- Man, I wanna go out and fight. - These guys are awesome.
- I loved watching it with them. - Yeah.
This is the best audience in the world, you know that?
There was a point when I leaned over to Gareth and said:
"These guys are kind of sick."
I said this to the guy that made this.
- I'm a nice person. - He's a nice...
We breed them this way.
Well, I think we should get right to the point...
...because this is some of the best action scenes I've seen in a long time.
And I think that in some ways--
I think the reason why so many people were surprised that it's not--
That it's a white guy from Wales making it, is it--
Is that it really looks like an East Asian action movie.
It's got, like-- I mean, the choreo--
You know, so many American movies...
...it's just a lot of chaos and you can't tell what's going on.
But you can track, even though the editing's fast.
Tell me about what you think makes a great action scene.
Blood.
No. Really, a lot of my influences...
...come from sort of '80s and '90s Hong Kong action cinema.
So I grew up watching, you know...
...all the sort of Jackie Chan films and Jet Li films.
Like my favorite ones are things like Police Story and Project A.
Those are the ones that kind of stick with me and I still rewatch to this day.
And then also, you know, John Woo's work...
...like The Killer and Hard Boiled.
And going back a bit further...
...you go back to like, Peckinpah's work on The Wild Bunch.
And what I love about the action scenes in those films...
...is that there's a certain degree of clarity.
You can kind of see everything and get this full spatial awareness...
...when you're in the fight scenes.
So you know who's coming from where...
...you know the attacks, the punches, the injuries and stuff like that.
So it's kind of going back to more of a sort of an old-fashioned approach.
Like, I'm not-- It comes down to the fact that I'm a really shit editor...
...so I can't do all the flashy stuff. I'm a very sort of basic editor...
...so everything's just cut to cut, there's like a straight out.
And so that's kind of, you know, helped me in a way...
...to have this old-fashioned style of shooting action.
You had to actually make something happen and then film it.
- Yeah. - In that sense, it's a lot like--
And this kind of leads to another comment.
People have compared kung fu movies to musicals...
...like, you get the head to toe, you see Fred Astaire dance.
I mean, these are incredible performers.
Can you tell us a little bit about silat?
Because I think a lot-- That was a new martial art to me.
Like, what makes that a particularly cinematic fight style?
I think all martial arts, they tend to share...
...the same kind of techniques. It's the same--
There's only so many ways you can throw a punch and a kick...
...and only so many ways you can look someone.
But it's the packaging that's different.
And one of the things I love about silat is the way that the guys perform it.
And it looks so fluid on-screen as well.
And it seems to be very sort of adaptable...
...to different environments and circumstances.
If they're in a wide-open space with a bunch of fighters, they can deal with it.
If they're in a tight, confined space, they can deal with it.
And it's this idea of-- They tend to have, like, a low center of gravity.
So they can start fighting eye to eye...
...then drop down and take your leg straight away.
It's that kind of adaptability that I really love...
...that we wanted to kind of explore more of in this film.
Was it more your--? Is it inherent to the martial art...
...or something you were going for, the physicality?
People being thrown into walls, people being thrown into objects.
I think that was-- That came from a desire to sort of make the fighting...
...feel like it was more, like, grounded in reality, more believable.
We have these moments where there's complex choreography going on...
...but then we kind of mix it up with some rough takedowns, rough throws.
Like, the throws in the movie, they don't feel 100 percent clean.
They feel like they're a bit trying to grab at certain parts of clothing.
And, you know, not quite-- Not a perfect execution of a throw.
Then that makes it feel a little more real.
So even though the fight scenes, like, they go on for five, six minutes...
...and that's the exaggerated part...
...but we tend to kind of put movements in there...
...that people can believe like, that would really happen in the fight.
That leads to an obvious question.
How did somebody not get hurt during all this?
People got hurt.
We do our best when we design these films...
...because we know some of the stunt work is gonna...
...appear to look very, very dangerous on camera.
But we do our best to execute them in a way...
...where we don't put the actors or the stunt guys...
...in real serious, serious danger.
But from time to time, shit happens.
The guy who gets thrown over the balcony...
...and snaps his back in half, so the way we did that--
When you watch that on the screen you think, "Oh, fuck," you know...
..."did he really break his back?" No. I'm not that mean. A little bit.
But the way we did it was we split it up into three separate shots.
So the first shot is a nice, big wide shot, and we follow the path down.
We took the wall out, put crash mats there.
He's on a wire to control his path.
And so he gets flipped over, then, boom, lands on the crash mats.
We lock the camera into position, then we put the wall back in.
When the Wall's back in, we lift him up 1 meter off the wall...
...drop him down onto his ass, so his legs come down one side--
His back comes down one side, sorry.
Onto his back, so his legs come down the other side.
Then we stitch all three together...
...and it's one seamless thing where it looks like, "Shit."
But what happened and why that went horribly wrong...
...because that's what you wanna hear, right, the bad part of it?
- So the poor guy-- - We're all Jackie Chan fans.
It always ends with the roll call of injuries.
So the part that went wrong with that...
...was on the first take that we did of the flip-over.
The guys who were controlling the wire pulled a little bit too hard.
So instead of him coming over and coming down nicely on an angle...
...his body just shot straight across...
...and he smashed the back of his head into the wall...
...that was still up on the second floor.
Because of the impact, they lost balance...
...and the wire slipped, and then he starts falling down.
But because of the bounce off the wall, he came down on a trajectory.
So he moved away from all of the crash mats.
Every single crash mat we put for him, he missed.
And so he fell 5 meters down onto concrete.
And I was like, "He's fucking dead. There's no way he lived."
So we all rush out.
And then you might have noticed, we had one or two paramedics...
...in our crew, in our credits.
We had a paramedic team and ambulance crew on standby...
...whenever we'd do these type of scenes.
So they came rushing out, checked his neck, vitals and everything.
And after about 10 minutes of us panicking...
...and not sure what the fuck was gonna happen, he woke up.
And he did the thing that all stunt guys do...
...when they've had a stumble or a bit of a fall.
He's like, "Let's go again," you know?
They sort of go, "I'm fucking tough. I can do this again."
But we were like, "No, you're gonna go to a hospital first."
And then three days, four days later, we called him back in...
...and then he did it again.
Real nice.
You know, another thing that reminds me of Jackie Chan movies...
...is that the hero is not-- ls often overwhelmed.
You know, he's often fleeing. Jackie Chan almost--
It's almost the art of running away half the time.
And there's a real sense of vulnerability to the leads...
...that I really liked.
Yeah. For me, it's like we borrowed--
Like, two of the sort of, you know, the key martial artists...
...is obviously Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan.
And the thing we borrowed from Jackie Chan...
...is that idea of that vulnerability.
That idea that, you know--
There's a moment in that film when he's walking down the corridor...
...after the fight with the machete gang...
...where if anyone comes out from another room, he's dead.
He can't fight anymore.
And we wanted to kind of put that in there...
...to get the audience to side with him a little bit more...
...to feel like there is a real sense of danger and a real vulnerability.
Even though we know he's the hero, he's gonna make it till the end...
...but it's that idea of, you know, "What if...?"
And it's just to plant that seed in their mind.
And then the Bruce Lee thing is that I've always loved the fact...
...that Bruce Lee would kind of just absolutely lose it in a fight and get--
You know, the rage would take over.
If you look at Enter the Dragon, there's the moment when he kills Oharra...
...when he jumps up and crushes his rib cage with a kick.
And that look of anguish on his face is kind of like he acknowledges...
...that he's crossed the line and that he let the rage take over.
And that was something that we riffed on a little bit...
...when he jumps backwards through the empty door frame...
...and slams the guy's neck down onto the door frame.
There's that sort of like, "Oh, shit, what did I just do?"
Well, you know who else has that quality is Mad Dog.
And I love both that he is--
It's so rare that we're willing to have the villain be tougher than the hero.
- It takes two heroes... - Yeah.
...which is kind of an old kung fu tradition, and that he's tiny.
That thing with Mad Dog, the reason we did that two-on-one fight...
...is because of the Jackie Chan film, Dragon Lord.
Because I just loved the fact that in that film...
...they're upstaged by the bad guy.
And they're being beaten, and thrown and hurled around.
And it just takes, you know, relentless pounding...
...in order to get him to stop. But, yeah.
He gets stabbed in the neck and it just makes him madder.
Yeah. It's like, "I'm gonna kill these guys before I bleed to death."
That was it. That's the timer on him.
And he's a small guy so he hasn't got that much blood.
Well, I already referred to this as--
Talked about how action movies can be like musicals.
And I wanna talk about what it's like to score a movie like this.
You know, I know you do a lot of-- You do a lot of songwriting.
And how does--? How do you approach a movie like The Raid...
...with these kind of set-piece moments?
I play in a band, so we do-- I mean, my--
I think my comfort zone in the, you know, past decade or so...
...has been more in songs, making songs for albums.
And approaching something like this is obviously very different...
...mainly because when you're writing a song, you're telling your own story...
...you're, to some degree, trying to grab people out of their everyday lives...
...and yank them into the song so that they're driving along and go:
"What's that playing on the radio? What is that?"
This is the complete opposite thing.
In fact, in the first few days of writing little sketches for the film...
...I found that all of the stuff that I did that was too overt...
...that was too type A, like, I had to--
It was either not gonna work at all or I had to mellow it out quite a bit...
...because I didn't wanna, you know--
Gareth is doing the storytelling here, I'm not.
And one of the main things, as you kind of alluded to...
...is there's a dance going on here. There's like, a rhythm and there's a--
It's almost like reverse engineering a music video...
...where there's already choreography, they're dancing. You're like:
"There's no sound. Now I gotta make--
What is the song? What are they dancing to?"
- And so that-- - Milli Vanilli mostly.
- And it's already got break beats. - Yeah, exactly.
Breaks.
A lot of it was just kind of trying to get in tune...
...with the internal rhythm that Gareth had set up...
...not only with the extensive months of fight choreography...
...but with the editing that he was doing, it was very tight.
So it was a matter of kind of watching the scenes enough...
...that we could draw out that internal rhythm.
And the other thing that we did early on is--
You know, because of a lot of the traditional things...
...that Gareth was drawing on...
...we felt one traditional thing we wanted to draw on...
...was each character has a theme, but less of a theme in our score...
...more of a sound.
So when you see the bad guy or feel his presence...
...you hear a certain drone or a certain texture...
...and the same when our lead character is thinking about his family...
...you're gonna hear strings and a piano.
So that was another element that went into the planning.
Yeah, just like the idea of like--
I come from an illustration background, painting background...
...so if you're gonna do a painting...
...one of the first things you do is choose a palette.
You put certain paints on your palette and don't use other colors.
And like the first day that Joe and I talked about this...
...we said we're not gonna use guitar, we're not gonna use certain types of--
For example, we strayed away from anything--
Somebody else pointed out.
Anything that sounded overtly, like, Asian or Indonesian.
We didn't wanna even touch anything that was gonna make people go like:
"What's up with that?"
Especially knowing we have-- Linkin Park has Indonesian fans.
I didn't wanna offend somebody by using an instrument in a weird way...
...that I don't know anything about.
So we really went with stuff that...
...as you could hear, you know, like, mashing up these break beats...
...mashing up organic instruments, mashing up these synths...
...and then running everything through guitar pedals.
There's also a real driving because the movie has those very--
Going up through the building.
There's these great moments of build or escalation that really lend itself.
Yeah, it was-- Obviously there's moments when he just left room...
...for the music to kind of step out front and be a character in one sense.
I mean, there are a few places where even the--
Like, there isn't really a lot of sound design...
...it's pretty sparse or it goes completely silent...
...and that was nice for us to be able to say:
"Okay, the music's gonna take over here and we'll get to just go to 11."
How did you plan that? Did you have moments when you--?
Did you have it mapped out when you wanted music...
...when you wanted to pull back and hear just the sounds?
It was an interesting process for the work that we did...
...like on the U.S. version, was that--
I'd just finished doing the original Indonesian version, see?
And when I decided to talk to Mike then...
...we had a chat about it and I wanted to get a feel of...
...what he wanted to do with the music, how he wanted to approach the score.
And I didn't wanna give them, like, a bunch of notes on:
"You should have your cue at this point.
I think you should kind of go for this tone here."
Because I'd just finished and I didn't wanna give them the same notes...
...that I'd given my guys in Indonesia.
So it was one of those things that once we spoke...
...and then Mike talked about bringing Joe on board--
And I was a huge fan of the work he'd done on the TRON soundtrack.
--And then, you know, got a clear idea of his approach...
...saying he wanted to come to it from a classical background...
...and make a score that was, you know--
Not like a bunch of songs pasted onto a film, but an actual full score...
...that was gonna know when to go in the background and support...
...and when to come into the front and push the film forward.
So once I kind of had all that, it was kind of like a reassurance for me.
And then I was just like, "You go ahead and you do your thing.
You can have full creative freedom to go off and do your thing."
And then once it was ready for me to take a look at it...
...I could come in and give some notes then and some feedback on it.
Do you remember any specific shifts that were made...
...in that feedback process?
I mean, I have to say, one thing that was really great for just--
I'm sure any musician working in this capacity is always...
You know, it's a pleasure to work with such creative, you know, freedom...
...and not have somebody looking over your shoulder and checking in.
I remember a day where towards the end of the process on this movie...
...I was back in the studio with Linkin Park...
...and we were talking about our album...
...kind of switching gears and everything.
And I was telling the guys, you know...
...one thing I learned from doing this score was that...
...you know, being allowed to kind of just dive down the rabbit hole...
...and go after creative ideas and let them snowball, really got--
I felt like it got us a lot further a lot faster, you know.
We had some really-- Some stuff that just--
If you had stopped us halfway through and gone:
"Okay, so, what are you doing here?" You know what I mean?
We would've snapped out of the spell and not arrived at what we arrived at.
So that was something that we actually implemented in our studio...
...for the next record. I mean, we're writing right now...
...we're gonna hopefully have something--
We are gonna have something out this year.
So that was-- Yeah, Gareth, I'm sure he's gonna be...
...taking a lot of credit for the next Linkin Park record.
-"I helped those guys outwith that." - You're welcome.
One interesting thing you talk about there is:
"With great power comes great responsibility."
That if a director tells you, "Okay, go for it," you know--
When we came to the table, we had a bunch of ideas, like:
"Okay, no guitars, distorted drums, stuff like that."
And when Gareth said, "Okay, go for it," you know...
...it's like, "Oh, okay, all right, we need to really, like--
This is our baby now. We gotta take care of this.
We gotta make sure it's great because the next time we give it to Gareth...
...it's gonna be almost done, you know. Let's make sure he loves this."
So it's almost like...
...because he gave us that freedom, we came out with something better...
...than if we did have someone nursing us the whole way through.
You mentioned the Indonesian version.
How was the Indonesian version different than the U.S. version?
I mean-- What was interesting to me, because I get to see both versions...
...is that some of the cues were very similar...
...and sometimes songs kind of ended in a similar way, but there was--
It was like the overall feel, and atmosphere and the tone...
...was almost the same, but the actual tracks themselves were very different.
That sounds bizarre? That's a weird way to say it.
But it's kind of like the guys that did the sound mix for the film...
...they also did the score.
So it was kind of hard in a way at the first point...
...to kind of separate what they'd done from it.
And I'd worked really, really closely with them on it, you know?
We were like 20 hours a day in Thailand...
...doing the postproduction work on it for about 10, 14 days...
...to get it in on time, ready for Toronto.
So it's hard sometimes to separate the two.
And for me, it sounds like, horribly diplomatic to say...
...but truthfully, I love both soundtracks equally.
There's things that I prefer that Mike and Joe have done.
And there's tracks where I prefer the guys in Indonesia have done.
It's that fine balance between the two. So, yeah, it's interesting.
Living in Indonesia for the last four years...
The film was universal. It's very easy to understand...
...but I do wonder how much the culture--
How much your observation as an outsider of the culture...
...have affected the story or the portrayal.
On this one, not so much.
On the first movie, Merantau, that was way more influenced...
...by observations and an experience of living in the country then.
But on this one, like you said earlier, it's way more universal.
And, you know, the whole idea of that building, thank God, is fictitious.
But, yeah, it was just-- It was--
It came less from living a life in Indonesia...
...and more from living a life watching a bunch of movies, basically.
Yeah, that building is incredible. It is a character in the movie.
I was wondering how much was mythological, purely from you...
...and how much was locally observed.
The building itself is CG as well.
Seriously. The real building that we shot the exterior for...
...is like a four-story building.
Very nice, clean office space and stuff.
I figured we need to do something to that.
- You're messing with me. - Swear to God.
My online guy would use that as a template...
...and just make it look horrible and tall.
I was gonna-- The interiors, I assume, were sets though...
...because that's incredibly well-designed.
- Yeah, all the corridors, the atrium-- - It looks like those hall walls...
...have had many holes punched in them over time.
- Many faces thrown into them as well. - Yeah.
Can you tell me a little bit about the conception of that building?
Yeah.
So like one of the things that we felt that we needed to do was to have--
We knew the film was gonna be contained within one building.
And once you do that, you need to try to find ways...
...where you can kind of make it, like, still feel fresh...
...and aesthetically different throughout the film.
Because it can get very boring if it's just--
All we had to work with was corridors, atriums and rooms. That was it.
So we decided to kind of try to have, like, a key moment in the film...
...that was set within that location.
So for the hallway, it was always the knife and the stick fight.
And then for the machete gang...
...it was using the door and going into the rooms.
It was always the neck breaker. That was the big thing with that.
For the atrium, it was the idea of playing around with light...
...and the idea that we could shut down the lights...
...and play around with that idea of when you look in the dark...
...you start to see more detail.
And so, like with the AK-47 guys and the shotgun blast...
...it was all playing around with time and light.
And then obviously, the big backbreaker fall.
- So it was finding-- - There's also the incredible--
Because it's like projects, it's cellular, that amazing vertical...
...where it's going through room to room.
- Yeah. And the thing is-- - I wanted that to go on forever.
The thing is, with the design of the building as well...
...because we have, like, T-section corridors, L-section corridors...
...straight corridors, atriums, stairwells...
...torture rooms, meth labs.
If you put all of that together and make a schematic...
...a blueprint of it...
...it just looks like the worst design of a building ever made.
It would never be a square block.
It would just be some fucking random shape or something.
Well, tell us a little bit about the performers.
You know, they're both--
Both the lead and the main villain are fantastic.
- Yeah, I mean, lko and Yayan... - Charismatic.
...they've worked with us since the first movie, since Merantau.
Before we started work-- Before I started working with lko...
...he was a delivery guy for a phone company.
He used to deliver documents between different offices and stuff like that.
And so I met him doing a documentary...
...and noticed immediately that he had a sort of screen presence about him.
And so we decided to sort of-- Sort of take him away from that work...
...and bring him into this, and gear up these films...
...to kind of launch him as an action star.
With Yayan, he was one of the choreography team for the first movie.
And he wasn't supposed to be in the first movie for a long time.
But he practiced with lko for the choreography...
...and the lift fight of Merantau...
...and we were still looking to cast that role.
And my line producer, Anne, she suggested that we give him a try...
...give him an audition to see how he handled the drama.
Luckily, Yayan was very natural and adept at doing the drama as well.
That's kind of like-- Once we'd worked together on Merantau...
...l knew I wanted them to do something in The Raid...
...and fight each other again...
...but have a much longer fight than we did in Merantau.
A lot of the other fighters from the film, we kind of scoured through Indonesia...
...to do a big casting session where we saw about 3- to 400 people.
And we whittled it down to, like, 80 that were really good.
But going back to the whole architecture...
...and the design of the building...
...the guy with the machete, with the big eyes...
...his day job is as an architect.
He does martial arts in his spare time. And he came and shot the film for us...
...and then went off and built a building somewhere.
I mean, when you say he had star quality--
Can you pronounce the name of the lead again?
- lko. -lko.
You know, how would you know he could carry a whole movie...
...just from, like, telephone delivery guy?
He's very, very charismatic and likable, but he really acts.
Did you have to work closely with him to get a performance or--?
Yeah, on the first movie, we sent him for--
We did like a three-month drama class before the film started.
And for the first film he relied more on sort of like visuals than he did...
...from trying to get into the psychology of the character.
So for the first film, it was almost sort of like show-and-tell.
I'd have to do the performance for him...
...and he'd watch me do it and then he'd do his interpretation of that.
He'd treat it the same way he would with choreography.
He had a very photographic memory for it.
That was his approach to the performance in the first film.
But on this one, having that whole experience behind him then...
...he got to kind-- It would help me a lot...
...because I got to get more into the psychology of it with him.
And so hopefully in the next film, I'm gonna push him even further then.
What it is like working with Indonesian crews? What is it like...?
Well, what is the film industry like there and...?
Crew-wise, like, they're brilliant and amazing.
We work ridiculously long hours out there.
There's no unions.
Like, our shortest clay was about 16 to 17 hours...
...and our longest day was about 26, which is technically...
...one really long day and one very, very short two-hour day.
But, yeah, so that's kind of like the--
We wanted to do five days, six days, five days, six days per week.
It ended up being five days, six days, six days, six, six, six, until we finished.
And it's literally like, it's very...
It is fun, but it's stressful when you're doing it.
It's one of those things where during the shoot, you think:
"I wanna be in postproduction."
When you're in postproduction, you're like, "I wanna release the film."
When you release the film, you're like, "I wanna shoot again."
It's kind of like this weird masochistic thing about it.
Yeah, I mean, the crew that I have, they've been great.
And they adapted really well too on the first film...
...because on the first film, I didn't speak any Indonesian.
And, you know, they've worked a lot with sort of--
On television commercials.
So they've worked with foreign directors before.
So they helped me with that language barrier.
But on this one, in the last two years, they've taught me a lot of Indonesian...
...a lot of things that I can use to insult people's mothers.
But also the ability to communicate with the crew...
...and kind of give direction as well.
So we're getting in that position now where we're both--
You know, I'm almost-- Not fluent, but getting close to it now.
Are you gonna keep making movies in Indonesia?
Yeah, absolutely.
I wanna do stuff outside Indonesia as well at some point...
...but for now, the immediate future is to do a sequel to this one.
They agree.
And, yeah, so we're gonna start shooting that in January.
That's something I really wanna do in Indonesia.
The idea is, I'd love to be able to do a project in Indonesia...
...then do a project outside Indonesia, and go back and forth, back and forth.
I've still got about five ideas I wanna do with lko for silat again.
Other than the lack of unions...
...what do you like about it that makes you wanna go back?
To be honest, when I was in UK, I didn't do enough...
...to get myself noticed in the film industry.
I didn't push enough and I kept myself too localized.
And since I moved to Indonesia, you know, it's given me my career.
And the people there have supported me.
They haven't kind of, you know, seen me as some, you know...
...white devil, outsider guy that's fucking with their culture and stuff.
They've actually embraced the films we've made...
...and they've been like, you know, proud of the success this film has had.
And so, yeah, it's been like a big support.
And that's one of the reasons why I still wanna make films there...
...is because I just feel like I owe it to them.
If you could turn the lights up for a bit...
...I wanna give the audience some chance...
...to ask a couple questions as well.
Somebody right here.
So basically, when it comes to the martial-arts side of the choreography...
...it's very much a collaborative process...
...between myself, lko and Yayan.
Yayan's the guy who played Mad Dog.
And the three of us are kind of--
For three months, we spend time in an office space...
...with lots of crash mats everywhere and a Handycam.
And I'll usually give them a sense of the location, the props...
...the opponents, what their skill set is...
...you know, what's the tone of the fight...
...and then tell them, "Okay, now fight your way out of that situation."
Then they'll come to me with a bunch of movements.
Because they'll design the idea of this elbow, this kick...
...this punch, this lock, this exchange.
And then I'll take a look at all of that and work with them then...
...to figure out the order of things.
So, like, what the flow of the fight should be...
...where those key cool moments should come in.
So we workshop it together, the three of us...
...and we do like a full video storyboard.
We kind of shoot it exactly as we would in the film...
...but just with the Handycam, so we know every edit, every shot...
...and we know if it flows, if it works, what doesn't, why.
Then we can use that as a template later on in the final version of the film.
So then when we're on location, we've got that laptop open...
...with the video storyboard, and we can sort of take a look at that...
...and every department knows what's required from every shot.
Then as we get the final version, we drop that into the timeline...
...and replace the shitty, like, office version.
And slowly, you start to see that scene build up again...
...and hopefully it looks better than it did in the office.
But if there are any edits that kind of jar...
...that don't come together properly, we're still on location...
...so we can just go back in and shoot another shot and then fix it.
So it's kind of born out of necessity and the idea of...
...like, wanting to keep the budget down in terms of the action scenes.
So that helps in a big way in that respect then.
But when it comes to the gunplay or the stunts...
...that's usually my twisted, sick little mind then...
...for the guy being shot in the face and the door with the neck and stuff.
And that-- Because lko and Yayan, they're too nice, they're too humble.
So they just wanna punch people and run away and stuff.
But I'm like, "No, pull the leg, pull the knife down"...
...and, you know, all that stuff.
Yeah, we tend to workshop and push it together. That's it.
There's an interesting balance of gunplay and physical activity.
Is that something--?
I mean, it isn't just a martial-arts movie or just a gunfight movie.
I think, like, for the gunplay stuff as well, it was one of those things--
Because they're a SWAT team, we decided not to have any martial arts...
...until they'd run out of bullets, until they'd lost their guns.
We didn't want it to be, you know, "Okay, it's a martial arts film.
It doesn't matter if they got a gun, they still use their fists."
It didn't make sense. I needed it to be a logical progression...
...from gunplay to weapons stuff.
Then when they haven't got any weapons, then it's hand-to-hand.
So, yeah, that was sort of the logical point to that.
And then the idea of not making it purely just a martial-arts film...
...I know that the action discipline is silat...
...so then that kind of tells people it's a "martial-arts" film...
...but one thing I noticed early on was that the concept was survival horror.
Like, the whole concept of it is typical to survival horror...
...so I decided to kind of, like, put more genres into it...
...that you wouldn't normally get in a martial-arts film.
Horror elements like the machete tapping against the tiles...
...and the guys hiding inside the wall.
It was just the idea of, throw in suspense...
...throw in thriller elements as well.
How do you feel about an American remake, guys?
It's happening-
I'm exec-producing on it.
I'm exec-producing the horrible remake.
It's... I'm actually... Like...
For me, I think it's got a lot of potential and it could do very well.
You know, the story line is very streamlined and universal...
...so it could take place anywhere.
And I think the key to its success will be as long as the direct--
Whoever ends up being given the directing job--
I don't wanna direct it, I've just done this one.
I've ran out of ways that I can kill people with doors.
So I think someone needs to come to it with a fresh pair of eyes...
...and, you know, be given the freedom that I had when I did this.
I had nobody sort of looking over my shoulder telling me:
"Oh, you can't kill people like that. You can't do this or you can't do that."
The only limitation I had was budgetary.
It was just, you know, can't afford to do it. That was it.
So I think that as long as the director of that remake...
...is given that kind of freedom, that kind of flexibility...
...then, you know, it can only lead to a good thing. They've also--
The guys have shown a certain degree of respect for the original as well...
...so lko and Yayan will be involved...
...in designing some of the choreography for the film as well...
...so there'll be like a silat flavor to it as well.
Yeah. I got a long list of people that I'd like to see in it...
...but I don't wanna say any of those names...
...because, you know, it's not nice to kind of either jinx...
...or let slip about stuff.
But those decisions haven't been made yet...
...but there's people that I really hope can be a part of that project then.
My wife. She's Indonesian-Japanese.
I was based in UK for a long time...
...and she got me the gig doing the documentary out there.
And while we went up to do the documentary...
...that was the first time I learned about silat.
It was the first time I'd seen it.
So I got blown away with this martial-art discipline...
...that I was not familiar with, and looked great.
And I felt it had potential to do well on film.
And so knowing that she had family there in Indonesia...
...and that I had no real ties that kept me in UK...
...beyond, you know, family and friends...
I had some ties to keep me in UK.
Family and friends that I love very much and miss every single day.
Yeah, it was like a no-brainer. It was this thing of like...
...go for it and make a fresh start and see what happens.
And so that's how I ended up over there.
We shot for about 72 days total...
...during which time I barely saw anyone.
The final fight was about six minutes worth of fighting...
...and about two minutes worth of drama wraparound.
And I wanted about 14 to 15 days to shoot it...
...but I got given eight.
So the poor guys who were fighting had to fight for like 14 hours a day...
...and six of those days were consecutive days as well.
The best analogy I can give you is, you know when you go to the gym...
...and you do one hour in the gym and the next day you feel like shit...
...and you feel like your body can't do anything ever again?
Imagine doing 14 hours in the gym...
...and then the next morning you do another 14 hours...
...and then for another four days on top of that.
You get one day break, then you do another two days.
That's what we put them through. But I was okay. I was fine. I just--
So fine.
I only cut dialogue from this, actually.
There's one scene where every time I watch it...
...I feel like it's out of place and I feel like it's a little too--
Not so much that the scene is too violent...
...but it feels like we've already had so much violence at that point...
...that I feel we need to have a little breathing space.
So there is one scene that I probably would have cut out at a push.
- Are you gonna say what scene? - Okay.
The elevator scene, with the stab through the neck.
It's like, I like the scene on its own, but in the flow of it...
...after the whole, you know, "butter knife in the belly button" bit...
...it just feels-- For me, it felt like it was--
It was the wrong time to have that scene.
And the information we take from it...
...we get anyway later on when we see the two dead bodies in the room.
So that was a bone of contention.
That was something we argued over throughout...
...all the way until the final picture lock on it.
Even in a movie like this, you feel it's possible to have extraneous violence?
Yeah. I think-- Well, here's the thing.
For this, when we came to the violence of it...
...we know that the film is violent, undoubtedly, yeah.
But one thing I feel is that the way we portray the violence...
...isn't in a way which is kind of, like, exploitative.
So we'll hit you hard in the stomach and make you have a reaction to it...
...but then we cut away to something else.
There's only two moments in the film where we linger on something.
The guy being stabbed five times in the chest.
He got injured in that. I'll tell you in a second.
And then Mad Dog having his neck ripped.
But the Mad Dog death had to be like that because it was the big climax.
You're establishing someone as a villain...
...or it's relating to the drama of their escape.
It is true that, that scene...
...it doesn't necessarily add anything to the character.
Exactly. So that was a question mark and that stayed a question mark.
Then when I finally watched it with people...
...it's one of those where you're like, "I wish I could pull that out now."
But it's okay. It's fine.
I think we're all having a pretty good time.
You were gonna tell a story about someone getting hurt.
We love stories about people getting hurt here.
So that guy, poor bastard.
What happened to him was, when we do the stabbing...
...we use old theater tricks, so we had retractable blades...
...that went into the handle and stuff like that.
For him, he had a pad on his chest so that when the blade--
When the thing is being stabbed into his chest, he doesn't get hurt.
And the thing is, when you stab down with one of those knives...
...there's still wood there, there's still a hard thing there...
...so the padding was necessary.
But as he got pulled down onto the floor...
...the padding shifted down...
...and the actor was so lost in his moment, he had no idea.
And he just went fucking nuts, and he just, boom, stabbed him with it.
And if you look closely when you watch the shot...
...the guy holds his performance. And he just like, he holds on...
...but you can see the vein in his neck goes really tight...
...and he goes red immediately.
And basically, he just took a beating in the rib cage.
And, you know, when we'd finished the shot...
...and the guy who did the stabbing got up and was sort of, you know--
He was in this whole thing of like:
Trying to control his feelings.
And everyone's catering to him, everyone's like, "Are you okay?"
Then I looked at the monitor and then I look across...
...and I see this poor stunt guy still lying on the floor...
...clutching to his chest.
And I was like, "Did it go in him?"
Like, we couldn't tell what happened.
And we ran up and then we lift up his T-shirt...
...and he's just got all these, like, immediate bruise marks...
...and sort of little pointers all over the top of his chest.
And so like we do usually with those type of things...
...we give them a cup of tea, give them a sit-down...
...and then later on we were done and we just told him:
"You don't have to do that ever again.
Just lie down, we'll put some blood on you for continuity."
- We'll make the bad man go away. - Yeah.
Is it hard to watch in the dailies later?
Or are you like, "Yes. Vein. Look at that vein."
The shot really worked so well though, but...
No. I mean, like, I joke around about it a lot...
...but like, absolutely, when we are shooting though...
...safety is the most paramount thing and stuff like that.
Like, we can joke around afterwards because no one died...
...but, yeah, it shakes you up a lot.
It shakes you up because you realize, like, when you're doing this stuff...
...that all of the sort of danger you're putting these people into...
...it's for like two seconds worth of a reaction on-screen.
And that's why when we do that, I have a huge amount of respect...
...for all the fighters and all the stunt guys...
...because they're putting themselves at risk...
...their health at risk, in order to entertain us when we watch it.
And you might have noticed in the credits, we have like...
...Drug's Lab number one, two, three, four, five-- To 20.
And the Carrying Bowo Guys...
...one, two, three, four, five, six-- All the way to 18.
The reason why is because usually in films...
...these guys get relegated to Stunts, and then just a list of names.
I wanted to give them a credit above other people...
...that did normal performance, but only in one or two scenes.
I was like, "Okay, it's my main guys...
...and then all of the stunt team and they get a credit and--"
- Yeah, good respect to them. - Yeah.
Well, it was an amazing team effort. Oh, look, we're out of time.
Well...