Q&A: Ghost Rider director Mark Steven Johnson
In a Premiere.com exclusive, Johnson talks about Ghost Rider's multi-year journey from the comic to the screen.
By Stephen Saito
"What year is it?" asks Ghost Rider writer/director Mark Steven Johnson, only half kidding when recounting how long it's been since production on the Marvel Comics adaptation wrapped. (It was June 2005, by the way.) "I've had two birthdays in just post-production."
During that time, star Nicolas Cage has filmed four other movies (World Trade Center, The Wicker Man and the upcoming Next and Bangkok Dangerous) and a flurry of comic book-inspired films have flooded the marketplace. Johnson is hoping that Ghost Rider's delay — it was supposed to be released in August 2006 — hasn't extinguished the fire from the titular hero's skull.
Almost four years to the day since Johnson's first comic book adaptation Daredevil's record $43 million opening on President's Day weekend in 2003, Ghost Rider will blazes into theaters on February 16, 2007, giving the darkest character of the Marvel brand — a stunt biker by day who by night turns into a skeletal cyclist out to avenge his father's death at the hands of the devil — his widest audience ever.
"Ghost Rider doesn't put on a leotard and jump out the window," Johnson recently told a gathering of reporters. "He's not that kind of guy. It's more like a monster movie. It's a werewolf story. The moon comes out and he changes and it's painful."
PREMIERE: Ghost Rider and Daredevil are two of the least mainstream comics in the Marvel Universe. Were you an outcast among your friends growing up?
MARK STEVEN JOHNSON: What's funny is that my friends didn't read any comics. Now there's kind of like this geek chic thing going on. Back then, you were not cool. So I was not cool, reading this stuff. It was really just about me and my brother. We were just obsessed with them. It was truly how we learned to read was by reading comics.
Ghost Rider was originally going to be a TV pilot. How did it become a movie?
Because the feature rights weren't available. That's the only reason. So I was like, 'I'll make a TV pilot.' [That] would've been impossible because of the effects, but I loved it that much, I was willing to try. At the time, they were making Angel, the spinoff of Buffy [the Vampire Slayer]. And they're like, 'Aw, it's too similar.' But I made the Daredevil movie and then the rights for the [Ghost Rider] feature became available. So it was a very roundabout way.
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