The Raid director Gareth Evans initially finished filming his action thriller Havoc in October 2021. He talks to us about its reshoots and lengthy delay.
Regular visitors to the site will probably remember reading one or two stories about Havoc, the latest action thriller from director Gareth Evans. Starring Tom Hardy and produced for Netflix, the film initially completed production in October 2021 – but then Havoc was subjected to a number of delays and stories of reshoots.
Almost four years later – and six years since Evans’ previous feature, Apostle – Havoc is finally out on Netflix. And if you enjoyed The Raid, or the heroic bloodshed stylings of director John Woo, you’ll almost certainly get a kick out of Evans’ wildly kinetic opus, whose action certainly lives up to its title.
As for the reasons behind the lengthy delay, we spoke to Evans himself about that very subject in March. The Welsh filmmaker was candid about the four year gap between the end of filming and release, and explained that a combination of factors made it difficult to get the cast back together for a bout of reshoots.
“We wrapped the film in October 2021,” Evans said, “and then we delivered an edit and we all felt, collectively, ‘Okay, this needs maybe a week’s worth of work to be done.’ Just to kind of iron out some story threads that needed a little bit more clarity here and there.”
Problems arose, however, when it came to getting certain cast-members back to Cardiff – where Havoc was originally filmed- for those reshoots. The Hollywood strikes which took up much of 2023 also threw a further spanner in the works.
“We ended up in a situation where getting the ensemble cast back together again, in the same place for the same week, proved incredibly difficult,” Evans said. “And so we were struggling to get everyone’s schedules to line up. And then just as we were about to figure that out, we got hit by the WGA strike and the SAG strike. And so everyone kind of stood down for seven or eight months. Then any projects that were going on before that got given priority to finish and complete.”
As a result, Evans and his team ended up waiting “for the best part of almost two years, just to get that one week of shooting done.”
After multiple delays, those reshoots finally took place in the summer of 2024. And while Evans didn’t specify which scenes were reshot, it’s surprisingly difficult to tell – at least on this writer’s initial viewing – exactly where those new sequences fit in the finished movie. The ill-fitting wigs of Josh Trank’s calamitous Fantastic Four – a famously troubled production peppered with reshot sequences – are thankfully nowhere to be seen.
Read more: Havoc review | Netflix’s most violent thriller ever? Quite possibly
In Evans’ telling, the delays even had a happy side-effect on his own finished piece.
“I’ve never experienced the post-production that has expanded that long before, but what it did was, it allowed us to interrogate the film and really try things out, experiment with the cut, experiment with the edit. And then see what we really needed. You know what I mean? So that when we did finally get to do these sort of additional photography, it was super focused on only the bits that we felt we needed.”
You can read our full interview with Gareth Evans – where he talks about his approach to action, love of John Woo and martial arts movies, and the current status of The Raid 3 – in the brand new edition of Film Stories magazine, available from the 28th April.
Havoc is streaming now on Netflix.
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