While this year’s Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance panel offered some crazy footage and a few revealing tidbits from the energetic directing duo Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, it was nothing like my rapid fire chat with the duo moments beforehand.

The two rock n’ roll directors behind the madcap action flicks Crank, Gamer and Crank 2: High Voltage are a lot like their movies: high energy, sporadic and fun as hell. Our conversation about Ghost Rider 2 (which hits February 17, 2012) went everywhere—from breaking stuntmen’s bones to the ins and outs of Hell demons to Idris Elba’s unmatchable badassery to Nic Cage’s vampirism.

In short: hang on.

Are you guys New Yorkers or LA-ers?

Mark Neveldine: I’m New York, Brian’s LA.

Oh, wow! Other ends of the Earth. Then you come together, smash heads and things explode. Everything goes crazy.

Brian Taylor: Like Milli Vanilli.

Well, less fake than that, I would imagine

BT: No.

OK, just as fake as Milli Vanilli.

BT: Yeah! It’s cool!

So, how did you guys end up grabbing the reigns on the Ghost Rider franchise? Why was this the next move and what did you want to do with Ghost Rider?

MN: We were pitching this movie. And a Sony exec, Rachel O’Connor, happened to be in the room. She loved our pitch and energy, and she liked our movies, and she thought, “Hey, these guys would be great for Ghost Rider. She brought it up to us. Brian’s a huge comic book guy, and he kind of introduced me to the comic. And we just said, “Hey, this could be fun.”

BT: Mark’s a big “Guys on motorcycles, lit on fire” guy.

MN: Huge. It was a perfect match.

BT: Yeah. Of all the big comic book characters for us to do—

MN: This is the one.

BT: It’s kind of perfect. It had a lot of elements that we really like.

What are those elements?

BT: Well, Nic Cage.

Nic Cage came with the movie!

BT: That’s a big element we really like. No, we talked about it. He was on our ultimate wish list for the first Crank movie. To play Chev Chelios.

What do you love about him? I’m sure it’s similar to what we all love.

BT: Yeah, it’s exactly what everyone loves. There’s nobody like him. He has a point of view and a way of attacking a scene with his mania, and…

Where does that come from? How does he muster this energy?

BT: He brings it—

MN: He’s not afraid to be free!

BT: He’s been alive for a thousand years.

Apparently! I saw that he was a vampire.

BT: He was a vampire.

Were you aware of that on set?

BT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We saw that.

MN: We felt it.

BT: Going back to Transylvania, that was like a homecoming to him.

My God…

BT: But he was, uh…Vampire’s Kiss was actually—

MN: It was a biopic.

BT: Semi-biographical. But no, Nic is fucking crazy. And so are we, so it was a perfect pitch. We loved it.

Awesome. And so, looking back to the first movie, what did you want to change? What did you want to introduce to Ghost Rider?

BT: Everything.

Everything! Does that mean that nothing worked for you in the first movie?

MN: No, the first movie is a great Disney film for kids…our movie has nothing to do with the first movie. Other than Nic. We just said, let’s go back to the source material: the comics. Let’s go back to how dark and cool this character really is. And we just kind of went from there, you know? And I might have seen…a couple minutes of the first movie…

It’s not even important to your vision.

MN: I think it’s super important to the fans, and to the awareness of Ghost Rider the comic book character—which is fucking incredible—but as far as this movie, it’s not. This is its own beast.

And you mentioned what attracted you. It’s got bikes! It has fire! How does that play to your own style, your own interests, in filmmaking? What you were able to unleash here with the toys that come with Ghost Rider?

BT: You get toys, but at the same, we wanted to do a superhero movie where the action was mostly practically based. Based on stunts and driving, blowing stuff up for real, stuff like that. A character like Ghost Rider lets you do that. Of course, everything’s enhanced with CG. If you blow something up, you could blow it up bigger. The guy who’s riding a bike…his head is on fire, and it’s a skull now.

MN: When the stunt guy really broke his leg in a scene, he now broke his neck as well. You can do a lot of things in CG.

Wait, did that actually happen?

BT: Yes.

A guy broke his leg—

MN: Yeah. It’s in the movie.

…and you’re like, “Wait, why doesn’t he just get more broken?”

BT: Let’s just break everything! Yeah, so it was an opportunity to do a superhero movie, but have it be more like…not a safe CG movie, but more a kind of grounded, gritty, gnarly, nasty superhero movie. And the Ghost Rider, he’s a mean, nasty character. He’s not really a traditional hero. He’s not going to save your cat from a tree. He might cook your cat.

Click to read the second part of the interview!