his week sees the release of the year's second big-screen comic-book adaptation, The Punisher, based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name. Rather than the convenient heroism audiences have come to expect from spandex-clad protagonists in similar films, however, Frank Castle is driven by vengeance, and the shift makes for a captivating portrait of one man's often violent quest for redemption.
Thomas Jane (Dreamcatcher) plays Castle, an FBI special agent who turns to vigilante-style retribution when his family is killed by mob boss Howard Saint (John Travolta). Jane, along with Travolta (Swordfish) and writer/director Jonathan Hensleigh (Terminator 3) recently spoke to Science Fiction Weekly about bringing the world of The Punisher to life. The film is being released by Lions Gate Films and opened nationwide April 16.
So, Thomas Jane, how many installments of The Punisher are you signed for?
Jane: Avi [Arad, the film's producer]'s got me down for 16. [Laughs.] I think it's three.
Why did you want to play this character?
Jane: Gosh, I've been waiting to do this my whole career—an antihero action film.
So were you familiar with The Punisher before you joined the project?
Jane: I read a lot of comic books as a kid, but I wasn't really aware of The Punisher until I got into the movies. Marvel had come after me for a couple different superhero parts and I'd turned them down, as I did this one initially, because I didn't see myself as a superheroic kind of a person. But as Marvel was quick to point out, this really was an antihero. He didn't have any super powers—he relied on his God-given talents and his wits to overcome his enemies, and that became much more interesting to me, because I've been waiting to play this kind of antihero since I was a kid.
What comic books did you read as a kid?
Jane: Oh, mostly EC comics like Tales From the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Incredible Science Fiction, Shock Suspense Stories, Two-Fisted Tales. I liked all the real genre stuff. That's where all the real literary talents, the Ray Bradbury, the Robert Heinlein adaptations were. I really got off on the writing. Then I got into Frank Miller and guys like that. The underground books like Robert Crumb. All that American Splendor stuff, I've been reading since I was a kid. I love that stuff.
Had you seen the 1989 version with Dolph Ludgren as The Punisher?
Jane: I saw parts of it, yeah, but I think that's The Punisher in name only. I think they used that as a template to jump off and create their own sort of story, and the respect wasn't there for the source material that we have now. It was a different period of filmmaking then, and we just weren't interested in the antihero for a number of years.
What interests you about antiheroes?
Jane: I like the humanity of it. It seems to me that those movies are more akin to reality, and the characters aren't torn between what was the right thing to do and what was the wrong thing to do. In my life, I've related to doing the wrong thing but for the right reasons or vice versa, doing the right thing but for the wrong reasons. That moral ambiguity is much more human to me than wearing a black hat or a white hat. In telling stories, we tend to break it down to a good guy and a bad guy—the good guy has sometimes done some stuff wrong but it wasn't real bad, but the bad guy was never any good and never had a chance in hell of ever being a good person. That stuff just was boring.
I've been waiting to do a kind of movie where an antihero character could come onto the American stage again. I think that echoes of the questions that we used to have in the '70s, our dissatisfaction with our leaders and our mistrust of our government, questioning our decisions and our roles on the world stage, opens up the door once again for the antihero to have a voice and a say. And that struggle between what's right and what's wrong, there's rarely an easy, clear-cut answer.
With such heavy undertones to the material, did you isolate yourself on the set to maintain the character's somber mood?
Jane: We tried to keep it light on the set. We were dealing with some pretty dark subject matter, and we wanted to inject a sense of humor into the film. There is a larger-than-life scale to the movie that, although it's rooted in reality, we can take liberties because it's a comic-book type of film and lends itself to a larger-than-life scale. Finding that balance was very important, and keeping it light on the set and staying creative was always a plus. Trying to leave the drama on the screen and not take it home with you is always a good thing too.
How did you make sure the tone of the film didn't become too kitschy?
Jane: It was all on the page. That was something that we drew directly from the actual source material. The source material has a great sense of humor as well as a fantastic violent sensibility that's cathartic in a way. All of that stuff is culled right from the pages of the comic book, and I think that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
How do you feel like the film's violence is cathartic?
Jane: There's a couple different reasons why I think it works. I think one is that we understand Frank as being a family man and devoted father and someone who's dedicated to his job. Near the beginning of the film, he's upset when people are killed on a job of his. He says, "No one was supposed to die out there." And then when he strings up Micky Duka, he needs information out of him and he could just blowtorch him and get it, but he does it in a humane way, he scares the information of him, and then he ends up converting Micky to his cause. And then there's just the cathartic feeling we get out of watching him kill everybody is because we've seen what he's been through and we can empathize with him.
When Rebecca's character points out, "What makes you any different than they are?" that brings back the sort of moral ambiguity of, how far is too far? But yet we understand why he goes to the lengths that he does, and the violence is not gratuitous in a way that it's overkill or he takes out a whole building or a whole restaurant or blows up half the town to get done what he does. A lot of stuff that he does is he turns these people's evil natures against themselves, and he watches as they destroy themselves. The humor that we injected into it gives him a sense of humanity, but it's a fine line. It's a hard type of movie to get right. If you get too sentimental, then it's just come on, already, get on with it, this is an action movie, not Faust or something. And then if it's too much B-movie, just blowing s--t up and going crazy, then we're "What the f--k is this?" It gets ridiculous.
John Travolta, how did you make sure your performance wasn't too kitschy for the rest of the film?
Travolta: I think the key here is the more serious he was, the funnier he became. I wasn't sure I was going to play this until the last minute, because I had to see what Thomas Jane was doing and the rest of the cast. When I found out they were playing it dead serious, and that was pretty funny, I thought, "OK, I'm gonna play it subtle and serious and it will be funny." It's funny because most comic-strip movies think they have to do the other, and the more we played it like we were in a Scorsese movie, the funnier it became.
At the same time, your character is a new creation and not from the original comic books, right?
Travolta: This is a new character, and I had to ask a lot of questions about him because there wasn't anything to base him on. I had to come up with an original. I thought, "Well, if I play it over the top, how do I do it?" And I kind of had this idea of kind of a spidery villain that was really funny and almost grotesque in a way, then it was whittled away. The way I was playing it was not where we were going with it. I'm just showing up for a very serious performance here.
The film seems to create this kind of verisimilitude between your character, Howard Saint, and The Punisher.
Travolta: I think that the brilliance of the movie is that the two have the same button pushed, and you go, "Oh my God, I understand this, but where's the dilemma? Who is going to be the real enemy here?"
It's interesting that Saint's quest for vengeance is pushed even further by his wife.
Travolta: I do agree that the wife takes it further. [Saint]'s just happy to get the guy who killed my son. She's the one who just can't stand the idea that it's not going to be everything to make her feel better. Of course, when you get to know her character more, you realize that everything is very lustful in her life, so it carries through.
Like Frank Castle, Howard Saint has an intense relationship with his family.
Travolta: I liked that. That was Jonathan [Hensleigh]'s idea. He just wanted a very sexy relationship. He wanted my character to be obsessed with [his wife]. My character is obsessed with her differently than The Punisher is obsessed with his family. He has kind of a healthy obsession with his family, and mine's kind of a possession/obsession. But they do push the same buttons in each family, but from different levels—one is the high road and one the low road.
What freedoms are there in playing a comic-book villain?
Travolta: The lateral movement you have on this is tremendous. It frees you up completely. Not at first, because it has to start out under control, but by the time he starts getting paranoid, the fun begins. Because, since Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, honestly, nobody has been able to walk down staircases like I get to. Let's face it—in the first one I come down to kill my best friend; it's down a staircase talking about some historic character. And the second one is throwing all her luggage [from a balcony] ... boom! And then I walk down that big staircase and I'm saying all these mean things. It's a blast.
Jonathan Hensleigh, at what point were you enlisted to bring The Punisher to the big screen?
Hensleigh: The picture that I signed on to adapt was Garth Ennis' Welcome Back, Frank series, so that's what the movie's based on. The reason that I like that particular vein is because I like the outcast, broken nature of Frank Castle and I like the fact that Garth took that character and put him into this dank, tenement apartment, surrounded by these three other broken outcast individuals.
I just thought that separated it from the normal, run-of-the-mill graphic novel. I thought it was utterly unique, I'd never seen anything like it, and it had a sweetness to it that I really responded to.
Why did you decide to kill the entire Castle clan, instead of just Frank's immediate family?
Hensleigh: I asked Marvel and the studio whether or not we could up the ante and increase the stakes by making the underlying event which gives rise to Castle's vengeance much more heinous, much more egregious, much more unconscionable, and they agreed, so we went in that direction.
Was the film always intended to be released with an R rating?
Hensleigh: The R rating was determined in our first meetings. We learned from the Internet that the hardcore fan base wanted an R rating, and that was unequivocal—not arguable—so we decided to make an R-rated movie and let the chips fall, and we kept the cost of the negative down. The Punisher comic carries a parental warning—the comic itself—so what I'm saying here is there are no surprises here. This is not going to be one of those pictures where a parent can say, "Oh gosh, I was surprised by this." This is what it is.
Even with an R, how conscious were you about the level of gore you wanted the film to contain?
Hensleigh: As a filmmaker, one of your greatest obstacles—one of your greatest challenges—is trying to grab and hold onto a consistent tone throughout. I had to ask myself constantly, because I'm not a fan of gratuitous violence, and there isn't a river of blood in this film. In fact, I hold the audience's view away from a lot a great deal—I don't care for anatomical displays of human viscera, and you don't see human brain matter being splashed all over. It's there for a purpose in the film, and the method of my madness was that I wanted to accentuate the ruthlessness and cruelty of the bad guys and make the audience hate them.
At the same time, the film seems to escalate from a sense of reality in the beginning to a tone that's more exaggerated.
Hensleigh: Absolutely. As a film fan, I don't like pictures that fail to escalate properly, so I tried to carefully plot things out so that the graph of the picture was ever escalating and so that it would end with a bang, if you will—that it would reach a crescendo.
How did you make sure that the tone didn't cross over completely to a level of kitsch?
Hensleigh: There's a certain style that everybody's riding in filmmaking, and that's just what I do. I don't care what adjectives are used, you can call it cheesy or it's a little bit kitschy or whatever, but I try to leaven the seriousness of stuff at times. I think it's just sort of a nod to myself. It's certainly a nod to the audience that proceedings aren't to be taken so seriously. That's all it is.
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