While we’ve recently seen some of the stars from Indonesian action blockbusters “The Raid” and “The Raid 2” on the big screen in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”, it’s been awhile since we’ve heard from Gareth Evans, the director of Indonesia’s most successful action movies ever.
Evans has been back in his native England for a while and doing pre-production work on his next film, “Blister”. But he couldn’t keep away from the camera for that long.
The director recently revealed that he spent a week over the summer working on a little film project with some special guests who came to visit him in England all the way from Indonesia: Raid stars Yayan Ruhian and Cecep Arif Rahman, as well as Hannah Al Rashid (who most recently starred in Joko Anwar’s HBO fantasy series “Halfworlds”).
The result is a samurai short film devoid of dialogue but full of brilliant sword-swinging action. The story given in the Youtube description says: In a time of civil war, a young warrior is given the task of delivering a treaty between two rival lords. During her journey through the woods however, she finds herself hunted by two assassins intent on intercepting her message of peace in a bid to maintain the fear, instability and violent rule of their leader.
Evans said that the film is actually a test action sequence designed by himself, Yayan and Cecep, to see if they could create choreography that would maintain the “style and rhythm” of The Raid films while staying within the parameters of a PG-13 movie.
For our money, the test was definitely a success. The lack of blood or gore taking away little of the impact of the impressive fight choreography. It’s also quite amazing that the whole thing was shot in just one week with a cast and crew consisting of only four people. And frankly we can’t believe that it was actually shot in England and not Japan.
We definitely can’t wait to see what Evans does with “Blister”, but what we’re really hoping for is some news, any news, about “The Raid 3” becoming a reality sometime in the foreseeable future!
