The M.I.A. video that inspired Gareth Evans to make ‘The Raid’
It’s rare that a film emerges seemingly from nowhere and changes the direction of modern cinema. One of these select few is Gareth Evans’ bloody 2011 Indonesian action thriller, The Raid. A low-budget film made in Indonesia by a Welshman unknown outside of the Asian country does not sound like the recipe for success that it was. An unrelenting and visceral celebration of the country’s martial art, Pencak Silat, it made stars out of both Evans and leading man Iko Uwais and is credited with reinvigorating the action genre.
The Raid does what it says on the tin. The narrative follows an elite squad of police tasked with infiltrating a high-rise building run by a ruthless drug lord in the slums of Jakarta. One of the law enforcement officers is Rama, Uwais’ character, a veteran who fights and improvises his way to the top to set up the final showdown with the boss, Tama. From the bottom to the top of the building, a host of memorable and violent set pieces play out, with the cops coming across an array of obstacles. It is utterly insane.
Explaining how The Raid came about, Evans told That Shelf in 2012: “We were trying to get a different film up and running, first of all, a follow-up to Merantau, called Berandal. That proved kind of difficult because the scope of that film was a lot bigger, and that meant that the budget was a lot bigger as well. Finding the budget for big films in Indonesia is incredibly difficult.”
Revealing how John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13 and the first Die Hard film inspired it, he continued: “We tried and pushed to get the budget for Berandal for about a year, which fell to the wayside. I just needed to get another film with Iko (Uwais), do something else with him before his name just fades. I started looking at different types of films that I wanted to make and, taking into consideration that we wanted a low-budget movie, something that only needed one location. I started looking at films like Assault On Precinct 13 or Die Hard and thought about fusing the two together with more martial arts.”
Despite the obvious influences that Evans took from the films of John Carpenter and the plot of the original Die Hard, it was another, more surprising influence that lit the spark. This was Romain Garvas’s nine-minute music video for M.I.A.’s 2010 single ‘Born Free’. A surreal depiction of dystopia where the law rounds up ginger-haired people for execution, it was “the over-the-shoulder feel” of following the Swat team in the video that galvanised Evans to make his idea a reality.
The director told The Independent in 2022: “I was blown away by the over-the-shoulder feel of that video following this Swat team”. He then found an investor willing to fund his new idea with $1.1m (£884,000). Although it wasn’t a lot, it was enough to get the film going. A modern classic ensued, spawning a revered sequel in 2014. We now see the stamp of The Raid across many other modern films.
