VIEWING GUIDE

THE VIEWING GUIDE

Gareth Evans (again) on Gangs Of London’s high-octane fifth episode.

A deep dive into the key moments from this month’s must-see

Co-creator/director Gareth Evans on the year’s most explosive piece of action drama.

THE JOURNEY

If Episode 5 of Gangs Of London were 25 minutes longer, it would be the best action movie of the year. As it is, it’s one of the finest pieces of action choreography ever seen on the small screen, as Evans focuses on the desperate attempt of traveller gang boss Kinney (Mark Lewis Jones) to save his son Darren (Aled ap Steffan), a patsy whose unwitting hit on über-criminal Finn Wallace kick-started the show’s cycle of violence, from a murderous Danish hit squad. The episode will explode into sustained mayhem halfway through, but first Evans documents the injured Kinney’s journey, including stealing a car — at gunpoint — from a local farmer. “We wanted to take him on a journey that is brutal and punishing and painful, but shows his inner strength,” says Evans of the previously remorseless Kinney. “He could easily have slit that farmer’s throat and driven away, but that farmer has no place in his world. We see little pockets of his humanity.”

THE DRONE SHOT

After getting to Wales, Kinney heads, on foot, to the farmhouse where Darren is holed up with black-market bullet manufacturer Evie (Caroline Lee Johnson) and her family. But the hit squad is right behind — as evidenced in a stunning overhead drone shot (actually a couple of shots stitched together). “I wanted to be able to tell our audience where all our players are,” says Evans of the shot, which was inspired by the long walk towards the end of The Wild Bunch. “And as it precedes the conversation between Evie and her kids outside the farmhouse, it raises the stakes. We know that hell is about to descend upon them.”

THE ONSLAUGHT

And descend it does. When the hit squad arrive, they shoot first and ask absolutely no questions later. And this team, acting with military precision, doesn’t let up. “This is the first wave of attack,” says Evans. “I wanted it to feel unrelenting. The sound mix was probably the most intense mixing we did on anything, because it was so constant.” It’s a savage onslaught that immediately notches up casualties, with Evie watching several of her foster kids killed in front of her. “Every single death had to carry some sort of emotional weight. It couldn’t just be about cannon fodder.”

SHUTTERS ISLAND

Before being shot dead, one of those kids, Liam (Samuel Mak), manages to make it to the kitchen

and trigger an old-school defence mechanism in the form of metal shutters that enclose the house. “I knew I wanted to do a siege, but didn’t want it to feel completely one-sided,” explains Evans. “So we reasoned that Evie would want her house fortified in some way. And by the time the shutters come down, you realise that within that three minutes of content, you haven’t breathed.”

TRES MAL

With the mercenaries, who have armour, C-4, ladders, and even an adorable basset hound, on the verge of breaching the house, Kinney’s right-hand man Mal (Richard Harrington), who has been keeping an eye on Darren, sacrifices himself in gloriously OTT fashion. Riddled with bullets, he hurls a bag of explosives at the attackers lurking outside the front door. “It was Jude’s [Poynter, the show’s stunt coordinator] and my love letter to the ‘heroic bloodshed’ genre,” says Evans. “You always get those wild, self-sacrificial deaths where, with their last breath, they turn the tables on the bad guys. But,” laughs the director, “he’s endangering his own people as well, by the way. Dropping a hand grenade in a bag of C-4 can’t be good for business.”

JOURNEY’S END

Throughout the episode, even as the hit squad do their thing, Evans has held out the promise of escape for Kinney and Darren. But, as they get to a jetty where a boat is waiting to take them to freedom, he snatches it away, with main merc Leif (Mads Koudal) shooting them both dead. As Kinney clutches and comforts his dying boy, the journey he undertook at episode’s start is complete. “If Darren had got on the boat and escaped, it would have been really unsatisfying,” explains Evans. “Like, ‘Really? They couldn’t stop the boat?’ And I felt there was a power to it. It needed to speak to the cruelty of these people, and their ability to do what they do.” Case in point: originally, as Leif executed Darren, Kinney asked why they’d chosen his boy to murder Finn Wallace. “Because no-one would care,” was the intended reply. But Koudal reasoned it would be more chilling if Leif didn’t reply. “And that was more powerful than it would have been with a line of dialogue.”

THE BIG REVEAL

After deliberately disconnecting itself from the main thrust of the Gangs storyline (although the action takes place before Episodes 3 and 4), Evans plugs it back in for the final moments. The question on everyone’s lips from the first episode has been, “Who ordered the murder of Finn Wallace?” And, in showing Leif take a phone call, and new orders, from fast-rising criminal Jevan Kapadia (Ray Panthaki), we get our answer. “Bringing the story back to London was important to us,” says Evans. “But we made a very conscious decision not to talk about London until Kinney and Darren were dead.” In fact, Jevan was only meant to appear as a voice on the phone, thus preserving the mystery, until Evans decided a proper reveal would be better. Those shots of Jevan were filmed by Xavier Gens, who was then working in London on Episode 6. “It’s the fun little final piece of the jigsaw,” adds Evans.

GANGS OF LONDON SEASON 1 IS OUT NOW ON DVD AND BLU-RAY, AND IS AVAILABLE ON SKY TV AND NOW TV