I had an exclusive interview with The Raid 2 stars Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian. We may save that for March in case they don’t travel to the States again, but they told me to call director Gareth Evans a “bule gila,” crazy foreigner. So I sat in a roundtable interview with Evans to deliver the message, and get some more questions answered about the highly anticipated Silat martial arts sequel.
CraveOnline: You joked at the Q&A that the American title will be The Raid 2: More Redemption.
Gareth Evans: Redemptioner.
Would you consider Another Raid?
We could do that, or A Good Day to Raid Hard.
Iko and Yayan told me to call you Bula Gila.
Motherfuckers. They’re so racist it’s unreal. The shit I have to put up with out there is unreal.
How do you twist a bone on camera without breaking it for real?
Which one? Sometimes it can be a simple thing like a little bit of help in the VFX. There was one in the warehouse when he climbs over the guy and then snaps his arm. If you look at the real footage, it’s very light. There’s nothing happening. He’s not breaking his arm, it’s just straight but then my online guy, my VFX guy will make it look like the bone pops. It’s trying to find a good combination of what we can do real in camera and then what we can accentuate with VFX but in a subtle way.
Gareth Evans on the one deleted scene scene he’s still reconsidering.
I’m still debating whether I should have put it in or not. There was one big shootout. It was to tie in with the first time we show Hammer Girl, Baseball Bat Man, that montage sequence. At the beginning we show this festival going on so there was a scene where after they cut to black from the Baseball Bat Man hitting the guy, it was going to cut back to the festival and we had a big shootout between the Japanese gang and the Indonesian gang. It killed the pace of the thing. It was starting to get too long and we needed to get Iko in the taxi as well. Iko’s the focus of the film. These two gangs, we don’t see them before, we won’t see them again, because it’s a fucking massacre. But it was hard to cut because that was a hard shoot. That was four or five days’ worth of filming.
Gareth Evans on adding the scene to a potential director’s cut
Possibly. If there will be one. Maybe, either that or definitely on the deleted scenes.
Did you build a roofless car for the overhead shot in the car chase fight?
We did not build. We just cut it off. But we didn’t even cut all of it off because we needed to stick it back on again. It was the only car we had because our budget would not afford us another car, and that thing was a debate for a while with me and the art guys. I was like, “Guys, I’ve got to do this shot tomorrow. Can you please cut the roof off?” They’re like, “But when do you need to shoot the car with the roof back on?” “Three days time after that.” “It’s going to take a while to weld it back on. We have to just do it.” We couldn’t just go off and get another car for it. We were really clutching at straws for some stuff to be able to get that.
Gareth Evans on explaining The Raid 2 to people who haven’t seen The Raid, or not.
It’s The Raid 2. I would never have watched Back to the Future II without seeing the first one because you can’t follow it. I know The Godfather II there are elements that you can get away with watching without watching the first one, but you wouldn’t get the full experience of it. There would be a lot of stuff that would be completely confusing to you. All of those sequels demand that you have seen the first one.
My opinion was you have to have seen the first one and hopefully you remember it well enough to be able to follow it. The lead, the main character is from the first one but I didn’t want to spoon feed. To be honest, also another downside is we shot them both on two different formats so the quality of the image would just look so fucking different. Different aspect ratios, different quality of footage. It wouldn’t be 2K, it would be HD for the first one so to blow that up would look ugly and we’d have to do black and white and treat it.
I must be one of the only people who saw the Hammer Girl subway fight uncut, because you showed it straight through at TIFF. Was it always going to be intercut with Baseball Bat Man’s fight in the final film?
Yeah, that was the intention. We just really wanted to have something to show and I kind of wanted to hold back on the baseball and assassin stuff for a while because we hadn’t done the score for it yet. So we had the Hammer Girl sequence that we could show and I think, to be honest, I think the version that played in TIFF with Hammer Girl, I’m pretty sure every frame of that is actually in there. It’s just that because it’s split down into separate subsections that there’s nothing missing from any. Maybe the beginning set up, a little bit at the beginning.
Gareth Evans on rumors he’s already finished the script for The Raid 3.
No, I haven’t started it. I know the storyline for it. It’s set three hours before The Raid 2 finishes, so there’s a key moment in The Raid 2 where we go back and revisit that scene and as a result of that we branch off, so we go in a totally different direction then. That’s as much as I can say right now. There are people involved in the second one that we expand a lot more in the third, which is probably pretty obvious now because most of the fuckers die.
Could it have more Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man?
Nah, they’re done.
Couldn’t Hammer Girl get her own movie?
Well, the thing is with Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man, I have an idea for maybe a graphic novel that would be an origin to cover them and Prakoso. I’d like to do a graphic novel that’s basically The Raid and The Raid 2 combined but with much more detail than that. So we do the origin stories, the backstories for all those characters and we get to know what Prakoso was like before he grew his hair out and had a beard and had a suit that was too big for him.
What do you love about those completely blunt names? Hammer Girl is what she is. Baseball Bat Man is who he is.
I’m just fucking bad at coming up with names. In the next movie it’ll be like Knife Boy and stuff like that.
Gareth Evans on earlier cuts of The Raid 2.
The only hard part is when it comes to that final cut in the film, because everything’s in there in the treatment and the script. We shot a ton of stuff that’s not in the film. The first cut of the movie was two hours 58, two hours 56 and I’d already cut 10 scenes out. Then I had to trim it down and get it down to now like 2:29. So there’s a lot of stuff that’s not in there. Originally, we bumped off [a character] as well so he was another victim. We shot it, we had it but it just took too much time.
Gareth Evans on whether the Sundance cut will survive for the theatrical release.
I don’t know, you have to ask the MPAA for that. This is the cut that I want to go with. The only thing I have to change is doing a bit of sound mixing because we want to refine it. We knew that before we came here. We’re not done with the sound mix yet. We got it to a point that it was playable but we’ve got a lot of work we want to do on that. There’s some VFX we didn’t get to have fully finished yet. We just had to put temp VFX on there.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
