The showrunner for Daredevil recently came out of the woodwork:
Paste: With Spartacus—and also with Joss’s work—every time you have a battle scene or an action sequence, you have to balance it with emotional character development. From a writing perspective, how do you approach that?
DeKnight: The character stuff is the important part of it. The action part of it, I always feel like anybody can really write action. It’s not that hard you just need a blueprint to tell the stunt team where they’re going, and let them take it from there. The most important part of any action scene, was the question, What are the emotional stakes of the action scene? It’s got to propel the story, and illuminate the characters. That was especially true in Buffy and Angel with the action and the monster of week. It was a metaphor and something to shine a light on what our characters were going through.
Paste: I talked with George Mastras about Breaking Bad, and he said something that could also apply to working on Daredevil—Every time the character wins, he also has to lose a little bit. When you’re handling a superhero, how do you think about his arc?
DeKnight: With this version of Daredevil, we wanted it to be grounded, gritty, as realistic as we could portray. That naturally fits in with the Daredevil character. Matt Murdock, on a regular basis, would get the shit beat out of him. That’s one thing that makes him a great character. He’s not super strong. He’s not invulnerable. In every aspect, he’s a man that’s just pushed himself to the limits, he just has senses that are better than a normal humans. He is human. The other thing that really drew me to this character is that he’s one of the most morally grey of the heroes.
Paste: How so?
DeKnight: He’s a lawyer by day, and he’s taken this oath. But every night he breaks that oath, and goes out and does very violent things. The image that always stuck in my mind was the Frank Miller Elektra run where he’s holding Bullseye over the street, and he lets Bullseye go because he doesn’t want Bullseye to ever kill anyone again. When I read that originally, when I was young, I’d never seen anything like that in comics. Superman scoops up the villain and puts them in jail. This time the hero didn’t do that. It was a morally grey ground that I found absolutely fascinating. There are two sides to this character. He’s literally one bad day away from becoming the The Punisher! Frank Castle went just a little bit further than he did. Daredevil has no qualms about beating the hell out of somebody. He’s not going to tie them up with his webs! He’ll come close to killing somebody. And it’s that fine edge—Why doesn’t he go all the way? I really liked the flawed heroes, the human heroes.
Well I'm intrigued!