and controlling his fall pulled too hard. "Instead of coming down at an angle, he just went straight across to the other side horizontally and smashed his head into a wall on the second floor, they lost their balance and let go of the wire and he bounced away from the crash mats and fell five meters onto concrete. We figured he must be dead. The medical team rushed over and ten minutes later he was up saying he wanted to do the next shot. It's the most horrible stunt I've ever seen go wrong."
LOW BUDGETS
Despite all the production value onscreen, The Raid was shot for just a little over $1 million. One way they saved money was by shooting 80 percent of the movie on a soundstage, building sets, then tearing them down, then re-using the same wood to build other sets. Characters in the film kick down a door, run through a corridor, and duck into an apartment, and all of those segments were filmed at different times, often in very different places. It didn't always work out. "We have a key conversation between two characters and we shot it on location in a real building but it was ferociously hot so I didn't have a chance to edit the footage on location and make sure we had what we needed," Evans remembers. "I didn't think we had what we needed, but we couldn't get into that location anymore, so my guys in the art department had to build an entire set that looked exactly like that room. We shot for a day on it to get the coverage I needed, and then in the editing room, it turns out I mostly had what I needed and I wound up only using about three seconds of footage from the reshoot. I felt really shitty."
YAYAN
The crowd favorite in the film is undoubtedly Mad Dog, a pint-sized silat tornado who is the number one killer for the drug lord. He spends most of the move parallel to the floor, bouncing off walls, unleashing hell with his feet and his fists. "Yayan is the nicest guy," Evans says. "He's been a teacher of _silat _for years, he's represented his country in silat, he's very humble, very intelligent, very philosophical." In Merantau, Yayan and Iko choreographed one quick fight scene in an elevator together and that was enough for Evans. "Okay, I want you guys to do everything for The Raid." At 44 years old, Yayan does 500 pushups a day and 500 situps, and he's not to be trifled with. "One of the styles of silat he does is a breathing technique that allows him to absorb pain and impact," Evans says. "One time I walked in the room and I hear all these people shouting. Our camera guys, who are these big bulky fellows with mohawks, are punching him as hard as they can in the stomach, and he's just brushing it off. 'Okay,' he said. 'Who's next.'"
