Talking on The Radio Dan Show today (transcribed by our friends over at Collider), The A-Team's Joe Carnahan has talked more about his plans for a Daredevil movie with 20th Century Fox. However, as the studio failed to reach an agreement Marvel Studios, the rights will now revert to them, making it unlikely that we'll ever see the directors unique take on the character. Fox execs were apparently keen to move ahead with hos take on The Man Without Fear, but there simply wasn't enough time to make it happen before the October deadline. Below, he discusses why there just wasn't enough time to bring his version of Daredevil to the big screen.
"I was brought in pretty late in the game, and my take probably didn’t help matters since they had an existing script. But I just thought that if you were going to do it, this was the way to go. This is the way that intrigued me...It was initially something I passed on because Christopher Nolan had done such a lovely job with Batman and unless you’re going to go after that trilogy, then that’s how you have to think. You can’t out-hurdle that, then what’s the point of trying? So it set the bar extraordinarily high, and I thought ‘Well, if we’re going to do this, let’s have a discussion about Hell’s Kitchen, and how it was really Hell’s Kitchen in the 70s,” so that got me really excited. But as I mentioned, the clock ticking and this kind of October drop-dead date, it wasn’t tenable. And having gone down this road in the past when you’re trying to write something and shoot it at the same time is disastrous, and I think you’d need an adequate amount of time to put that script together in the right way. My brother [Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom)] was interested in writing it with me, so we’ll see."
While the film was set to be based on Frank Miller's "Born Again", Carnahan's plans to maintain the 1970s setting may have ended up being a controversial decision among some fans (similar to the initial reaction when it was announced that
X-Men: First Class would be set in the 1960s). Here Carnahan talks more about why he believes that period would have been a good choice to set the film in.
"As I’m finishing my kind of reimagining of Death Wish, I think the 70s is figuring into my conscious and subconscious mind right now. I think it was the last time music and movies were just tremendous. We just cranked out some great stuff. I think that’s why the sizzle reel is able to be kind of abstract because people have such great fondness in their hearts for that decade, particularly the early part of that decade. I’m excited; you know the idea of having Daredevil on top of a building somewhere with the Serpico marquee in the background was enough, that image was enough, for me to want to make the movie."