'The Raid' Director Envisions The Film As First In A Trilogy

Welsh director Gareth Evans became one of the new action filmmakers to watch when his film The Raid, filmed in Indonesia and featuring some seriously bone-crunching, face-shooting conflict as cops invade a building controlled by a drug lord, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. At TIFF and other festivals The Raid has wowed audiences; Peter and Germain both have nothing but praise for the film.

Evans has talked about wanting to make a sequel, and now says that he envisions a trilogy of films that starts with The Raid, with the second chapter possible called Berandal.

Before making The Raid, Evans had conceptualized a film called Berandal (the Indonesian word for 'thug') but couldn't get the film financed. In the wake of The Raid's success, Evans has come up with a few tweaks to Berandal, which will set the film firmly in the same world as The Raid. Star Iko Uwais, who also worked on the fight choreography, will be returning.

And then speaking to Collider at Sundance, Evans said,

While I was developing 'The Raid,' I was looking at ways to kind of link those two scripts together because we had done all this choreography on that first film, we were like ready to go we just needed the finance to pull the trigger on it. Because I didn't want to just abandon that project, I started to look at ways we could link the two together. So the one problem I had with that original script was that the lead role didn't have an interesting enough backstory.

As I was thinking about it, I thought 'Well if I make this a continuation of the story from 'The Raid,' it'll work much better, and it'll kind of add more ideas and add more different elements to it,' so it's actually gonna be the sequel to 'The Raid.' We're in a position now where we can finance that movie, which is great [laughs]. So yeah, it's a big relief now. For three years that's been the itch I couldn't scratch, so I'm kind of dying to kind of get stuck in and do that film next. That'll be part two. Part three [will be] further down the line. A lot further down the line.

Evans also said, "for 'The Raid' sequel, I want to bring car chase elements to it as well. So we have like a cool fight scene where you go inside a car, fighting against four people as it's speeding along a one-way."

All this info has been around for a day or two, with the idea of a Raid sequel, actually dating back a couple weeks. This evening, however, Variety's Jeff Sneider said via Twitter "Breaking: The Raid gets a sequel," which could indicate that things are moving forward quickly.