In a plush hotel filled with business being done, the director Gareth Evans is surrounded by cut glass and burnished wood. This feels ill-fated. In Evans's thrilling, symphonically violent films, things rarely end well for the furniture. His latest, The Raid 2: Berandal, features a nightclub scene in which a mob of assassins swarm over the banquettes like cockroaches. Later, a high-end restaurant kitchen becomes the stage for a dervish whirl of fists and cooking implements.
"It's true," he says. "In hotels I do always look at what you could rip out to use as a prop. The nicer the place, the more I want to destroy it."
If his work suggests a wildman, the reality is a chipper, semi-bearded figure in a hoodie, ambling back into the splendour after a fag. At 33, his accent is mostly still pure Hirwaun, the south Wales village on the edge of the Brecon Beacons where he grew up. But occasionally, there's a trace of something else – the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, where he's lived since 2006, and where he's become the most achingly credible director of action movies on the planet.
Once he's done in London there will be a brief trip home, long enough to show his family the new film. His mother, he says, can be squeamish. His grandmother, at 91, is more robust.
That the original Raid, released in 2012, created a stir among action fans was not so newsworthy. But Evans' film – in which a band of vastly outnumbered Jakarta cops are trapped in a tower block seething with gangsters – wowed viewers in cultural corners the martial arts movie doesn't often reach. Critics with faultlessly high brows lined up to lavish it with praise, noting its place in an action cinema line of descent stretching back to The Battleship Potemkin. It was also just spectacularly good fun – an adrenal series of hectic set pieces based on the Indonesian martial art pencak silat, in which limbs, hands, feet and faces collide so swiftly and gracefully you're convinced that what you're seeing must be impossible. At the screening I went to, journalists broke into stunned applause. It seemed the only thing to do.
Now, with the sequel about to come out, Evans is in the curious position of being admired equally by film snobs and fanboys. The weight of anticipation is worn lightly. "I don't like to get ahead of myself. I just think at least I didn't take studio money to do it, so it's not their cash I'm burning."
By the standards of Hollywood, the film cost only a few peanuts more than its predecessor (Evans puts the budget at £4.5 million to The Raid's £1m). The money was enough to stage a boggling, seven-minute car chase through the streets of Jakarta, if not to persuade the police to protect the crew from the wrath of the city's drivers. "One guy they let through the barriers swerved straight at us, screaming abuse."
He tells me that London had a moment of influence. At one point, a character attacked through a car window has to escape by pushing the accelerator with his hands. The idea came from an acquaintance of his brother in the police, who on the night of the 2011 riots did the same to avoid being beheaded by scaffolding poles. Recalling watching the news from the safety of Jakarta, Evans suddenly looks freaked out: "They burned down a fancy dress shop. Why would anyone do that?"
In 2006, he was bored and marooned, a graduate of the University of Glamorgan's MA in Scriptwriting for Film and Television. There had been a number of little-seen projects, including a short about samurai that roped in a group of Japanese students, shot in Tom Jones' hometown of Treforest – but his hopes of making it as a director had petered out. For four years he commuted between Swansea and Cardiff to a job producing web content for people learning Welsh online.
The break came through his half-Indonesian, half-Japanese wife, Rangga Maya Barack. The two had met as students when she badgered him for help with her dissertation on Hitchcock. Back in Jakarta, she said, was a job on an Indonesian TV documentary about the native martial art of silat.
The climate left him groggy but silat changed his life – its speed, its percussive rhythms and the fact no one else had got there first all convinced him he wanted to make movies about it.
For Evans, film and martial arts are forever linked. Back in Hirwaun, his father taught computer science at secondary school. He also nurtured a love for movies – his son remembers seeing the "colours and shapes" of Kurosawa films by the older man's side. By seven though, he had developed a very specific taste – 70s and 80s martial arts movies, secured from the video shops of the Cynon Valley, ritually watched with his father. "Every Saturday I nagged him: 'I wanna watch Jackie Chan, I wanna watch Jackie Chan.'"
But for all the mayhem in the Evans' front room, his father was particular about the violence that was shown. Scarface, for instance, would find the boy sent out into the hall during its most savage moments. "My dad said shock an audience, don't repulse them. I don't want to be sadistic. I can watch that stuff. I don't want to make it."
His daughter is five. At some point, he says, he wants her to see his films. For now, letting her watch Peppa Pig on his iPad is vexed enough. "She clicks on related search and you're down the rabbit hole. You go from Peppa Pig to women giving birth in three clicks, and after that you don't even want to know what she can see."
Evans's own childhood unfolded in an 80s south Wales still traumatised by the miners' strike. He was, he says, "sheltered" from the atmosphere by his parents, allowed instead to escape into films. For his 18th birthday, he got a camcorder. Actual violence was never his thing. He studied silat to help capture it onscreen. "I was bad at it." Otherwise, he says, he has "only been in one fight as an adult." A fracas broke out in a club in Swansea; he tried to intervene. "But when I went to swing a punch, I couldn't land it properly. At the last second I held back. I don't have the instinct. In real life, I balk. Even seeing a real fight, I feel horrible."
Squeezing the most out of its budget, The Raid was made in Jakarta on indoor sets with local martial artists. The shortest working day was 17 hours. The temperature reached 42 degrees. On screen, the cops' bloody trial was as taut as a tripwire, calling to mind the relentlessness of video games and the classic early films of John Carpenter. In the wake of its success, Evans "retrofitted" the script for a story called Berandal (the title translates as "thug") to dovetail with the first film. Essentially a police procedural, the sequel has a scattering of the operatic touches familiar to fans of Asian cinema, lyrical flashes of blood on snow and pretty girls with clawhammers. But really, it manages to be something wonderfully unlikely – The Raid again, only much, much more so.
The same hyper-kinetic energy now spills out into grand apartment complexes and the frantic streets of Jakarta. Every scene brings a fresh amazement. Part of the secret may be that "every fucking penny is up on-screen" – the work ethic from the first film living on, only extended for three hot, fraught, perfectionist months.
Even before then, there were weeks of careful preparation, Evans ensconced in a gym strewn with crashpads and whiteboards with his leading man Iko Uwais and Yahan Ruhian, a tiny, bearded Javan whose agility is a highlight of both Raids. What they created has almost nothing to do with the weary action films Hollywood turns out. Instead, the choreography is so beautiful it feels like a terrifying musical. Evans beams at the comparison. When the Dutch occupied Indonesia in the 19th century, he says, they banned silat, so it had to be disguised by performing it to music.
He says he doesn't mind that the kind of artistry he specialises in won't win him any Oscars. "That's never going to change. But it's not about that. It's about spending 10 days on a kick that will be onscreen for two seconds, so some kid somewhere gets their mind blown."
