I met Timo Tjahjanto at Netflix’s South Korean headquarters on a sunny April afternoon in Seoul. As a long-time fan of genre films, I was excited to speak to this tall Indonesian man who had carved out a prominent space for himself among a new wave of Southeast Asian genre directors. The Indonesian film industry is often underrated and overlooked, but Timo is one of the first Indonesian directors to have attracted international attention for his work. That he did so by making wild, extreme movies is even more remarkable.

Timo’s inspiration swings between the old-school gore of the terrible south European, British and Hong Kong flicks of the 1980s we both grew up watching and the hyper-realistic martial art action films he paid homage to in 2018’s The Night Comes for Us, the first Indonesian film to be released as a Netflix original.

• Tags: film, Indonesia, Issue 33, Marco Ferrarese, Timo Tjahjanto