A Colt Is My Passport will be the next film from The Raid and Havoc director Gareth Evans, as filming has just wrapped in Wales. Like a ninja armed with a camera (and cast, and crew), director Gareth Evans has spent the past few weeks filming his latest movie without the wider world even realising ... The Raid and Havoc director Gareth Evans has finished shooting his latest movie
A Colt Is My Passport will be the next film from The Raid and Havoc director Gareth Evans, as filming has just wrapped in Wales.
Like a ninja armed with a camera (and cast, and crew), director Gareth Evans has spent the past few weeks filming his latest movie without the wider world even realising it. The Raid and Havoc filmmaker has, with the help of screenwriter and stunt expert Chris Webb, shot a remake of the Japanese thriller A Colt Is My Passport from 1967.
Just as he did with this year’s Havoc, Evans and his team have again used locations around Cardiff as stand-ins for an American city; according to Deadline, the director’s remake moves the original film’s action to Detroit in 1978, in which a returning Vietnam soldier becomes a contract killer and ends up on the wrong side of a gangland boss’s henchmen.
Havoc was a hardboiled homage to the work of John Woo (including, er, Hardboiled), and it sounds as though A Colt Is My Passport will continue in a similar vein. Bankrolled by Amazon MGM, its cast includes Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, with whom Evans collaborated on the TV thriller series Gangs Of London, who’ll play the lead character, Colt. He’ll be joined by Jack Reynor, Lucy Boynton, Victor Alli, Ewan Mitchell and Noah Taylor.
Evans made his mark in 2011 with his third feature The Raid – an Indonesian crime thriller that blended martial arts with a horror director’s eye for grisly wounds and bone-cracking violence. The Raid 2 followed in 2014, and then his first film for Netflix, 2018’s Apostle. His TV series Gangs Of London began in 2020 and is now on its fourth series, while Havoc, starring Tom Hardy, was a hit on Netflix in April this year. Covid and Hollywood strikes saw it heavily delayed, however, so here’s hoping that A Colt Is My Passport’s post-production phase is less filled with disruption.
The original A Colt Is My Passport was directed by Takashi Nomura and starred Joe Shishido hitman Shuji Kakimura. Like the later work of John Woo, Nomura was heavily influenced by French director Jean-Pierre Melville and his stylish noir-infused thrillers, such as Le Samourai. Over the decades, film noir has evolved and migrated from place to place – from its roots in German expressionist cinema to Los Angeles in the 1940s, to France, Asia – and most recently to the mean streets of Cardiff.
More on A Colt Is My Passport as we get it.
