Set in pre-colonial New Zealand, The Dead Lands follows a Maori boy (James Rolleston) who recruits a legendary warrior (Lawrence Makoare) to help him avenge his tribe and father, who were slaughtered in a violent act of treachery. Directed by Toa Fraser, the film is a brutal, grimy tale of revenge that focuses on Maori martial arts, a form of combat seldom, if ever, seen on-screen. It’s a rare representation of New Zealand culture in its purest form, as well as a thrilling beat-’em-up in the vein of ’80s and ’90s action classics like Rambo and Predator. We recently spoke to Fraser about representing New Zealand cinema, his partnership with Gareth Evans and the Raid crew, the tradition of physical expression in New Zealand, actors acting with their bodies, constraints fueling creativity, and much more.

The Dead Lands is out in limited release today.

Coming from an American perspective, The Dead Lands is unique on several levels, especially because my familiarity with the Maori is so limited.
Me and all the cast grew up watching Terminator 2 and Commando, so from our point of view, it was an opportunity to tell a story in our world in a way that we wanted to when we were kids, playing with broomsticks and smacking each other over the head, wondering what it would be like to be one of our ancestors. There’s a great storytelling tradition we grew up with, stories from the Pacific that have been handed down from generation to generation. They were told in a particular kind of way, and they often had this ghostly quality to them, as well as an athletic, muscly quality. We wanted to tell the story in the way our ancestors might have if they had access to the tools and equipment we have these days.

The film’s mostly been talked about as an action movie, and while it is, I think it’s better categorized as a martial arts movie. Is that fair?
Yeah, sure. We worked with XYZ Films on this and Gareth Evans was really helpful to me. I had a great couple of conversations with him. All of those Raid guys have been very supportive of us. There was this really awesome sort of conversation across the ocean between Indonesia and New Zealand during pre-production. New Zealand kind of sits in the middle of Western and Eastern storytelling traditions.

The fighting is really in-your-face and intimate, really small-scale.
We wanted to do that. There was a way to make this film with a bigger budget, with helicopter shots and wires and slow motion, but we wanted to keep it bare-bones, raw, and real, but with a graphic novel quality as well. It’s a film that draws from many influences across the world.

If I’m being honest, I’ve lived a very sheltered life. I’ve never been in a real fight, and I haven’t inflicted much physical harm on anyone else. So watching your characters, whose lives and culture are so ingrained in violence, is really fascinating to me. Can you talk about the psychology of your characters, who answer the call to violence so readily?
I suppose the most important thing that springs to mind while listening to you speak is this idea of there being a sense of a code of violence and combat in this world. That was really important to us when we were making the movie. There’s not just fighting, but a lot of pre-fight theatricality and dance and posturing, that tongue-waggling stuff, which is as important as the fighting, almost. My experience growing up as a teenager in Auckland…I was involved in fights growing up. It was quite a part of our culture. We were really aware that violence was a major part of the language of this movie, but at the same time we wanted to talk about the code around it as well.

I talk about this a lot: I think not enough attention is given to actors who act with their bodies. I think your actors are phenomenally expressive storytellers with their bodies.
That’s awesome. A great compliment. That comes from theater as much as anything else. A lot of these guys come from a theater tradition. In fact, there was a production of Troilus and Cressida in Maori at Shakespeare’s Globe in London about a year and a half before we made this movie, and a lot of the actors that were involved in that, their performances inspired the production of our movie. When we were in L.A. last week, James Cameron gave Xavier Horan a similar compliment. He said, “He moves so well.” It was a beautiful compliment. Our culture is very physically expressive: We love rugby and dancing, and it’s a very strong way of expressing ourselves, through physicality.

Whenever you’re watching the Academy Awards and they show clips of the acting nominees, we only ever see them doing these dialogue scenes in little rooms. We never see someone praised for expressing themselves with their bodies.
I did a dance film before this, Giselle, and I worked closely with Ethan Stiefel on that, the great American choreographer. He’s a martial arts guy himself, so we talked a lot about, for this film, the body language of a warrior and what he thought a warrior would move like. Low center of gravity, a lot of weight in the knees. I totally agree with you.

I think Lawrence Makoare’s physical stuff is great. Whether he’s beating people up or laying on the ground hurt, he’s a great storyteller. What discussions did you have with him about his physical performance before shooting?
I didn’t really know what kind of movie I was going to make until Lawrence came in and did his audition. He did a performance of one of the emotional scenes that was pretty good. I gave him a tiny bit of direction, and his next version was amazing. We all sat around on the floor crying. Lawrence, referring to his tears, said, “Don’t you think this will make me weaker?” I said, “No, it makes you stronger.” He was a long way away physically and linguistically from where he wanted to be for that character, so I trained with him and a trainer for four weeks. It was hell. When it came to shooting, we didn’t have to talk much. We had each others’ back.

You’ve said that movies done in pre-colonialism New Zealand don’t really exist, and that it’s an untapped time in history. Would you like to revisit the time period again?
I loved making this movie, and it’s very much in the tradition of the stories we grew up with. In terms of New Zealand cinema, this is only the second full-length feature film in Maori. We were very aware that we were tentatively opening a door, and we worked hard to make sure the door was opened properly.

You’ve also said that you’re a big proponent of creativity being born of constraints. Can you give me a specific example of how constraints helped your creativity on this film?
I guess I mentioned it before, but going for a very brutal, dusty, sweaty, bloody kind of style was born out of constraints. We didn’t have a massive budget, so we didn’t have drone cameras or helicopter shots. The whole ethos was born of a tight schedule and a desire to tell a story in a way that we feel is very much a part of us.

There’s a nighttime fight scene in the film that looks incredible.
That was a real collaboration over months to get that scene to look right, from the beautiful location of Piha Beach in Auckland to the post-production facilities in London. Raukura Turei, who plays Mehe, the only female warrior in the movie, had a big sense of responsibility herself. When she rehearsed the scene she was doing it on a nice clean floor, but I forgot to tell her we’d be doing it in a stream and that there would be rocks under her feet. But the real key to the look of that scene was Leon Narbey’s great cinematography, but also a very talented colorist in London named Sam Chynoweth. Grading and coloring movies is such a massive part of the process these days. When I found out he was working in the building, I said, “We need that guy!” Turns out Sam was one of the guys who colored The LEGO Movie, which is one of the massive achievements in visual pizazz in the last ten years. He worked really hard. We actually shot that scene in daytime. If you’re into the look of that scene, it’s largely down to a modest guy in a post-production place in London.

Welsh-born filmmaker Gareth Evans’ The Raid: Redemtion shook up the martial arts movie genre in 2011 with its exhilarating action, scintillating fight choreography, and no-holds-barred brutality. The film didn’t have much of a plot to speak of: A police raid on an apartment building filled with deadly gangsters doesn’t go as planned, and voila! We’ve got a killer action movie. Droves of martial arts movie devotees flocked to Evans’ mini-masterpiece of bodily destruction, and now he’s followed it up with The Raid 2: Berandal, a sprawling film (it’s an hour longer) with an expanded narrative element and, impossibly, better fight scenes than the original.

Picking up right where the first film left off, we rejoin ass-kicking rookie cop Rama (Iko Uwais), who’s thrown into a new mission before he can wipe the dried blood from his fists. He’s sent behind bars undercover to earn the trust of Uco (Arifin Putra), the arrogant only son of crime lord Bangun (Tio Pakusodewo). After saving Uco’s skin a few times (most notably during an incredible prison riot sequence set in a muddier than muddy courtyard), Rama (now going by the name Yuda) becomes his right-hand man and earns himself a spot as a henchman in Bangun’s mob after serving his 4-year sentence in the slammer. Making this absurd commitment to his undercover work even more difficult is the fact that he’s left his family to fend for themselves, missing a big chunk of his son’s childhood. While Rama is under Bangun’s employ, a gang war erupts, stemming from a few shady dealings made by Uco, who’s been obsessed with the fact that he’s relegated to diminutive tasks by his father despite being the sole heir to the throne. Amid the chaos, Rama discovers that the cops he works for may be as unscrupulous as the criminals.

While The Raid takes place over the course of a day, The Raid 2 covers several years and locations, and narratively, the scale and depth Evans adds here is staggering. The intricacies of the gang dynamics, set against the backdrop of Bangun and Uco’s father-son conflict and the even larger Sisyphean tale of Rama, can be overwhelming at times. When your adrenaline is still running high following a fight scene and you’re chomping at the bit for more, it’s hard to keep your brain focused on the finer plot details which, if you miss too many, can pile up and make it hard to keep track. Once all is said and done, the overall shape of the story comes across clearly, but some expositional segments feel disposable, especially when sandwiched in between the film’s amazing fight sequences.

The fights are so breathless, so immaculately constructed and filmed that it bandages any negative impact the inflated story has on the experience. Uwais is marvelous on screen, moving at light speed, with pinpoint precision and controlled viciousness. It must take a world of focus and practice to pull of the superhuman choreography Uwais and his team have designed, but every move he and the supporting fighters make looks spontaneous and urgent.

And urgency is what informs Evans’ camera, which is as nimble and mobile as the actors. In an amazing shot, a man is sprinting toward the camera and then suddenly jumps laterally, crashing through a window and landing on his side on the ground. Evans twists the camera with the actor, falling from vertical to horizontal, a kinetic, jaw-dropping effect. He’s a brilliant action director and editor, always knowing exactly what to show, how long to show it, and how to make each blow look unimaginably painful. Cinematographers Matt Flannery and Dimas Imam Subhono, who also worked on the first film, have outdone themselves here, making the tornado-like fights easy to follow and coherent.

The gore factor is high here, even higher than its bloody predecessor. Body parts are twisted and turned the wrong way, skin is slashed, and heads get caved in by a variety of deadly instruments (including a baseball bat, swung by the aptly, hilariously named Baseball Bat Man). This is midnight horror movie-level stuff, for sure. The sheer variety of the fights stands out, with each scenario giving Uwais and his dance partners something different to do. There are fights in cramped spaces like a bathroom stall and the backseat of a car; there are wide-open brawls in flat arenas like the aforementioned riot scene, and in vertical arenas like a night club with cascading balconies; and there’s even a car chase that may be the most violent since Tarantino’s Death Proof.

The crowning jewel of the film, however, is the climactic one-on-one kitchen fight scene, which is perhaps the best I’ve ever seen. It’s a beautiful crescendo of intricate exchanges, false stops, and ferocious flashes of violence. What’s most impressive is that the scene is long, but in a good way: We feel exhausted ourselves watching them devote every fiber of their being to the battle, and as it goes on and on, the characters seem to develop an inexplicable wordless bond as kindred warriors born to battle each other at that very moment. It’s strangely emotional and completely riveting. The Raid 2 is a gloriously savage affair that ups the ante more than any action movie in recent memory.

The Raid 2 trailer

2011’s The Raid: Redemption was an adrenaline-pumping, relentless martial arts movie that wowed action movie lovers and garnered a ravenous fan following. With The Raid 2: Berandal, director Gareth Evans manages to make the fight scenes even more intense and intricate this time around, a tall task following the high bar set by the first film. He’s deepened the drama as well, giving lead star Iko Uwais some dramatic dialog scenes to sink his teeth into in between ass-kicking.

We got a chance to sit with Gareth and Iko in San Francisco and chat about how The Raid 2‘s story was actually written before The Raid‘s, out-doing the first film’s already over-the-top choreography, Gareth’s take on violence in film, Iko using his real life family for inspiration, and more. Check out parts 1 and 2 of our conversation below.

Part 1

Part 2

It comes as no surprise that a sequel has already come out less than a year later after the success of V/H/S. The quick turnaround is also not a surprise considering the low budget and format of the anthology itself (in fact, this movie was ready to go before the first one officially hit theatres). People discover a pile of VHS tapes and put them on one by one, with each piece of found footage on the videos making up a short. The predecessor’s lazy appropriation of found footage aesthetics are still here, but the conceptual insanity of the tapes have been upped considerably. The trade-off between committing to the format and maximizing entertainment value works enough to make V/H/S/2 an improvement over V/H/S, even if it’s only a marginal one.

Simon Barrett handles directing duties for “Tape 49,” the wraparound segment which is just as forgettable as V/H/S’ “Tape 56.” This time the poor souls discovering the tapes are two private investigators who break into a house and find a pile of videos waiting for them. There are some vague pieces of information in this short that expand the series’ mythology, but none of it is particularly interesting or memorable. Its only purpose is to act as a palate cleanser between segments, a job it does well even if it’s not for the right reasons.

Adam Wingard, who directed “Tape 56” in the last film, is first up with “Phase I Clinical Trials.” This short is the most derivative one, as it feels like The Pang Brothers’ The Eye ported into the found footage genre. After getting an eye transplant that uses a camera to help regain vision, a man (Wingard) begins seeing ghosts as the transplant picks up on the same frequencies the undead exist on. The segment, filmed entirely from the eye-cam, feels like a leftover from the first film. It’s lazy, filled with bad jump scares and eye-roll worthy excuses for exposition and nudity.

The next tape is the first one by a new director in the series. Eduardo Sanchez, the co-director of The Blair Witch Project, tries his hand at a zombie film with “A Ride in the Park.” The main selling point on this tape is its unique gimmick, where a biker with a helmet cam gets bitten by a zombie and turns into one. The POV zombie twist is definitely original, but that doesn’t mean it’s especially good. The segment’s ending, a surprising attempt at making the zombie protagonist human, doesn’t work due to the truncated nature of the storyline.

The third short, which functions as a centerpiece of the entire film, is Gareth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto’s “Safe Haven.” Since V/H/S/2 premiered this has been the one thing everyone’s been talking about, and it more than lives up to the hype. A documentary crew profiles a cult leader and, while visiting his compound for an interview, get caught up in the middle of something far worse than anyone could imagine. This is not only the series’ highpoint by a country mile, it’s also the best horror film of the year (even if it’s only 30 minutes). Evans, who wowed people with The Raid: Redemption last year, once again seems heavily influenced by John Carpenter with his slow building of dread before unleashing pure apocalyptic insanity. It won’t be a surprise if people end up buying V/H/S/2 on video only so they can get their hands on this segment.

Unfortunately for Jason Eisener, he has to follow Evans and Tjahjanto’s gonzo horror masterpiece with “Alien Abduction Slumber Party.” Thankfully it’s a good closing short for the film, and the only one that feels committed to the found footage format. The self-explanatory title sums up the story, as a group of young kids partying while their parents are away get attacked by aliens. The footage comes from a camera that was mounted on their pet dog, which makes most of the segment incompressible, but it’s largely the point. There are only hints of the insanity going on in “Slumber Party,” and the frantic nature makes it a more exciting watch.

By simply reducing the number of tapes in this film by one, V/H/S/2 is a leaner and meaner sequel. It continues in the first film’s tradition of adapting old horror subgenres (ghosts, zombies, apocalyptic horror and aliens, respectively) into the found footage format while ramping up the absurdity. It’s a predictable direction for the series to go, but a welcome one nonetheless. Only time will tell if a second sequel will provide diminishing returns for the series, but as of now V/H/S/2 is enough of an improvement to suggest there’s still a reason to keep making these films.

The Raid: Redemption could be seen as a slaughterhouse more than an action movie. Calling the plot and characters paper-thin would be an understatement, and the body count only stops rising the moment the credits start rolling. Any other film might fail at taking such a basic approach but The Raid (the subtitle was only added for legal reasons) thrives on its simplistic structure.

The movie opens with its only moment of character development. Rama (Iko Uwais) wakes up, goes through his morning routine and says goodbye to his pregnant wife and father before joining a SWAT team on a mission to take down the drug lord Tama (Ray Sahetapy). What makes the mission complicated is that Tama resides on the 15th floor of an apartment building that serves as his base of operations.

Unsurprisingly, things go to hell immediately and soon Tama is offering everyone in the apartment free rent for life if they dispose of any police in the building. Soon enough Rama and several other members of the SWAT teams are the only good guys left alive. Realizing the only way to get out alive is through Tama, fight and butcher their way to the top.

What The Raid does best is set up the stakes in the film early on. While some people might compare this to Ong-Bak or other popular Asian imports from the last decade or so, it’s clear that Gareth Evans is a fan of low budget 1970s thrillers like Assault on Precinct 13. The Raid is more of a pure survival tale than a flashy action movie, which keeps the pacing relentless and the action exciting throughout its runtime.

Of course it would be useless to review The Raid without mentioning the jaw-dropping action sequences. The movie starts with gunfights (most likely a nod towards John Woo’s films) before getting rid of them for close combat weapons until its nothing but flying fists and feet by the third act. Evans keeps his camera movements and style as simple as possible. He goes against the current status quo by putting his focus on the choreography instead of the camera itself. Considering the quality of most recent action films it comes as a revelation to see someone shooting fight scenes in a coherent manner.

There are no punches pulled throughout the film either. This is a survival story, and it shows through each fight sequence. Every single hit is done with the intent to seriously harm or kill someone, and there are plenty of moments that got howls from the audience I saw it with. This is a hard R action movie, and one of the more brutal action films to come along in a while.

Despite the real lack of substance when it comes to story or character development, there are no complaints when it comes to the action. These are some of the best action sequences and fights I’ve seen in a long time. Gareth Evans keeps things brisk and varied enough to not make the action feel dull or monotonous for a minute, and uses his cast’s fighting skills to their full potential. While it’s true that there isn’t more to The Raid other than its fighting, when the fighting is this good I don’t see a reason to complain.