Thomas Jane is THE PUNISHER

It does have a very fervent fanbase. I knew that going in being a comic book collector myself. I still collect comics. I still have a great love and respect for the genre. I have a great love and respect for people who appreciate the genre. I didn’t want to take on the role if I felt I was going to not be able to give a valid interpretation of Frank Castle. That said, you can’t please everybody. You’re always going to piss somebody off. In the comic book world, there are different eras of a character. A writer will take him one place, and another writer will come on and take him to a completely different place, and then one artist will draw him a certain way, and then another artist will see another aspect of Frank and draw him another way. The costume changes, the weapons change, his sidekicks change, and the enemies change. Everybody has their certain favorite Frank, or their definitive version of who that is. So there’s no way in the world you’re ever going to please all these people because we got to pick one guy and stick him in a movie. I had to please myself at the end of the day. I had to pick my favorite Frank and bring that guy to the screen, the guy I related to most. I went on the websites and I prowled around and culled all sorts of information about what people felt Frank Castle was. But at a certain point, I had to throw everything away and just go with what I wanted to do and create my Frank Castle and fuck everybody else.

When I grew up as a kid, I fell in love with the EC Comics from the 50’s. It was illegal to produce horror and science fiction in the state of New York because of EC Comics. They just went over the line. Their covers were hangings and brutal stabbings. When they came out in the early 50’s, people were just shocked and brutalized. There were government commissions set up to investigate the violence and corruption of the child. “The Seduction of the Innocent” is a fantastic book and you can read all about that stuff. “The Red Scare” and calling them communists. It’s really funny that those are the first books that I started getting into that world. “The Vault of Horror,” “Two Fisted Tales,” “Tales from the Crypt,” incredible science-fiction, weird science-fantasy…I collected them all.

I still do. I covet them. They’re holy grails to me. You do a movie like “The Punisher” and now I get the [William] Gaines file copies. Just pristine, immaculate copies and of course, if I do “The Punisher 2,” I’ll start working on some of the original art. Some of those great Johnny Craig covers…I’m going to have an orgasm if I keep talking about them! They ripped off Ray Bradbury but they brought a real sense of literacy to comic books that is still unrivaled today. Their passion for what they did and unwillingness to accept the normal boundaries of what’s in good taste was constantly called into question. [co-creator of EC Comics Al] Feldstein once said “No, but it tasted good at the time.” It’s funny that those are heavy influences on me and I’d be attracted to a thing like this.

They do. And they will. Here’s the funny thing: I find that as a kid, I could take much more violence, blood, guts, and gore, and you could bring it on and nothing was too shocking for me as a kid or teenager. And now, I’m at 35 and my tolerance for that stuff is much less. As I grow older and closer to the grave, that stuff becomes more and more disturbing to me. I do remember, though, that I lived in another world than I do now as an adult. That world demanded a certain kind of shocking, take it to a limit, stretching the bounds attitude that was cathartic to me. And I sought it out in my movies, I sought it out in my comic books and novels. Now, kids are seeking it out in their video games. You can’t do something tragic or gory enough in these video games. There’s a cathartic quality that serves a purpose that I’m not smart enough to fully understand except on a gut level. That said, our tolerance for violence right now as a country, is not what it was in the 70’s. If you go back and look at “Rolling Thunder” with William Devane or “Point Blank” with Lee Marvin or “Death Wish” with Charles Bronson, you’ll find that the violence in our movie is not as shocking as it was when my parents were my age. The end of “Taxi Driver” is just brutally violent and shockingly real that we couldn’t do that today without an X rating. There’s just something about the quality about what we expect as a nation right now that influences and colors the way we watch movies right now. The fact of the matter is that most of this stuff, we kind of cut away from. Most of the stuff that is violence and uncomfortable is what you don’t see, and what you would cut away from or is implied. That’s moviemaking. People’s response to the violence, I’m proud of, because I know that on some level, they’re emotionally connected to the material. They’re not saying that about “Dawn of the Dead.” “Dawn of the Dead” has brains and shit on the floor.

No I didn’t. I view the original “Punisher” Dolph Lundgren version as “Punisher” in name-only. I think they bought the name and bought the title character and went off and made their movie based on what they wanted to do. It really is “Punisher” name-only. I see little or no relationship to the comic book source material.

Much more than the producers would have liked, I tell you. [Laughs] I really have to hand it to Gale Anne Hurd, Avi Arad, and Jonathan Hensleigh especially, for allowing me to be as collaborative as I was. I had my own ideas as to how I wanted to portray Frank and the things I wanted to come across. Jonathan and I were able to come together on those things. The producers allowed me to be collaborative. I was able to tailor it into what I wanted to inject into the film. I took out as much dialogue as I possibly could. I wanted to get that silent movie quality to Frank. I tried to make him as fallible as I could and I tried to find a humor without making fun of it, which is really important. To me, it’s the kiss of death when you start winking at the audience as an actor. I just never liked it. I don’t like it when we do monologues looking into the character and I don’t like it when we wink at the audience and go “I know I’m acting silly here or stupid.” That’s just out of bounds for me.

I put on about 25 pounds of muscle and trained for about six months with Navy Seals, learning stuff about counter terrorism units, what it was to be a Special Forces operative, and just tried to gain all the skills that I needed to be Frank Castle. It was a very physical part and I approached it in a physical way.

I was very influenced by Buster Keaton in this role. I was very influenced by the great action stars of the 70’s and the great silent film stars. Buster Keaton is my man. He was an indomitable spirit in a sea of chaos. That’s how I saw Frank Castle. I also saw Buster’s immaculate ability to portray physically great pathos and emotion. To be able to create a well-rounded human being and I related that to the silent action stars of the 70’s who did things instead of talked about them. That combination for me was a wonderful blend because at a certain point, as I got older, I wanted to make fun of those action stars – all of the Steven Seagals, Van Dammes and Stallones. These guys relied more on their tough guy attitude than they did on their human spirit and what made them so attractive to me in the first place.

I’d certainly imagine myself doing that. That’s one of the reasons why these classic stories have been around for a couple of thousand years. It taps into something very primal. It’s an instinctual primal part of our marrow to protect the ones that we love at all costs.

He’s a great guy. He’s a legend to me. It was an honor and a real pleasure to work with him. He’s very collaborative and a gracious man. You just want to kill him.

Emotionally the focus is on his wife and son. By expanding the scope of it we are able to make it more cinematic. On film time is everything. It’s dictated by the constraints of time itself. By allowing the scene to blossom it sinks in the way we needed it too. Another reason is that the Punisher was created in 1974 post-Vietnam era. The random killing of Frank’s family in Central Park was incomprehensible because it was something that was relevant back then. Today that’s not as relevant. The randomness is something that socially doesn’t speak to us and filmmically it’s hard to do because you don’t have nemesis or anyone to go after. It’s not Greek. The Greek storytelling is two diametrically opposed forces and this is a classic Greek story.

Mantle lived with us. We can relate to him and we have baseballs signed by him. Frank is stuck in the comic world.

I’m sure that both movies will hurt each other at the box office. I think it’s inevitable. But when I was a kid, I loved going to the marquee and seeing two films on it I really wanted to see. That was a great weekend for me as a kid. For people that love this kind of thing, it’s going to be a fantastic weekend. People will go see both movies. This movie will find its audience and it doesn’t have to sell happy meals or make $150 million dollars at the box office to be successful. It’s a niche movie, a genre film. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Sure, there are little illogical things and stuff like that but I just don’t care. It’s not that kind of movie. It only needs to please a certain section of the audience. People that don’t like too much violence or don’t like that kind of thing aren’t going to see it anyway. They get the gist of what it is. So this is the kind of movie that we can make for a certain person and not have to pull punches, or wash it out, or weed it over, or turn it into something that its not. That’s kind of unusual but we made it with a low enough budget so that we were able to do that.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck