Tom Hardy has added another action-directing icon to his filmography. The London native teams up with Gareth Evans, the visionary filmmaker behind The Raid franchise, on HAVOC, a new high-octane thriller that sends a detective (Hardy) through a labyrinth of conspiracy, crime, and corruption.
Hardy is no stranger to being directed by innovative storytellers. He has teamed with the likes of Christopher Nolan several times (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Dunkirk) as well as George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road) and Ridley Scott (Black Hawk Down).
ScreenRant spoke with both Hardy and Evans to dissect Evans’s directing style and his unique method of coming up with his screenplays.
Tom Hardy Praises Gareth Evans’s “Super Fresh” Storytelling
“It’s completely compelling, and it moves at such tremendous dynamicism…”
When asked about how Gareth Evans compares to past action-focused directors he’s worked with, Tom Hardy came alive.
“I think Gareth has, whether he’s aware of it or not, or he can take the compliment or not, he does have an absolute laser for a very specific thing, which is definitely to do with action and telling the stories through physicalized choreography,” Hardy praised. “Whether it’s with the vehicular or human form, he’s kinetic. His storytelling is super kinetic, it’s super fresh. It’s completely compelling, and it moves at such tremendous dynamicism.”
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Evans’s balance of action and story led Hardy to put him in some elite company.
“There’s something about it that’s full of life and vitality,” Hardy continued. “It’s really unique. I’ve not worked with anybody quite like that before. Obviously, George Miller’s a really good reference point in many aspects. Chris Nolan, that is somebody who I have worked in a very dynamic way with.”
Gareth Evans Explains His Unique Storytelling Starting Point
“I didn’t know why he did it at that time…”
Part of the way that Evans achieves that “dynamicism” is through his storytelling structure.
“Everything I’ve done always starts with being one small little seed of an idea or an image or something,” Evans explained. “I had this idea of a scene. It was only the first opening of the thing where it was like I knew I wanted to do something that felt like a breakneck sort of throwback love letter to the Hong Kong hero, bloodshed genre, the whole great John Woo and Ringo Lam and everyone else.”
For HAVOC in particular, Evans began with a visual of a cop scooping cocaine into a coffee cup at a crime scene.
“This was going to be the first scene of the film in my head at that time. I didn’t know why he did it at that time.”
“That was the very early seed of an idea that all within weeks and months of building playlists, watching movies, finding tone elements that were speaking to me in a way and that felt like they were in tune with that initial opening idea,” Evans said of the film’s initial opening. “It mushroomed out from there. We started to play with themes of parenthood, of relationships between fathers and sons, mothers and sons.”
HAVOC arrives on Netflix on April 25.
Source: ScreenRant Plus
