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Netflix’s Havoc director on how the Tom Hardy thriller is an ode to Hong Kong action films
Gareth Evans talks about cribbing ‘rhythms and movement’ from ‘heroic bloodshed’ films for his action movie starring Tom Hardy as a bent cop
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Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans burst onto the action scene with The Raid (2011) and The Raid 2 (2014), a bone-crushing brace of visceral Indonesian martial arts films that propelled its leading men to international stardom.
His new film, Havoc, stars Tom Hardy and trades the sweaty streets of Jakarta for a gritty unnamed city on the United States’ east coast in the midst of a blood-soaked gang war.
Shooting the film in the UK was a gruelling process stalled by the Covid-19 pandemic, union strikes and clashing schedules.
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But Havoc arrives on Netflix on April 25, with an international cast including Timothy Olyphant, Jessie Mei Li, Sunny Pang and Yeo Yann Yann.
Speaking to the Post, Evans says Havoc is his love letter to the so-called heroic bloodshed film genre – which came out of Hong Kong and often features police officers and criminals who are two sides of the same coin – and speaks enthusiastically about the influence of Hong Kong cinema on his style.
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“It has been massively influential and I really wanted to pay homage to the decades of cinema that have informed my career,” he says. “For me it’s about rhythms and movement of the camera, so I will definitely be cribbing on things from Ringo Lam [Ling-tung] and John Woo [Yu-sum].”
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