I brought the idea of doing a Punisher film to New World at the time. They had never even heard of it. No one was making comic book movies at the time. I brought it to them and I wrote a script basically off of my own ideas that I brought to them. They changed it quite a bit. I wrote something that was a lot closer to the comics but they were concerned it was too comic bookish at times. A few months later, Batman came out.
Was Frank Castle living in the sewer in your version?
He was living in the sewer. He had the skull on his shirt and the Punisher I wrote was very much a sort of Frank Miller punisher from the Daredevil comics sort of mixed in with that first series, the Mike Zeck series that they did. It was a very kind of pure comic bookish kind of character and it got altered quite a bit, but I brought the idea to them. So I was actually coming up with action stuff myself and selling it to studios and to people. I did that for about three or four years and then I actually left the business for a while. I went and lived in Paris and wrote a novel, and was actually brought back into the business by my friend Lawrence Bender who produced Safe by encouraging me to write something more personal and interesting that I might be able to direct. That’s how my first film came about.
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