Mark
Steven Johnson loves comic books, and I mean LOVES comic books. He
has an almost childlike excitement for them. Talking to him you
begin to understand the man and why he works the way he does.
He was very open about the troubles that plagued DAREDEVIL.
But I think this time, he may have a winner. This dude loves the
Ghost Rider comics which he calls flawed, but he feels that is one
of the things that made it special.
He
also talked about some upcoming projects including PREACHER, which
if all goes well, will be seen on HBO as a series. Mr. Johnson was
open and honest and truly seemed proud of what he had done with the
adventures of Johnny Blaze. It
seems that the changes he made might just work. I look forward to
not only seeing the completed GHOST
RIDER, but to the other projects Mark has coming up. It was
also exciting to hear the idea of PREACHER becoming a reality with
guest directors such as Kevin Smith, another comic book dude.
Mark
Steven Johnson
You
obviously had enough time to do everything that you wanted to do on
this film production wise, right?
To
do everything that I wanted? Well, close. I mean, there’s never
everything that you want. You always want more. That’s just the
nature of the beast. It’s tough because you can’t shoot it like a
normal movie and every time there is a close-up of Ghost Rider it’s
going to cost $50k and if it’s a wide shot its $100k. So you can’t
cover it the way you normally would and you always want more
coverage than you have. So it’s not like a normal movie. Your hero
is a special effect, and that’s the tough part for me. You always
want to have more than you can have, but it’s at what cost because
it’s a very expensive character. That’s why it has been so tough to
pull off.
Can
you talk about the genesis of you coming onboard because I know that
at one point [Steve] Norrington and [David] Goyer were involved? Did
you ever take a look at what Norrington had done with it?
Of
course. Sure.
Did
anything carry over?
Yeah,
there are a couple of scenes there. There is the scene in the prison
cell where everyone jumps on him and beating on him and he turns
into Ghost Rider and explodes and burns his way through the bars.
You saw a little bit of that in the trailer and that’s from Steve
Norrington, or I should say David because David wrote that. I really
liked that a lot and I loved David’s script. I thought it was great.
It was a different script. That’s also the nature of the beast that
when you come onto a movie you want to make your own version of the
movie.
Goyer’s
was a very dark, very hard R which is cool, but its one of those
things where it’s my deal with the devil, if you will – when you
want to make a GHOST RIDER movie it’s expensive. It’s not like you
make like THE CROW or BLADE or something. It’s like what I was just
saying to you. It’s so expensive that it’s like, ‘If you’re going to
give me all the money to make this movie right I have to be
responsible and try to get everyone I can to come and see the film.’
You can’t make it a cult film. You have to make it a big film which
it should be.
Are
you trying to go PG-13?
We
are PG-13, yeah, which I was actually really happy and surprised
about because I was expecting to have to cut stuff out so it
wouldn’t be an R. DAREDEVIL was an R and I had to cut things out to
make it a PG-13 and this is just like, there is so much stuff in it
that I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re dead.’ But we made it which is
amazing. You know what’s funny is that what made DAREDEVIL an R is
there was this scene where Bullseye kills Elektra, he gutted her –
that was okay. He kissed her afterwards and then he threw her down.
The kiss gave us an R. Isn’t that weird? Its okay to kill a girl,
but you just can’t kiss her afterwards because somehow that’s
repulsive. I don’t know.
So
the cut that you have right now is everything that you want from the
studio?
Sony
gets it. Sony has had so much success with SPIDER-MAN that they
understand Marvel and they appreciate it and get it. So, again, it’s
not SPIDER-MAN or it’s not X-MEN or it’s not FANTASTIC FOUR. It’s a
very unknown character to most people, Ghost Rider, and so for them
to give you the money to do it right says a lot for Sony. So it was
great that they believe in it and they were willing to take that
gamble and have supported it. They’ve been great.
Because
it’s an unknown character does that give you more leeway and
freedom?
It
does because, and again, I’m the biggest fan of this comic book in
the world, but it’s not a perfect comic either. I can’t lie to
anyone and the fans of the comic know this too. It’s not like
SPIDER-MAN where you look at it and you go, ‘God, this is perfect.’
There are so many great stories and it has so many great villains.
GHOST RIDER has some great stories and an amazing look which is what
attracted me to it, but it’s also very flawed in some ways. The
origin of it has been very mixed up and they keep trying to change
it and update it and it got more and more confusing until no one
knew what to make of it.
So
my goal coming into it was like, ‘Okay, I have to pay tribute to the
character and the origin, but I also have to streamline things. I
have to make things simple so that people can understand what the
hell is going on.’ That’s what turned so many people off to the
comic. You start reading it and then go sign onto Wikipedia or
whatever and start reading the back story and you go, ‘I can’t
follow this.’ It’s too much. The bottom line is that all you need to
know is that Mephistopheles comes from Faust, right? He’s a specific
kind of devil. He’s not the devil. He’s a devil who makes you sign a
contract in blood and if you want something you go to him and he
makes the deal and then he owns your soul. So my idea was like,
‘Wait a minute. Okay.’ Why did Mephisto give the Ghost Rider all
this power and then the Ghost Rider uses it against him and makes
the devil look like a fool?
He
makes the devil look like a dupe. So my idea was always just like
let’s make it real clear. He goes to the best rider in the world.
In the old days it was on horseback and today it’s on motorcycles or
a car or whatever, and he goes to them and looks for the best rider
and says, ‘You will be my bounty hunter. If something gets out of
hell and doesn’t belong here I’m going to send you after it to bring
it back’, very simple. There is heaven. There is hell. There is our
world. If something gets out of hell the devils job is, ‘He doesn’t
belong here. Come back. We have to keep the balance.’ That’s the
deal to the end of time and that’s biblical, right?
So,
the deal is that he goes to Johnny and makes this deal as a kid to
save his dad from cancer and screws him over like the devil always
does, and so Johnny grows up to become the Ghost Rider and becomes
the devil’s bounty hunter; and that to me made sense. So for the
first time for me it was really clear. It’s funny because when Steve
Norrington was attached to the older version, it was very sweet
since I’d never met him, but he sent me an email one day and said,
‘I really dug DAREDEVIL, I really liked it.’ And he said, ‘I’m
really happy you’re doing GHOST RIDER. I just want you to know
that I tried to make it for years and I couldn’t. Good luck.’
So
I called him up and said, ‘Do you want to go have a beer and talk
and just trade war stories, DAREDEVIL vs. LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY
GENTLEMEN which turned into several beers and many hours later. He
was wonderful. He was like, ‘What is it?’ I told him and he goes,
‘F*ck, you solved it. That’s it.’ Ghost Rider is the devil’s bounty
hunter. It makes so much sense because it’s so clear. ‘I’m going to
give you all this power to work for me, to do this job.’ Johnny’s
heroic thing is that the devil says to him in our movie – every
once in a while something gets out of hell, but in our movie it’s
the son of the devil which has never happened – ‘Find my son.
Bring him back to me. Destroy him and I’ll give you your soul back.’
What
made you decide to shoot in Victoria and how did the shoot go?
In
Australia? Yeah. We started scouting Texas where the movie is set
and everywhere else, and to be honest with you it first was for
monetary reasons. It was cheaper to go to Australia and I thought,
‘No, it has to be here.’ Then I went to Australia and everyone goes
to Sydney which is beautiful, but I went to Melbourne and I just
fell in love. It’s this gorgeous place, one of the greatest cities
in the world and it looks like so many different cities. It was so
beautiful and the people were so cool, and the whole movie became a
love affair with Melbourne. It’s the best.
How
do you want audiences to see this movie? Do you want them coming in
with the comic book knowledge?
You
can’t because it’s too small. As much as I love them and I’m one of
them we’re a very small percentage. You have to go beyond that
otherwise you’re making it for too small of an audience. So, again,
you want to come back to the basic tenants of what the movie is
about – what would you do for love? That’s what the movie is
about. Would you sell your soul for love? Would you ride through
hell for love? What would you do? That’s what the movie is truly
about and once you do that with it, everyone can relate to it.
You
see it in the poster. It’s not the Ghost Rider on the Hell Cycle.
It’s Nick [Cage] and Eva [Mendes] faces and the Ghost Rider is this
big [showing how small he is]. There is a reason for that. The Ghost
Rider is important obviously since the movie is called GHOST RIDER,
but you want to know that it’s about these two people. It’s about
love. It’s about Johnny making a deal for the love of his father and
then he continues to fight because of the love he has for his girl.
That’s what the movie is about.
Nick
is something of a nerd for the comic, isn’t he?
A
nerd? Yeah, he loves it.
Was
it a big surprise to have a big star who loved the comic book as
well?
Yeah,
but that’s really common. A lot of the actors like me grew up with
it. So it’s a big thing in America. You grow up with comic books.
You learn to read with comic books. It’s pictures and words which is
the perfect thing. You go from storybooks to comic books, and Nick
was involved before I was involved. So it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, who’s
going to be Ghost Rider.’ It was, ‘Nick is Ghost Rider and I hope
that he likes my take on it.’ So I came into it that way.
Did
you have Nick in mind the whole time while writing the script?
Absolutely;
I mean, you write the best Johnny Blaze that you can and to be
honest, it’s funny because you have all your weaknesses as a writer
and your strengths as a writer and I remember writing Johnny Blaze
for the first time and he was drinking Jack Daniels out of the
bottle and chain smoking. I remember giving Nick the first draft and
he was really honest about it. He was like, ‘I don’t know anyone who
drinks Jack Daniels out of a bottle.’ I thought, ‘I don’t either,
but they’re always [doing that] in the movies. Who does that?’ No
one does that. He was like, ‘I don’t chain smoke.’
So
then you start talking to Nick and he brings something different to
it. Then Nick starts saying really far out things, and they’re so
far out there that they’re honest. I mean, it’s like when Johnny
Depp in PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, does this sort of gay, drunk Keith
Richards and the studio freaked out were like, ‘What are you
doing?!’ He was just doing something different, but there was
something in that character that made it honest. Nick did the same
thing. He was just like, ‘I feel like if you didn’t know that any
minute you were going to turn into the Ghost Rider, what would that
be like?’ Nick said, ‘I think that it would be like I’m in a dentist
chair and that musak is playing and at any minute you’re going to go
and it’s going to be painful and horrible. So you’re going to try
and calm yourself and keep yourself safe because at any minute
you’re going to change.’ I thought that was really smart and
interesting and different. Nick always brings that.
What
did you learn from DAREDEVIL that you applied to GHOST RIDER? Did
you ever go back and look at what the fans didn’t like about
DAREDEVIL to make sure that you got it right here?
Well,
it’s night and day to be quite honest with you. With DAREDEVIL, I
really owe Fox because I know that I’ve slammed them in the past
which isn’t fair because it was a very tough shoot and I had to
fight for everything, as I’ve said in the past, on that movie. They
didn’t want a costume. They didn’t want horns. They didn’t want
anything. So everything in that movie was a fight which is very
difficult. There are things in the movie that I’m very proud of and
then things that didn’t work. It was a very, very difficult shoot.
This
movie is even bigger. It’s a much bigger movie. A bigger star, a
bigger everything, but they got it at the studio which made it much
easier for me. So, as far as what I learned, it was so much. I went
from directing only one small movie to suddenly directing a $75
million movie and now I’m doing a $100 million plus movie, but I
knew about visual FX. I knew about action. I knew about so much more
than I did back then. So, the answer is that even though it was a
bigger movie, it was much easier this time.
So
there was never a sort of JUDGE DREDD moment where they said, ‘We
love the film, but we can’t have it like this?’
No,
no, and I wouldn’t have done that again, to be honest with you,
because I’ve already been through that. Last time it was like, ‘We
love DAREDEVIL, but we don’t want to do horns and a costume. It’s
silly.’ It was like, ‘But that’s it. That’s the character.’ That’s
the hard part. Fans get angry and are like, ‘He’s in a leather
costume. That’s not what the comic is.’ You want to say, ‘Look, I
love you guys, but you don’t understand. There was no costume! I
fought just to get a costume and just to have the horns and the
double D. That was months of fighting.’
Again
though, no one is the bad guy here. They gave me a big shot and they
were very supportive in the end, but these movies are difficult.
They’re very hard. Sony is very supportive. They really get it and
Marvel; of course Marvel is your biggest heroes. Again, they had so
much success with SPIDER-MAN, they trusted that there’s a reason
that these characters stick around. I mean, it’s not like – again,
the other characters have amazing storylines, amazing villains and
they’ve been around for years. SPIDER-MAN is like the rogue’s
gallery. Take your pick. There are so many great people to pick
from. GHOST RIDER doesn’t have that.
You
say, ‘Who’s the greatest GHOST RIDER villain?’ People go, ‘What?’
GHOST RIDER has existed solely because of the image of the flaming
skull and the Harley. There is just something about it that’s a very
visual image that sticks in your head. People get it for tattoos.
They put it on their motorcycles and has been around forever because
of that image. So that tells me that it’s going to translate to film
better than most.
Did
this sort of prep you for doing THE PREACHER because that’s the
whole heaven and hell thing, right?
Well,
THE PREACHER is something that I’ve always wanted to do. It is the
greatest, but it is so difficult, and I love it more than anyone
does. I remember reading a script a while ago that was going to go
to film and I was like, ‘How do you make a two hour movie of THE
PREACHER? You can’t do it.’ So when I went into HBO I said very
simply, ‘Here is the comic. There are seventy something issues here,
seventy-five issues plus the four issues of killers.’ I said, ‘Every
issue is an hour.’ It’s a six year show and HBO, God bless them,
went, ‘Cool.’
So
are you staying really loyal to the whole storyline?
Not
loyal. Exact. So it’s like we had our first meeting the other day. I
keep waiting for them to go, ‘We’re not doing this!’… But they
were like, ‘God bless.’ I was like, ‘F*cking HBO has balls.’ They
were like, ‘Bring it. Do it.’ It’s just like DAREDEVIL, it’s just
like GHOST RIDER, no one comes to your door and rings the doorbell
and goes, ‘Hey, you wanna do these movies?’ I’m the last guy, but
I’m the guy who gets it done because I care and I do it. So people
have tried to make DAREDEVIL and they’ve tried to make GHOST RIDER
and it hasn’t happened, but I got them made.
DAREDEVIL
was with mixed results and GHOST RIDER, I hope much better and
PREACHER, I hope to be exact. In fact, today I emailed Kevin Smith
and I said, ‘Dude, I just got Preacher. You know you love it. If it
goes would you please direct an episode?’ I want to go to Kevin. I
want to go to Robert Rodriguez and do guest directors. I think that
would be really cool. I want it to be a prestige thing. ‘You love
Preacher? Come do a show.’ Usually it’s a guest actor. I want it to
be a guest director. I want to keep the spirit of it, keep the vibe
of it, but also know that there’ll be a different imprint every time
when it comes to directing the show. My job is to help write the
shows. I’m working with Garth [Ennis] everyday. He’s a big part of
it to make sure that it’s exactly what we want and then let the
director put his imprint on it, but it’s got to be a book.
How
involved would Garth be if the series takes off?
If
he wants to be, absolutely; my first meeting was yesterday, and
Garth was in New York, but he was on the speaker phone. Like all
meetings, there were twenty people there and one person on the
speaker phone and everyone was going like this to the speaker phone
[bending down into the “speaker phone”]. I’ve never met Garth
and it was so great to talk to him and ask him questions, which is
what always happens with the creators. They’re like, ‘Dude, don’t be
beholden to the source material.
I
just did that because of A, B, or C.’ He was like, ‘Do whatever you
want.’ I was like, ‘No, no, no. It has to be exactly that.’ So he’s
the one who is going, ‘Use your own thing.’ But I said to him also,
‘Are there any stories that you wanted to tell, but you weren’t able
to? Was there something that you wanted to do, but you didn’t have
time? I want to hear that too.’ We want to fill it out and we want
to make it, like I said, a six year show or above with a definite
ending, ending the way it does which is incredibly controversial.
Again, no one would have the balls to do this, but HBO.
Do
you think it’d be harder or easier to do it exactly as it is whereas
with GHOST RIDER you could play with it and open it up a little bit
and pick and choose?
Right,
GHOST RIDER for years came in and out of circulation for years for a
reason. It had flaws. Again, the image was great. The idea was great
and so my goal was to find out what made the strengths were and then
what could I bring to it. Like I said, the bounty hunter thing was
my idea and I think it’s a good idea. It helps the whole thing to be
stronger, and the creators and the comic people said, ‘Yeah, great.
We want to do that.’ ‘The Preacher’ doesn’t need that. ‘The
Preacher’ is perfect in my opinion. All the things that made people
go, ‘Nah, it’s not for me.’ made me go, ‘Yeah.’ That’s what I’m so
excited about.
You’ve
dabbled with Marvel and you’re dabbling with Vertigo. Are you going
to dabble with anything like a Dark Horse product like GRENDEL
or THE GOON, any other comic book character that you want to tackle?
There
are so many good ones out there. For a long time I really believed,
and even though I’m not attached to it, I’ll say it if it helps set
it up, that MIDNIGHT NATION was a really cool story. Joe is such a
great author and he and I tried to set that up for a minute. Nothing
happened with it, but people should read MIDNIGHT NATION. I think
that would be a great series. Again, it’s a journey. It’s like
Stephen King’s THE STAND. It’s just like, ‘I’m in. I want to see
what happens to these people.’ It’s like LOST or anything else. But
there are many things. Right now my focus is on getting this out and
doing THE PREACHER right.
Did
GHOST RIDER wind up being a higher stress level than you expected,
making a movie with a flaming skull? The fire is tough to do with
CG.
Well,
I’ve seen CG fire before and yes; I thought that it would be easier.
We all did, which is why we come out February 16th, but
we were supposed to come out in August. Literally, there will be FX
delivered up until the end of January 30th because we had
to write new programs. Fire is f*cking tricky, man. Look at that
fire which looks cool and then you move it and you put it on film at
twenty four frames per second it changes everything. It all of a
sudden looks really flickery and light and not strong, and so you
add liquid to it to make it feel stronger and smoother and whatnot,
but then it’s like Ghost Rider, [it] goes that way and the fire
stays here which it really would as a sort of ghost image.
We
didn’t want that because it looked weird. Fire has to be a Ghost
Rider. He commands the fire. The fire doesn’t command him. All of
these little things become like your life, and so it’s really about
– like I’ve always said – looking at the greatest CG creations,
which is Gollum, I think. It’s probably like Gollum or the last
PIRATES, Davy Jones was genius. It’s amazing, right? Those things
are great because you have expression. You have eyes. Gollum’s eyes
are huge and you’ve got lines in the eyes and the lips and the teeth
are like this.
We
didn’t have any of that. We had no expression. So you’ve got a skull
that’s got no eyes, no lips, no tongue, it’s got no wrinkles. All
you’ve got is this fucking skull. So you have to deal with that, and
then my idea was to use the fire to give it expression. Once you do
that that’s a whole new thing now and the fire has to change colors.
It’s got to get smaller when he’s sad and go blue. Then angry goes
white hot and it gets super high and that became a whole other
thing.
How
much of that is Nick, all of the Ghost Rider? How much is a hundred
percent CGI?
Every
time you see the Ghost Rider it’s all CGI, but a lot of the times
Nick is doing all the expressions and all of that. So it’s his body
language. It’s his movement. It’s his talking and everything else.
What it would be basically is that Nick, or Eddie, his stunt double,
depending on the scene and how violent it was, they’d wear a green
neoprene skin diver head with an interactive lighting collar to give
the interactive light for the flames. So they do that and we remove
the head and put the skull on, put the flame on and then its like,
‘How much flame do you put in the eyes so that it’s not cartoony?’
But you do want to put light in the eyes so that it doesn’t go
entirely black. Black just disappears.
And
the transformation, is that all CG as well?
It’s
just Nick with putting the CG flame and skull there. Yeah. That’s
one of the things that I thought would give us the R.
Is
the skull based on Nick’s own head?
Yeah,
it’s Nick’s skull. It’s weird, isn’t it?
You
make it a painful transformation like in AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN
LONDON…
That’s
exactly what we were going for even with the tone of the movie. It’s
that. That’s right. I always like those scenes that aren’t movie
scenes like when a girl is walking out and all the cops are like,
‘Fire! There’s a girl right there.’ But I love that. It’s movie
logic.
I
love the nod to the western Ghost Rider. How much of a role does he
play in the film?
He
plays a significant role. A lot of people think that shot that you
saw is the end of the movie, but it’s not. It’s actually the kick
off of the second act. It’s the handing off of the baton. The old
Ghost Rider is saying, ‘Now it’s your turn. Go fight him. The end of
the world, everything is on your shoulders.’ The difference between
Nick as the Ghost Rider and other Ghost Riders is that he didn’t
sell his soul for greed, for riches or for fame or anything else. He
sold it for love and that makes him different.
Can
you talk about casting Sam Elliott and Peter Fonda in this?
Yeah.
Well, Sam Elliott is the man. You talk about big stars or whatever,
we’d be in Australia and if you walk around with Sam Elliott people
just smile. They’ll come over to us, and if it’s a guy Sam goes,
‘Watch. ROAD HOUSE.’, ‘Dude, ROAD HOUSE! I love you in it!’ If
it’s a girl it’ll be one of his other things. He’s like people
always remember ROAD HOUSE. What I wanted to do is create a movie
that has a distinct feel like a western. I want to do a superhero
western that’s gothic like a Hammer film meets a f*cking ONCE UPON A
TIME IN THE WEST. Sam is that. You see Sam and you’re like, ‘Okay,
I’m in.’ It’s real and it’s good. With Fonda I wanted to get the
ultimate motorcycle icon which Easy Rider, Captain America. That
makes this the first crossover film. Captain America vs. Ghost
Rider! You heard it here.
Let
me know what you think. Send questions and
comments to jimmyo@joblo.com.