Welsh director Gareth Evans' second 'Raid' movie is an all-action expansion of the first Indonesia-filmed hit

At over two metres tall, Gareth Huw Evans looms. A gentle giant, some people may say. But the good-humoured Welshman has become known for movie mayhem since he released The Raid: Redemption three years ago.

Like Godzilla director Gareth Edwards, who is also Welsh, Evans could have gone to Hollywood. Instead, he prefers to hone his skills in Jakarta, where he lives with his wife, Indonesian-Japanese film collaborator Rangga Maya Barack-Evans, and their young daughter.

Blessed with a cinephile father, the 33-year-old director-writer-editor was introduced to a range of films as a child. Along with English-language movies, he also saw the works of Akira Kurosawa and "tonnes and tonnes of martial arts movies over and over as a child - my dad loved Jackie Chan".

Evans first met silat expert Iko Uwais in 2007 when he moved to Indonesia, at his wife's suggestion, to direct Land of Moving Shadows: The Mystic Arts of Indonesia, Pencak Silat, a documentary on the martial arts of Indonesia. Then working as a delivery man, Uwais became an adviser on the film and went on to star in and choreograph the Welshman's subsequent three features: Merantau (2009), The Raid (2011) and this year's The Raid 2.

Far bigger and bolder than The Raid, The Raid 2 is not so much a sequel as a revised version of the film Evans wanted to make when he was forced to set the first Raid amid the confines of a 15-storey Jakarta tower block.

"After trying for two years, we discovered nobody would pay so much money to make a film in Indonesia," the filmmaker says. "So The Raid was a backup, something we could do cheap and quick", for US$1.1 million. "Thankfully audiences seemed to like it, so we went straight into reworking the script and incorporating the undercover cop elements."

With The Raid 2, Evans has attempted what seems to be a mission impossible: to achieve international box office success with a martial arts epic in the Indonesian language. It did not fare well in the US, although the hyper-expectant fan-base was out in force at the film's world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Evans' wild imaginings of the myriad ways in which to injure and maim proved so affecting that one viewer fainted midway and the screening was temporarily halted.

But he may gain ground in markets such as France and Japan, where it'll be released in July and August respectively.