Exclusive: Gareth Evans on the Hong Kong influences behind Havoc

While we’ve been hearing about Gareth Evans’s Havoc since 2021, it’s finally made its long-awaited debut on Netflix this week. Action fans have been waiting with bated breath for this one, with it the director’s first all-out action movie since The Raid 2, with his most recent film Apostle being a detour into horror. At the same time, he also tackled the TV series, Gangs of London (which has plenty of bone-crunching action of its own). 

While The Raid films mainly relied on martial arts for the action sequences, Havoc is done in a different style, with Evans revealing that it’s his tribute to the heroic bloodshed genre that rose to prominence in the 1980s, and made Chow Yun-Fat into perhaps the era’s great action hero. 

“I love the Hong Kong heroic bloodshed genre. I grew up watching those movies, where it was John Woo, Ringo Lam, or Johnnie To… you know, even early Wong Kai Wai when he did As Tears Go By. All of that stuff is a huge part of my formative film experiences, the same way as when I saw martial arts movies come out of Hong Kong, like when I first saw Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. When I first saw the sort of heroic bloodshed genre in Hong Kong, it was probably when I first saw my first clip of John Woo in a tv special, just before Hard-Boiled was coming out in the cinemas. And there was a sequence where Tony Leung and Mad Dog are on opposite sides of the glass panels, shooting at each other. It just felt like nothing else. It felt like, whatever this is, it’s resonating with me and doing something chemical within me. I love its rhythms, energy, and percussion. So for me, that whole genre of filmmaking has been so influential. I wanted to do something I felt was a love letter to it, and this is what Havoc has become.” 

While I spotted a music track from A Better Tomorrow on the soundtrack, Evans also revealed he worked in wholesale sound effects from some of the movies that inspired him. You can pick up on these during the climax of the film, including a memorable sound effect from John Woo’s The Killer when the cop character played by Danny Lee is firing an AK-47 and it runs out of bullets. 

Looking to check out some of the movies Evans is name-checking? While many are out of print here in the U.S, the good news is that Shout Factory recently acquired the rights to the famous Golden Princess film library, which contains all of Woo’s classics like A Better Tomorrow, Bullet to the Head, The Killer, Hard-Boiled, as well as Ringo Lam’s Full Contact, and many more. So, hopefully, within a few months, these movies will be easier to find! 

Check back soon for more from our chat with Evans, and here’s what he recently revealed to me about his concept for The Raid 3!

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