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Features
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Giving Up the Ghost
Writer-director Mark Steven Johnson and actress Eva Mendes offer a sneak preview of Ghost Rider, next summer’s good vs. evil battle pitting Nicolas Cage against Peter Fonda.
Monday, August 8, 2005
By Christina Radish
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Albert Ortega/Wireimage.com
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Johnson at Comic-Con
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In an attempt to differentiate the action thriller Ghost Rider from all the other comic book movies out there, writer-director Mark Steven Johnson has opted to take it out of New York and set it in Texas to give it more of a western feel. Albeit by way of Australia, where the film recently wrapped.
“It’s an unnamed town, and it feels very much like Once Upon a Time in the West meets a Hammer film,” he declares during a recent interview with FilmStew at Comic-Con 2005, where he was promoting next summer’s Sony epic. “It doesn’t look like anything else. A lot of the movie really looks like a painting, but it’s got a huge western vibe to it.”
Starring Nicolas Cage as Johnny Blaze, a motorcycle stuntman who sells his soul to the devil, Johnson was eager to bring his favorite aspects of both the original and the Danny Ketch versions of the comic, together for his vision. “The cool thing is that you get the best of both worlds,” says Johnson. “I thought the Danny Ketch version had better villains than we did. Some of the stories were really excellent too, especially the ones with the Marvel Scarecrow.”
“What’s nice is that we got to cherry pick the best from both,” he adds. “It gives you less pressure because it’s not out now. I know they’re going to bring it back, but there’s not a Frank Miller around that you have to be beholden to, which is nice. It freed me up a bit.”
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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The sultry Mendes
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Ghost Rider went through several rewrites by David S. Goyer before Johnson came on board, but the Daredevil director reveals his script is much closer to the comic. “We set it up so that the deal with the devil is made when Johnny’s a young boy,” Johnson explains. “Johnny and his girlfriend, Roxanne, split up because he has to leave her behind. He can’t risk putting her in danger. But, they meet up again, years later in life.”
With his pact, Blaze agrees to become the host of a “spirit of vengeance” that takes its form at night, as a demon with a flaming skull, on the motorcycle of hellfire. The goal with the script was to simplify what Johnson felt was, at times, a very convoluted story.
“We just made it real simple,” he insists. “There’s Heaven and there’s Hell, and there’s our world, and every once in awhile, something gets out of Hell that’s not supposed to be here, and that’s when you call upon the Ghost Rider. He works for the devil as a bounty hunter.”
“The idea is that there’s always been a Ghost Rider,” he continues. “He used to be on horseback, back in the day, and now he’s a motorcycle rider. The concept is that you find the best rider, and you make him go and track down these demons for you.”
The form of the devil that Johnson makes use of in the film is Mephisto, played by Peter Fonda. But the writer-director admits he had to makes some changes when it came to the cinematic look of this fearsome character.
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Michael Caufield/Wireimage.com
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Cage at last summer's CineVegas
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“It’s pretty tough to pull off Mephisto from the comic because he’s bright red with a big cape and big horns,” he says. “Our demons, and also our devil, have a certain look that they wear when they’re here, but there’s something underneath. You get ripples of it. When they get angry, you’ll see it.”
“And then, later in the movie, we’re going to reveal what they really look like,” adds Johnson. “It probably won’t be that close to the comic book Mephisto because that’s a tough one to pull off on film. But, it will be really, really horrific.”
Playing Roxanne, the love of Johnny Blaze’s life, is 31-year-old Cuban-American beauty Eva Mendes. Although working with Fonda was a dream come true, she confesses she had never seen him in his most famous film, Easy Rider.
“One day, we were hanging out on set, and I was just like, ‘Yeah, I’m so sorry, I’ve never seen Easy Rider,’” she recalls. “I thought he was going to hit me or something, but he was like, ‘You’ve never seen it? Why don’t we have an Easy Rider party at Mark’s place, and I’ll narrate the film for you guys?’ So, we sat there and he narrated.”
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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Dancing with the devil
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Johnson has equally high praise for the 65-year-old veteran actor and his ability to take on such a difficult role. “Fonda is great; I went through and looked at all the movies where someone has played the devil, and it’s a tough one,” he suggests. “No one has done it great. Most people go really big with it. They’re always very comedic, and I didn’t want to do that.”
“I wanted to play it really subtle,” he observes. “You have to differentiate your devil, and ours is Mephistopheles, which means he’s the deal maker. Rather than just be like a fire and brimstone devil, he’s a easy salesman. He’s trying to get you to sell your soul, so he’s got to be the ultimate salesman. He’s not the guy calling attention to himself. You think, ‘Well, he’s not that bad,’ and then you realize what you’re in for, and just how horrible it is.”
Although Ghost Rider is intended as straight drama, Johnson says it’s hard to keep out some of the humor when working with someone like Cage, who is such a big fan of the comic that he has had a Ghost Rider tattoo on his arm for years. “I didn’t want it to be too jokey, but Nic’s real funny, so automatically, there’s a lot of humor in the movie,” he says. “It’s really horrific because, when Ghost Rider changes, you’re used to seeing it in a comic panel.”
“When you really see somebody’s flesh blown off of his face and coming off of his skull, it’s really intense,” he maintains. “We just wrapped a few weeks ago and I’ve only seen test footage, but even the test footage is intense, so you have to balance that with some humor.”
Similarly, in the comic, Mendes’ character of Roxanne is quite different from the actress herself, who is grateful to Johnson for his willingness to cast against type. “She was this very hot, voluptuous blonde that was a little victimy for my taste,” says Mendes. “She cried a lot. And, what I want to thank Mark for is taking a chance and thinking outside the box because, obviously, I’m not blonde and I don’t look like the original comic book Roxanne.”
“Now she’s darker,” she continues, laughing. “She’s a little more exotic, and just stronger. She’s really, really crazy in love with this man, and is willing to stand behind him and beside him, through thick and thin, while still having a life of her own, and being an independent career woman.”
| As for the final look and effects of the film - including how Blaze can manipulate fire, what his voice will sound like as Ghost Rider and, most importantly, what the penance stare will look like - Johnson is still hard at work on all of those aspects. “The toughest thing in the whole movie is the penance stare,” he reveals. “The penance stare is when Ghost Rider says, ‘Look into my eyes,’ and they can look at all the sins that they’ve done to other people, and he makes them relive those sins, tenfold.”
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“Ghost Rider doesn’t kill, but it’s supposed to be a fate worse than death because you’re trapped looking at all the sh*t you’ve done to everybody else,” adds Johnson. “I don’t want to do the little vignettes, where you use quick little pieces of people’s sins, because we’ve seen that before. How to do that without becoming a little mini-movie is the challenge.”
Even though his experience of making Daredevil with 20th Century Fox was less than perfect, Johnson says that Sony has been so supportive that he would gladly take on another Marvel character, if the opportunity arises. “There are so many great ones. I love Preacher, but I don’t know how you’d do Preacher. I think it would be a great HBO series. That’s the best way to tell that story. I also love the Surfer, and the Hulk. I love all of them. I think a lot of them are going to come back and get re-imagined.”
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