After writing 1997's Jungle 2 Jungle, a remake of the 1994 French film Un indien dans la ville, Evans and Gideon wrote "screenplays and rewrites and all of that kind of stuff" before their next credited film. They struggled to have their subsequent scripts produced as each demanded too high a budget for most studios, including what they regarded as a "great World War I love story", until they wrote the 2007 film Mr. Brooks, starring Kevin Costner as the title character. With the idea of a seemingly normal Business man who leads a second life as a serial killer, they hoped to "make an adult film" and "change our image" as Writers in the film industry. They originally conceived the project as a television series, which they pitched to a number of television producers and studios in Hollywood. Their original version was considered "too soft", and their revised story, which was deemed "too dark", was written instead as a film spec script. Fifteen years since Kuffs, Evans said that, with Mr. Brooks, directing again "was kind of like riding a bicycle".