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span class="caption" style="width: 398px;">JP/Dina IndrasafitriEmerging filmmaker Gareth Huw Evans never dreamed he would end up making movies about martial arts, and yet he is doing just that now — thousands of miles away from his hometown in Wales in the United Kingdom.

“It used to be the case if you directed a martial arts movie you were either Chinese from Hong Kong, or from Thailand or an Asian country. Welsh people don’t really make martial arts films,” he said in an interview with The Jakarta Post.

Evans’ latest movie, The Raid (Serbuan Maut) has been garnering much hype after it was shown at the Toronto Film Festival last year, and made it to a Time.com list of one of the most anticipated films of 2012.

The movie, which was released last week in Indonesia and several other countries including the US, tells of a battle in a 30-story building in Jakarta between an Indonesian SWAT Team and a drug cartel.

The Raid was shot in Indonesia and is in the Indonesian language, and uses the Indonesian martial art pencak silat. In addition, 99 percent of the crew involved were Indonesian.

Except for Evans, that is.“From the outside it looks really weird that a Welsh guy moves to Indonesia to make a martial arts movie about silat. But it never felt weird to me. It felt natural,” he said.

His love for movies began at an early age thanks to his father, a computer teacher who had the habit of renting movies for the family to watch.

“Every weekend [my father] went to the video rental store and brought back videos ... Some weeks it would be Seven Samurai, some weeks it would be some classic American movie, sometimes it would be an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie or a Jackie Chan movie, and he was the one who kind of introduced me to all these different movies,” Evans recalled.

Before coming to Indonesia, he tried to enter the movie industry with little success. Then Christine Hakim Films gave him a chance to shoot a documentary on pencak silat.

“I’ve grown up with martial arts all my life since I was a kid. I have been obsessed with watching Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li ... like when I watched Enter the Dragon I was probably 5 years old and I remember thinking that Bruce Lee was this superhero,” he said.

But silat was different from everything he had seen before, and Evans soon fell in love with the martial art’s versatility.

“[Pencak silat] has a very low center of gravity so you can fight high, you can fight low. And you can change your body position very fast and how to adapt in every environment just made me excited about ‘Hey, we haven’t seen this before in the film. … Let’s find a way so we can incorporate some of this choreography into this film,” he said.

Evans even studied the art for several months to grasp the deeper meaning of it, although he did not necessarily become an expert from the effort.

“I think deep down I just wanted to be Jackie Chan. I didn’t want to do the boring lessons, I just wanted to jump around and do somersaults and things,” he said, laughing, of all the martial arts he has studied over the years.

But Evans’ fascination with Indonesia goes beyond its martial arts. He enjoyed his time and his work with Indonesians and he and his wife decided to make the move to the archipelago.

“When we moved, it was a comfortable transition to make and I am glad I did it because without a doubt Indonesia has given me my career,” he said.

Merantau Films, which is based in Jakarta, was subsequently formed in 2008.

Its first action movie involving pencak silat was Merantau, which exposes the Minang [West Sumatran ethnic group] culture of leaving one’s hometown to make it big. The movie stars Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhiyan, both of whom he met during the documentary shoot.

 Merantau was met with several favorable reviews, but Evans said they failed to use an effective marketing strategy for the film, and while demands for the movie surfaced after its release, it was actually harder to maintain an audience share during the period.

Thus, for The Raid’s promotion, Merantau Films decided to screen the movie at a number of festivals overseas before releasing it in Indonesia.

“All the films we make at Merantau Films we cannot make without making sales internationally. We have to sell internationally, otherwise we cannot stay afloat,” Evans said.

The Raid, which, according to Evans, centers on one of his favorite themes of “cops in extraordinary circumstances”, differs from Merantau in other ways. For one, it was produced with a smaller budget.

“The landscape in Indonesia has changed. When we did our first movie we had more money to play with. Investors were more confident with local films. But after Merantau came out we spent a year and a half trying to get the budget in place for a different film. We couldn’t get that money up in time. … The Raid was sort of a backup project. It was sort of a plan B and it was something that I knew we can do for a low budget,” he said.

Evans had to employ the tricks he used to apply in his independent movie-making days to deal with the limited resources, such as creative shots and “cheaper ways to make the film look more expensive”.

The film’s success, which roughly began at the Toronto International Film Festival, struck him as a surprise.  

“We went to Toronto and we said ‘OK, let’s hope we get a good review. That’s all we expect. Let’s hope we get one good review that we can post and quote and put on the poster and then all of a sudden people started going crazy for it,” Evans said.

And while adjectives applied to The Raid might include “ultra-violent”, “bloody” and “brutal”, he asserted that the movie is not made for children to watch and that the only thing a movie can do in terms of inciting violent behavior is to “give people fashion tips” such as wearing long black jackets like characters in the action movie The Matrix.

“I don’t think films can inspire violence. I think somebody has to have a problem mentally in order to commit something violent in reality … If somebody wants to beat somebody the way Mad Dog beats people up, then they are sick in the head,” Evans said, referring to a particularly violent character in The Raid.

In general, movies for Evans are more entertainment than lessons on morality anyway, he said.

“If there is one [morality lesson], fine. No problem. But I think film is all about escapism, about giving people a kind of opportunity to step outside their own lives for two hours and to just enjoy being in that world,” Evans said.

The Raid is projected to become the first in a trilogy. However, he said he would not limit himself to making action movies exclusively.

“I don’t want to be locked into making just one type of movie because the thing is for me I just love cinema. The idea of going to a room and experiencing what I don’t get to experience in my normal life. Whether that’s a big action movie, a scary horror film, a beautiful musical, a romance drama, but to go to a place where you know you are 100 percent safe and experience all these things is what makes making films such an incredible thing,” Evans said