[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”7507″ img_size=”700×296″ alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]Earlier today Joblo got an exclusive interview with director Gareth Evans, The Raid and Raid 2. Talking about Raid 3 and what the story would have been if he decided to continue that story. In the interview Gareth says,
“So when I ruled out The Raid 3, I felt a little bit of a backlash over that. [Laughs] It’s really humbling that people want to see it. It’s not that I’m turning my back on action. If anything, I’m about to jump back in and embrace it again. We’re going to do a 10-part, nine-hour series for Sky Atlantic and HBO/Cinemax, a contemporary action thriller set in London. I’ve been working with my stunt coordinator for Apostle, we’ve been designing action sequences for this TV show. It’s going to be ten hours worth of various action set-pieces. So I’m going to dive back into that world; it’s got some brawling stuff, it’s got some gun play, it’s got some car chases. A wide spectrum of action we’re going to be exploring in this series. So I’m not turning my back on action by any stretch of the imagination. I just feel like, what we did with The Raid and The Raid 2… when Rama says ‘I’m done,’ that was kind of us saying we were done with it.”
I like how he talks about the backlash from the fans that wanted Raid 3. This tells me that these type of action films are great across the bored with beautiful choreography and fantastic editing. In this quote he also talks about his upcoming work “Apostle” which to me sounds like a fun time especially since he can direct action sequences perfectly.
He continues to talk about the Raid 3 saying
“I knew what I wanted to do with The Raid 3, I knew what that story was going to be. If I was ever going to make it, it really had to have happened after we made The Raid 2. The storyline was going to pick up – I’ll give you a little bit of it – if you were watching The Raid 2 and rewound from the ending about 15-20 minutes back to when Goto gives instructions to his right-hand man to go kill the police, kill the politicians, ‘kill everyone that we work with, we’re going to start fresh,’ that was going to be the first scene of The Raid 3. It was going to be more about the yakuza than it was going to be about Rama; Rama was not really going to feature in that storyline much at all, it was going to be about the bosses in Japan realizing that someone in Jakarta that represented them started to fuck with the politicians and the police in a country they don’t belong in. It was going to be the fallout from that.”
“It was going to be a 95 minutes, 100 minutes, sort of… escape into the jungles of Indonesia type of thing. But it really needed to be made at that period of time. Four years, five years later to go back and try to recreate that, it felt a bit disingenuous. I made three martial arts films in a row, I wanted to explore other things first. It was always a cool idea, but it stopped being really special for me. The Raid, it gave me an awful lot that I’m very appreciative about, but that adventure is kind of over now.”
When I first read this I thought to myself, why focus on the Yakuza? Then thinking about it a little more I felt like this idea is perfect having the story center around the gangs. has so much story.
What do you all think of Gareth Evans statements and story on The Raid 3?
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DC Fanboy! Superman is the greatest comic book character of all time. Favorite movies are Man of Steel, Goonies, Back To the Future
