Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

In terms of the storytelling and the character arcs, there's a lot of influence that came from the likes of Park Chan-wook and Kim Jee-woon. So films like Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance and I Saw The Devil have a great sense of tragedy and inevitability, and that kind of downward spiral that the characters are on. That sense of brutality was something we wanted to explore in The Raid films.

I also went back to a lot of Asian cinema for visual inspiration, like the South Korean films such as 'Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance' and 'Oldboy'. They are very kinetic, very visceral.

And also the Korean cinema wave, especially Park Chan-wook's vengeance trilogy, was very important to me. Sympathy For Mr Vengeance in particular showed me that you could go to the very end of your concept, no matter how extreme, and make it artful. This really liberated me in my own approach to Raw.

Oldboy is itself world cinema DNA, a South Korean film that influenced Western filmmakers profoundly, including Tarantino and Spike Lee. But its own roots are in a Korean cinema tradition that found in genre films a way to process the country's traumatic history. The hallway fight, one man against many, a single continuous take, became one of the most imitated action sequences in cinema. Oldboy is streaming on the Criterion Channel alongside the full vengeance trilogy.