There are two kinds of people - those who want to watch The Punisher hang upside down from a chandelier as he blows people away and those who don't. If you're the first kind, continue reading. Punisher: War Zone is the latest attempt at rebooting the popular comic and (so far) unsuccessful film franchise about a vigilante who prowls the city, annihilating every criminal he encounters.
Unlike the self-consciously serious 2004 reboot, the new film is a gleeful orgy of blood, brain matter and insider movie jokes as shotgun blasts turn heads into smoking stumps, grenades blow bodies apart like spaghetti and The Punisher kills someone doing parkour, the annoying French acrobatics popularized in movies like Casino Royale. In other words, this is a film designed to give studio executives nightmares. German-born director Lexi Alexander, a former karate and kickboxing champion, famously battled with Lionsgate over how far she could take her mad vision - and judging by the pale-faced people clutching the walls as they exited Monday's screening, she won! Lexi recently dialed up SuicideGirls to give us the story.
Ryan Stewart: Without knowing, I bet Lionsgate fought you over that little moment when the uniformed policewoman gets impaled with a sword.
Lexi Alexander: You're correct. How did you know that?
RS: Just American sensibilities, I know that had to irk them. How did you get brought onto this project?
LA: There was an executive named John Sacchi at Lionsgate who was a fan of mine, my previous work and actually a script that he had read. He came to me with this and then there was a little bit of development and we went from there.
RS: Everyone knows about the rift you had with them, of course -- which scene would you say caused the biggest disagreement?
LA: Oh my God, there were so many. Look, it's like on every movie -- different people with different opinions. Sometimes, believe it or not, it wasn't me disagreeing with them, sometimes it was Lionsgate disagreeing with Marvel -- they had their very own take. I would say the biggest that comes to mind -- and I'm so happy I was right because what's really shitty is when a filmmaker is really loud and pushy and then falls on his ass or her ass -- so, the parkour scene. I pushed so hard for it. And it was so questioned and the fact that it's working out, I could just do somersaults right now. That was one of those things where it could have been really bad if that didn't work.
RS: Is that your favorite kill in the movie?
LA: It's something that I wrote and fought really hard for and nobody wanted it, the grenade and the parkour guy.
RS: It got a huge reaction in my screening, for sure. Great comic timing on that one.
LA: That's very vindicating.
RS: Why would they choose to fight that battle? That's one of the movie's best moments, in my opinion.
LA: People didn't want the parkour guys in because at that time they were really kind of over-exposed. They were in every film. And I fought for it, because I said, "Yeah, they are in every film, but we are the only ones blowing them up!" And even that they are in every film is really funny. That didn't quite go by really easy, but in the end they said yes to it, so it was all good.
RS: Your squabbles with the studio ended up getting pretty serious, didn't they? A lot of people were speculating on how that was all resolved.
LA: Well, I think that when Harry Knowles put that on his website - I don't know if you read his site, but he is a wonderful, good guy and he is never on the side of the filmmaker or the studio, always on the side of the film. When he was writing that we were going through some disagreements. I don't think it was worse or better than any other movie. Every filmmaker I know has the same arguments. It's unfortunate that ours gets kind of thrown out there on the Internet and then every site tries to top it, you know? Harry Knowles was so kind to say his opinion: "Leave this director alone and let her do her thing, she already did a good job." He writes: "Don't push her aside!" Then the next website writes: "Lexi Alexander got fired!" Then the next one writes: "Lexi Alexander takes her name off the film!" So it's a little bit of sensationalism. I'm here.
RS: Did you ever want your name off the film?
LA: My name was never off, nor would I want it taken off, nor did I ever get a pink slip. The truth is that we had probably the same discussions that any other film has, and since you saw it last night, you could also see that this was a very distinctive take on the film. Obviously, there are not twenty executives there to say, "Yes, Lexi, [we'll] do everything you tell us, we'll go ahead with everything." Obviously, once in a while they were saying, "What? That's crazy." You know, I just had to convince them.
RS: Let me ask you this -- did you enjoy working with [producer] Gale Anne Hurd? Was she a good collaborator?
LA: [long pause] Next question.
RS: Fair enough. I'm actually a big fan of her work, which is why I was curious about the interaction.
LA: [uneasy laugh] I enjoyed working with her.
RS: I hear protest in your voice, but I want to switch gears and talk about the comedy. People seem to be responding to it -- at my screening they were laughing and clapping throughout.
LA: Oh, good! Yeah, that's exactly what I was aiming for. It's funny, I read a couple of reviews today and some of them - only a few - but some of them said, "Oh, I wish that Jigsaw wouldn't have been humorous!" But that was my favorite part of the whole fucking thing. It's over the top. It's funny. It's a comic book movie. It's great that Ray [Stevenson] is such an incredible actor that he can give weight to the internal turmoil of The Punisher, but my God, you've got a guy with horse hide on his face - how serious can we get? I was in a screening yesterday with a lot of people and I was so touched when they were laughing out loud that I was almost crying.
RS: I'm not a reader of the comics - are they as violent and over the top as the movie?
LA: The comic books are. I tried to put as much of the comic in there as I could, but it's a violent comic book. It's a little bit over the top, the violence, and some of the scenes like the exploding heads and the guy [getting impaled] on the fence, they are taken directly out of the comic book.
RS: What's your preferred technique for blowing up a head, by the way? A little practical, a little CGI mixed together?
LA: It was a bit of both. There was practical - we had a head made and blown up on the set and when I looked at it, when I saw the cut, I said, "It looks a little bit like styrofoam here and there, it looks fake." And then the visual effects people came in and corrected it. I think when you mix the practical with the visual effects, that's when you really get magic.
RS: Were you ever wary of getting involved with Punisher in the first place? This is the second attempt at rebooting this franchise in less than twenty years - a lot of baggage.
LA: Quite honestly, that's what I was thinking. When I got the script it was called Punisher 2 and I actually passed - a couple of times - and then my agent said, "Look, you know they have a thirty-five million dollar budget. It's a comic book film. They don't want it to be a sequel. You can make this your own film. You can reboot it, you can put something new on it." So I said, "Alright, then send me the comic books." Now, I was still convinced I would pass at this point, and then I read the comic books - I read the MAX [Marvel's adult audience] series - and I was like, shit, this is great. Why didn't anybody do this? So once I had confirmation from them that they really would let me do this with a new actor and a new look and a new feel to it, I was totally up for it.
RS: You decided to do away with most of the Frank Castle/The Punisher origin story - just a few quick flashbacks. I guess we've seen it twice already, so why bother, right?
LA: Yes, I think there's that, and plus you only have ninety minutes, a hundred minutes tops, you know? I can't spend the first act on his backstory, especially when that's exactly what people criticized about the previous one, the Thomas Jane one, you know? I wanted to do it a little bit more like Tim Burton's Batman, where you see kind of see it quick. What's really interesting is his life now, as The Punisher.
RS: Punisher is sometimes referred to as Marvel's Batman - they have sort of a similar MO. Have you thought about the similarities between the characters and their movies?
LA: I don't think you can compare the two at all, in terms of Chris Nolan's series. It's hard as a thirty-five million dollar film to get compared to a 'three hundred million dollars on top of a stage for a hundred million dollars that was already there' film, you know? Sometimes I read these things and I go, "That is really a tough one to compete with, you know?" He also chose a different tone. If anything, I would compare my film much more to Tim Burton's Batman. I think that, color-wise and in terms of the tone, we went much more in that direction, a very surreal world.
RS: What about The Punisher as a character? Does he have a code? Would he kill women and children?
LA: He killed a woman in the opening scene! Didn't you see it?
RS: Yeah, last night. I must have been rubbing my eyes at the wrong moment or something. Which woman did he kill?
LA: Remember the mafia wife? The Don's wife? There were actually discussions about that. We went back and forth on it and we compromised on the fact that if she would go for a gun, he would kill her. Personally, I would have had him kill her just because she's sitting there. But yeah, and I do think he would kill a kid if the kid's out there pushing weapons or drugs. If he would see a twelve year-old at the school ground pushing heroin, he'd kill the kid. That's what I think. That's The Punisher. That's why people who love The Punisher, and know his mythology, and are so obsessed with him. He's not a hero, he's really kind of an anti-hero.
RS: You watched the 1989 film with Dolph Lundgren, I assume?
LA: I did.
RS: Your film struck me as being much more like that one than the recent Thomas Jane one. Do you agree?
LA: If you would say, "Which resembles it more?" then yes. I don't think it resembles it a lot, but of the two? I would say, probably yes.
RS: I can tell you're happy with the way it turned out.
LA: I'm extremely happy. It came at a price, I would say, but I made the film I wanted on the screen. I think personally, in my opinion, it would have been very dangerous to put a compromise on the screen for my own career and for the promises I made to these actors who I talked into joining the film. I don't really care that it was an uphill battle; I'm glad with what's on the screen. I think people have really enjoyed it, like they did at your screening, and I'm extremely happy.
RS: And whatever anger issues you had, you could work out through The Punisher anyway, right?
LA: Of course. That's where all my anger comes out. I had The Punisher take care of it. It's my therapy. It's a lot cheaper than therapy and as a matter of fact, I get paid for it instead of my expensive shrink.
RS: Is there going to be some stuff left over for the DVD?
LA: Yeah, but not a lot of action stuff. I would say more quiet scenes, a little bit more between Castle and Soap, a little bit more between Castle and the girl - they actually took more of the calmer stuff out and left the action, and I feel really good about keeping all the action in.
RS: I think you did a good job - I had a blast watching it.
LA: Well, thank you. Lionsgate doesn't tend to show their films to critics, to any of you guys, five days before [release], so that was a leap of faith, I think, and it's worked out for us.
RS: If things go well at the box-office, would you come back for a sequel?
LA: [laughs] No. But Ray Stevenson should direct one. That's what I'm campaigning for. I think he'd be a great Punisher director.
RS: You took enough punishment?
LA: I did indeed.
Punisher: War Zone opens in theaters nationwide today.
Unlike the self-consciously serious 2004 reboot, the new film is a gleeful orgy of blood, brain matter and insider movie jokes as shotgun blasts turn heads into smoking stumps, grenades blow bodies apart like spaghetti and The Punisher kills someone doing parkour, the annoying French acrobatics popularized in movies like Casino Royale. In other words, this is a film designed to give studio executives nightmares. German-born director Lexi Alexander, a former karate and kickboxing champion, famously battled with Lionsgate over how far she could take her mad vision - and judging by the pale-faced people clutching the walls as they exited Monday's screening, she won! Lexi recently dialed up SuicideGirls to give us the story.
Ryan Stewart: Without knowing, I bet Lionsgate fought you over that little moment when the uniformed policewoman gets impaled with a sword.
Lexi Alexander: You're correct. How did you know that?
RS: Just American sensibilities, I know that had to irk them. How did you get brought onto this project?
LA: There was an executive named John Sacchi at Lionsgate who was a fan of mine, my previous work and actually a script that he had read. He came to me with this and then there was a little bit of development and we went from there.
RS: Everyone knows about the rift you had with them, of course -- which scene would you say caused the biggest disagreement?
LA: Oh my God, there were so many. Look, it's like on every movie -- different people with different opinions. Sometimes, believe it or not, it wasn't me disagreeing with them, sometimes it was Lionsgate disagreeing with Marvel -- they had their very own take. I would say the biggest that comes to mind -- and I'm so happy I was right because what's really shitty is when a filmmaker is really loud and pushy and then falls on his ass or her ass -- so, the parkour scene. I pushed so hard for it. And it was so questioned and the fact that it's working out, I could just do somersaults right now. That was one of those things where it could have been really bad if that didn't work.
RS: Is that your favorite kill in the movie?
LA: It's something that I wrote and fought really hard for and nobody wanted it, the grenade and the parkour guy.
RS: It got a huge reaction in my screening, for sure. Great comic timing on that one.
LA: That's very vindicating.
RS: Why would they choose to fight that battle? That's one of the movie's best moments, in my opinion.
LA: People didn't want the parkour guys in because at that time they were really kind of over-exposed. They were in every film. And I fought for it, because I said, "Yeah, they are in every film, but we are the only ones blowing them up!" And even that they are in every film is really funny. That didn't quite go by really easy, but in the end they said yes to it, so it was all good.
RS: Your squabbles with the studio ended up getting pretty serious, didn't they? A lot of people were speculating on how that was all resolved.
LA: Well, I think that when Harry Knowles put that on his website - I don't know if you read his site, but he is a wonderful, good guy and he is never on the side of the filmmaker or the studio, always on the side of the film. When he was writing that we were going through some disagreements. I don't think it was worse or better than any other movie. Every filmmaker I know has the same arguments. It's unfortunate that ours gets kind of thrown out there on the Internet and then every site tries to top it, you know? Harry Knowles was so kind to say his opinion: "Leave this director alone and let her do her thing, she already did a good job." He writes: "Don't push her aside!" Then the next website writes: "Lexi Alexander got fired!" Then the next one writes: "Lexi Alexander takes her name off the film!" So it's a little bit of sensationalism. I'm here.
RS: Did you ever want your name off the film?
LA: My name was never off, nor would I want it taken off, nor did I ever get a pink slip. The truth is that we had probably the same discussions that any other film has, and since you saw it last night, you could also see that this was a very distinctive take on the film. Obviously, there are not twenty executives there to say, "Yes, Lexi, [we'll] do everything you tell us, we'll go ahead with everything." Obviously, once in a while they were saying, "What? That's crazy." You know, I just had to convince them.
RS: Let me ask you this -- did you enjoy working with [producer] Gale Anne Hurd? Was she a good collaborator?
LA: [long pause] Next question.
RS: Fair enough. I'm actually a big fan of her work, which is why I was curious about the interaction.
LA: [uneasy laugh] I enjoyed working with her.
RS: I hear protest in your voice, but I want to switch gears and talk about the comedy. People seem to be responding to it -- at my screening they were laughing and clapping throughout.
LA: Oh, good! Yeah, that's exactly what I was aiming for. It's funny, I read a couple of reviews today and some of them - only a few - but some of them said, "Oh, I wish that Jigsaw wouldn't have been humorous!" But that was my favorite part of the whole fucking thing. It's over the top. It's funny. It's a comic book movie. It's great that Ray [Stevenson] is such an incredible actor that he can give weight to the internal turmoil of The Punisher, but my God, you've got a guy with horse hide on his face - how serious can we get? I was in a screening yesterday with a lot of people and I was so touched when they were laughing out loud that I was almost crying.
RS: I'm not a reader of the comics - are they as violent and over the top as the movie?
LA: The comic books are. I tried to put as much of the comic in there as I could, but it's a violent comic book. It's a little bit over the top, the violence, and some of the scenes like the exploding heads and the guy [getting impaled] on the fence, they are taken directly out of the comic book.
RS: What's your preferred technique for blowing up a head, by the way? A little practical, a little CGI mixed together?
LA: It was a bit of both. There was practical - we had a head made and blown up on the set and when I looked at it, when I saw the cut, I said, "It looks a little bit like styrofoam here and there, it looks fake." And then the visual effects people came in and corrected it. I think when you mix the practical with the visual effects, that's when you really get magic.
RS: Were you ever wary of getting involved with Punisher in the first place? This is the second attempt at rebooting this franchise in less than twenty years - a lot of baggage.
LA: Quite honestly, that's what I was thinking. When I got the script it was called Punisher 2 and I actually passed - a couple of times - and then my agent said, "Look, you know they have a thirty-five million dollar budget. It's a comic book film. They don't want it to be a sequel. You can make this your own film. You can reboot it, you can put something new on it." So I said, "Alright, then send me the comic books." Now, I was still convinced I would pass at this point, and then I read the comic books - I read the MAX [Marvel's adult audience] series - and I was like, shit, this is great. Why didn't anybody do this? So once I had confirmation from them that they really would let me do this with a new actor and a new look and a new feel to it, I was totally up for it.
RS: You decided to do away with most of the Frank Castle/The Punisher origin story - just a few quick flashbacks. I guess we've seen it twice already, so why bother, right?
LA: Yes, I think there's that, and plus you only have ninety minutes, a hundred minutes tops, you know? I can't spend the first act on his backstory, especially when that's exactly what people criticized about the previous one, the Thomas Jane one, you know? I wanted to do it a little bit more like Tim Burton's Batman, where you see kind of see it quick. What's really interesting is his life now, as The Punisher.
RS: Punisher is sometimes referred to as Marvel's Batman - they have sort of a similar MO. Have you thought about the similarities between the characters and their movies?
LA: I don't think you can compare the two at all, in terms of Chris Nolan's series. It's hard as a thirty-five million dollar film to get compared to a 'three hundred million dollars on top of a stage for a hundred million dollars that was already there' film, you know? Sometimes I read these things and I go, "That is really a tough one to compete with, you know?" He also chose a different tone. If anything, I would compare my film much more to Tim Burton's Batman. I think that, color-wise and in terms of the tone, we went much more in that direction, a very surreal world.
RS: What about The Punisher as a character? Does he have a code? Would he kill women and children?
LA: He killed a woman in the opening scene! Didn't you see it?
RS: Yeah, last night. I must have been rubbing my eyes at the wrong moment or something. Which woman did he kill?
LA: Remember the mafia wife? The Don's wife? There were actually discussions about that. We went back and forth on it and we compromised on the fact that if she would go for a gun, he would kill her. Personally, I would have had him kill her just because she's sitting there. But yeah, and I do think he would kill a kid if the kid's out there pushing weapons or drugs. If he would see a twelve year-old at the school ground pushing heroin, he'd kill the kid. That's what I think. That's The Punisher. That's why people who love The Punisher, and know his mythology, and are so obsessed with him. He's not a hero, he's really kind of an anti-hero.
RS: You watched the 1989 film with Dolph Lundgren, I assume?
LA: I did.
RS: Your film struck me as being much more like that one than the recent Thomas Jane one. Do you agree?
LA: If you would say, "Which resembles it more?" then yes. I don't think it resembles it a lot, but of the two? I would say, probably yes.
RS: I can tell you're happy with the way it turned out.
LA: I'm extremely happy. It came at a price, I would say, but I made the film I wanted on the screen. I think personally, in my opinion, it would have been very dangerous to put a compromise on the screen for my own career and for the promises I made to these actors who I talked into joining the film. I don't really care that it was an uphill battle; I'm glad with what's on the screen. I think people have really enjoyed it, like they did at your screening, and I'm extremely happy.
RS: And whatever anger issues you had, you could work out through The Punisher anyway, right?
LA: Of course. That's where all my anger comes out. I had The Punisher take care of it. It's my therapy. It's a lot cheaper than therapy and as a matter of fact, I get paid for it instead of my expensive shrink.
RS: Is there going to be some stuff left over for the DVD?
LA: Yeah, but not a lot of action stuff. I would say more quiet scenes, a little bit more between Castle and Soap, a little bit more between Castle and the girl - they actually took more of the calmer stuff out and left the action, and I feel really good about keeping all the action in.
RS: I think you did a good job - I had a blast watching it.
LA: Well, thank you. Lionsgate doesn't tend to show their films to critics, to any of you guys, five days before [release], so that was a leap of faith, I think, and it's worked out for us.
RS: If things go well at the box-office, would you come back for a sequel?
LA: [laughs] No. But Ray Stevenson should direct one. That's what I'm campaigning for. I think he'd be a great Punisher director.
RS: You took enough punishment?
LA: I did indeed.
Punisher: War Zone opens in theaters nationwide today.
nicole_powers:
There are two kinds of people - those who want to watch The Punisher hang upside down from a chandelier as he blows people away and those who don't. If you're the first kind, continue reading. Punisher: War Zone is the latest attempt at rebooting the popular...
john_hancok:
Its going to be very interesting seeing a differnet take on the maniac that is the Punisher. I've never seen him as a deeply profound or distinctive character but always enjoyed his cameos in the comics. I'll definetly be checking this out in theartres today out of curiousity. Thank goodness marvel has there own production studio now at least the movies stand a chance of being like the comic its based on.