When Mark Goldblatt got the job directing The Punisher, he had already established himself as a noted film editor who had worked on The Howling and The Terminator; he has since worked on such movies as Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Starship Troopers. The greatest testimony to his skill is that he is a man who has worked repeatedly with such top-notch genre talent as Joe Dante, James Cameron, and Paul Verhoeven. As it was, Goldblatt’s foray into directing was all too brief, and The Punisher was only his second (and last) film as director. “I had [directed] a movie called Dead Heat (1988, recently released on widescreen DVD by Anchor Bay Entertainment) with Treat Williams, Joe © 1989 New World Pictures.
Piscopo, and Vincent Price,” Goldblatt reveals. “Before
The Punisher © 2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.
Dead Heat came out and bombed at the box office, [New World Pictures] was very high on me. They thought I did a good job, especially given its low budget. Basically, New World was offering me a choice of projects. I was approached by producer Robert Kamen, who created The Karate Kid [the film series that began in 1984]. He had shepherded the Punisher project and had engaged Boaz Yakin to write the screenplay. Boaz has since had a lot of success: Remember the Titans and Fresh, and a few others.”
Men at Work The Punisher proved to be an interesting exercise in low-budget filmmaking for Goldblatt. The film was a 50-day shoot, had no second unit crew, and was budgeted for only $9.5 million, a very low sum for a film even in 1989 (that was for everything, including the actors’ salaries). New World got creative, though, and early on realized that they could stretch their dollars farther by taking a step that is very common these days: shooting the film outside of the United States. According to Goldblatt, the first non-U.S. site discussed was British Columbia. In the end, the producer settled on Australia. “One of the issues about the movie, which is a little interesting, is that we were told we were supposed to start scouting locations in Australia,” Goldblatt explains. “If I had had my choice of wherever I would have shot it, in terms of what the movie called for, it would have been New York. I always felt New York and New Jersey was really Punisher territory. We went to Sydney, which doesn’t look anything like New York, though it’s a beautiful place—I love it. For the [limited] budget we had, I knew we could get really great people [there] compared to the people that might have been available at that time in the States.” As it turned out, there were other reasons besides economic concerns for making The Punisher in Australia. “It became apparent that New World had a company that they had set up in
Filming Down Under
Australia, New World Pictures Australia, a company that had raised
Australian as well as
a lot of money,” says Goldblatt. “It
American actors got
had been around for some years, but
kicked in the head
had never made a movie. If we would
by the Punisher.
agree to go to Australia, [New World]
Photo courtesy of
would agree to make our movie.
Andy Mangels.
If we didn’t agree on going to
© 1989 New World Pictures.
Australia, they probably wouldn’t
The Punisher © 2004 Marvel Characters, Inc.
have made our movie at all. It was that simple.”
8 4
•
B A C K
I S S U E
•
C o m i c s
i n
H o l l y w o o d