THE RAID 2011
Pixar king Lee Unkrich reflects on why you have lotso love for Lotso Bear
Gareth Evans on the most intense moments from his action classic PORTRAIT WILL BREMRIDGE
A DELIRIOUS, POUNDING fusion of John Woo, John Carpenter and Jackie Chan, The Raid is one of the most intense and unrelenting action movies of the century so far. Written and directed by Gareth Evans, a Welshman who had moved to Indonesia, it stars his discovery, the astonishing Iko Uwais, as a cop who finds himself trapped in an apartment building, beset on all sides by bad guys who will stop at nothing until he’s dead. And it’s chock-full of gruesome, gruelling scenes that virtually demand to be watched through splayed fingers.
THE WALL SCENE
The Raid isn’t all Sturm und Drang. Notably, it’s perhaps at its most tense when Rama and wounded cop Bowo (Tegar Satrya) are forced to take refuge in the hollowed-out wall of an apartment. They find themselves unable to make a sound even as a machete is driven through the wall, in an attempt to ferret them out, and straight through Rama’s cheek. “I knew it was a martial-arts movie in terms of the action component, but we were fundamentally making a horror film,” says Evans. “Part of what makes great horror is the build-up of tension.”
THE HALLWAY FIGHT
As Rama and his dwindling band of colleagues try to fight their way out, this desperate hallway head-to-head has more than its fair share of moments to make you squirm, as Rama rakes a knife down someone’s leg, or smashes a guy’s head into a wall. “In The Raid, it was kill or be killed,” says Evans. “We realised that no-one Rama encounters should be left in a position where they can get up and fight again. If you stab someone in the leg, they can hobble towards you. If you drag it through their thigh, they’re not getting up.”
THE MACHETE FIGHT
An exhausted Rama finds himself facing off against a gang of machete-wielding maniacs, in the confines of one of the building’s corridors. It’s an exhilarating blur of fists, acrobatics, and meticulously choreographed near-misses. “A massively important thing when designing a scene is picking the right angle,” says Evans, who plots every major action scene months in advance. “So when the main machete guy gets slashed across the face, you follow him away so that we aren’t seeing anyone in the background. Then you can cut to Iko facing the next attacker. There are lots of little tricks to mask the fact that in reality they’d pounce on him at once and he’d be dead.”
THE BACKBREAKER
At the end of one showdown, Rama settles one guy’s account by grabbing him and leaping backwards onto a doorstep, breaking his back. It’s simply impossible not to wince. “That took forever to shoot,” remembers Evans, outlining a hugely complicated multiapproach method which involved locking down cameras, and slowly lowering down stuntmen on slings. “We want to make you think you’ve seen something gonzo in one shot, but it was never done that way.”
THE TWO-FOR-ONE
The film’s final fight is a near-eight-minute mano a hermanos brawl between Rama, his criminal brother Andi (Doni Alamsyah), and the psychotic Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian). “It wasn’t purposeful that it was that long,” says Evans. “It just felt like this guy was the big bad guy, and it should take a lot to take him down.” Turns out what it takes is a simple fluorescent lightbulb, handy for slitting Mad Dog’s neck. “That would normally crumble in your hands,” laughs Evans. “In Indonesia, they’re industrial-strength. That’s what it is.”
“IT’S ONE OF the worst things
I ever did in our relationship.” Lee Unkrich is recalling his inspiration for the scene in Toy Story 3 where Andy’s toys — in a bin bag for storage — are accidentally thrown out. It’s based on fact. “It’s something I feel just awful about,” he recalls, of the time he accidentally binned his wife’s beloved childhood toys, during a house move.
“But at least she knows that that moment was memorialised in a movie.”
And what a movie. There was an 11-year gap between the second and third instalments in Pixar’s beloved series, and the expectation around the return of Buzz and Woody was immense. “I was on a tightrope constantly, just doing everything I could to get through each day and not crash,” Unkich recalls. Most of the pressure was self-imposed, as the director — who edited the original and co-directed part two with Pixar godfather John Lasseter — was flying solo. “But I think I always believed in the film itself.” Crucial to that was the ending — both the notion that Andy would give away his toys, and our heroes heading into an incinerator, having been betrayed by Lotso bear. “We did have worries about whether it was gonna be too intense, but emotionally we knew it was strong. I remember the very first time I showed it to John, he just kind of squeezed my shoulder and I knew he was happy.”
Unkrich recalls his own evolving feelings towards one of his favourite films, 1989’s Parenthood, as a pointer for why this film has endured. “One of the things my wife and I often talk about is how that film has changed as we’ve lived our lives.
When you’re younger, you relate to certain characters. And as you grow up and get married and have kids, if you return to Parenthood it kind of opens itself up to you in different ways.” Another factor was an audience that was literally growing up. “Kids who were quite young when the first
Toy Story came out were heading off to college. We just hadn’t thought about that.”
Unkrich, who would go on to direct
Coco before retiring from Pixar, is currently finishing a book about
The Shining (keen-eyed viewers can spot references to his favourite film in
Toy Story 3). But we can expect him to return to cinema eventually, hopefully to make another 21st-century classic. “Movies are in my blood, so I can only be on vacation so long.”