Gareth Evans reveals secrets of The Raid 2: Berandal!
In August this year I had the good fortune of interviewing soon-to-be-white-hot director and all round good bloke Gareth Evans.
I was primarily there to talk about the terrifying segment of V/H/S/2 that he and co-director Timo Tjahjanto were responsible for. But, I couldn’t let the interview go without taking the opportunity to ask him about what we can expect from The Raid 2: Berandal.
Mr. Evans graciously revealed teasers of what we can expect and, to my, joy also confirmed the sequel does feature a car chase! Something I’d hoped for when writing my review of the original movie.
If like me, waiting for The Raid 2 is like a kid waiting for their first Christmas, then read on and prepare to get rather excited.
“It’s a lot different from the first film. My main goal is that I didn’t want to just rehash the first one. Whenever you see a sequel that’s just a retread you ask, why aren’t you doing anything different when we already have this one?
I wanted to expand the universe more. There are names of characters thrown around at the end of The Raid seemingly for no reason, but they play an important part in the sequel. The main character Rama gets told to find Bunawa because he’s a good cop who can be trusted. Here we meet Bunawa, who plays a major part.
The Raid’s villain Tama says to Rama, “You think Reza sent you here to collect money from me? They sent you here to die.” Now we see who Reza is and we find out about the higher echelons of the police force and how big the corruption is.
We’ve also put symbolic links between the two films. The guy who let Tama rent the building in The Raid here in the sequel has similar artwork in his office, so maybe the painting in Tama’s office in the first film was a gift from him.
We’re not in one building any more, we’re out on the streets and we’re taking the action into lots of different places. And we have more characters; I wanted the sequel to be more of an ensemble piece.
The time line is different too – the first film is all in one day, the sequel takes place over three to four years.
And we also have a car chase in The Raid 2. Joe Taslim from The Raid went off to do Fast & Furious 6 and he kept telling me that I should watch his movie with him at the cinema.
But, I was like, “Fuck you, I’m just shooting a car chase right now so I do not want to see Fast 6 and compare.” In Fast 6 they crush six cars with a fucking tank in less than two minutes; I had six cars in total, and I wasn’t allowed to smash them up as much!
So, we didn’t have the budget to focus on flipping cars and going crazy with, so we’ve focused more on the question, when a car crashes what impact does it have on the person inside?
Hopefully that will make us stand out a little bit because you see things in one or two shots that you don’t normally see in a car chase.
Opinions may be divided this time because some people will just want the first film again. But hopefully there will be those who see we’re trying to do something different, something new, and they will be happy with what we’ve done.
But, it’s all for the audience to decide, so we’ll see!”
Indeed we shall when The Raid 2: Berandal is released in 2014.
Rob Daniel
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