YEARS IN THE MAKING, GARETH EVANS’ HAVOC IS FINALLY UPON US — AND IT’S TAKING NO PRISONERS. HERE, THE DIRECTOR TELLS US HOW HE PUT TOGETHER A BRUISING, BLOODY BONANZA

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

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A Triad gets interrogated.

DON'T CALL ITA COMEBACKDON'T

Gareth Evans prefers another term. “It’s been quite the hiatus for me,” he tells Empire.

He’s not kidding. Since the Welsh director stabbed the last ‘i’ and shot the last ‘t’ in the face on 2014’s The Raid 2 , the man who has a genuine claim on the title of the world’s greatest contemporary action director hasn’t directed much action. “My action output since then has only really been the first season of Gangs Of London [in 2020],” he says. “And that was on TV. This is the first time I’ll have done a film with action at its core for a long time.”

He’s referring to HAVOC, the movie that teams him up with Tom Hardy for a bloody, balls-to-the-wall exercise in, well, havoc, that could well fully justify its all-caps title. After a decade away from making movie mayhem, Evans is back in business, and so we asked the master of action to give us an action masterclass. Here’s his guide to wreaking HAVOC.

DEVISE A PLAN

For Evans, every film he makes starts with an idea for a story, rather than a cool kill or bone-break. Since The Raid and The Raid 2 —the pair of no-holds-barred, relentless belters that he made after moving to Indonesia —put him on the map, Evans has had his fair share of big-budget propositions. He turned them all down. “I got offered a few things, and I’d read a few scripts that weren’t self-generated projects,” he tells Empire over a lengthy Zoom from his home in Wales. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted by a few, but nothing was enough to drag me away from the things that would speak to me. As soon as I lock in on a film I want to do, I can’t divert my brain into something else.”

That had been the case with ‘Blister’, which he came close to shooting soon after The Raid 2. Locations had been scouted. Action sequences had been designed. And yet. “After developing it for a while, there was a fork in the road,” he says, face etched with regret. “That one fell by the wayside.” And it was certainly the case with Apostle, the incredibly bleak folk-horror film which hit Netflix in 2018, and which was as far removed from action as he could get. But it was after that movie that the desire to return to action took hold. A concept popped into his head, which he shared at a breakfast at SXSW in Austin, Texas, with then-Netflix executive Matt Levin.