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Blaze of Glory: Nicolas Cage Finally Gets Superheroic For ‘Ghost Rider’

Oscar-winning superstar Nicolas Cage as the longtime comic book fan finally gets to fight evil in the form of his favorite childhood hero, Ghost Rider, and Hollywood.com takes you deep inside his (flaming) skull.

Hollywod.com: You’ve been a comic book fan forever – your professional name comes from the comic book hero Luke Cage, your son is named Kal-El, and you came this close to playing Superman. How much did your involvement set the tone for Ghost Rider?
Nicolas Cage: I was with the project when Steve Norrington was still attached to it and that was a much darker interpretation. David Goyer wrote that script and it was a good script, and I’m sure that Norrington would’ve done an amazing job, but I think that when [director] Mark [Steven Johnson] came onboard and he wrote this version I think that it opened up the character to a wider audience. I wanted the kids to go see the movie. So, yeah, there are some scary moments in it, but more scary like a 1950s Vincent Price B-movie, which is fun. I didn’t want them to be too scared. So, the spirit of it is that I wanted to be very playful. There’s a lot of humor in the movie. This character is absurd. He’s an absurdist character and I think that’s a good thing because that gives me a chance to bring comedy to it as well. He’s not a chain-smoking, hard-drinking bad ass. What I wanted to contribute was that Johnny was trying to keep the devil away because he really is in trouble with the devil. So if that’s the case then why bring him in. So he’s trying to deflect and stay relaxed by listening to Karen Carpenter and eating jelly beans out of a martini glass and just trying to stay calm, because he knows at any moment it can creep up on him.

HW: Marvel’s comic book characters are known for being heroes with emotional issues. Does Ghost Rider have a literal battle with his personal demons?
NC:
Yeah. That’s what is really exciting about it. In a way I could argue that the responsibility here is bigger than even the responsibility that I had with World Trade Center. You could pick or chose whether or not you could take the kids to that film, but in this case the kids are going to want to go see Ghost Rider and their minds are so impressionable. So what I wanted to make clear was that no matter how much trouble you get into you can always take a negative and turn it into a positive. That’s the spirit of Johnny Blaze. He’s a man who’s dealing with the worst kind of trouble. His soul has been abducted by the devil. I mean, that’s as big as it gets, and yet he’s figuring out a way to turn it around and turn it into something positive. I was thinking that with kids who might be going to the principal’s office and they know that they’re in a world of trouble, they can find some way to make the best out of it and do something good from it, no matter how bad it gets.

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HW: Ghost Rider also has the distinction of being both a superhero and a monster, like the Incredible Hulk. You were always drawn to those kinds of characters.
NC:
Those were my favorites. I don’t know why, but I just gravitated towards the monsters. I like the Hulk and I liked Ghost Rider the best. That’s really where I got into reading. I just thought that it was such an exciting and complicated universe. I didn’t know how something so scary could also be good. That appealed to my own complicated way of seeing things and made it unique. Even when I became a film actor I’m always gravitating towards characters that are grey. They’re not just black or white. They’re beleaguered and yet they’re trying to do something good with whatever the trouble is.

HW: Can you talk about your first experience with Ghost Rider, when you first happened on it?
NC:
Yeah. I was living in Long Beach, California and I was about seven years old and I went around the corner to the market in the neighborhood and I saw it on the stand and there was this flaming skull and it was really comfortable. It was the first one. He was on the bike and he was coming right at you. I bought it and I took it home and I remember just staring at the cover in my room by myself for like hours. My older brother was like, ‘What’s the matter with Nicolas? He’s been staring at this comic book for hours.’ I don’t know why, but I just thought that it was trippy and scary and cool. It appealed to me. I think that I identified with him because he’s a scary character and I was trying to comprehend how something scary could also be good. As a boy I grappled with nightmares and things like that. So I was trying to get control of the nightmares by maybe making friends with them. Ghost Rider was like the perfect way to do that because here was a nightmare who was also a friend.

HW: Did you stick with the character through the ’90s when the character was resurrected and given a whole new look and became more popular than the first time around?
NC:
No, I didn’t. Mark Steven Johnson did though. He was really aware of all of the different versions of the character. I was really about the ’70s character that I read as a boy. That’s what had stayed with me. I really like the iconography: the flaming skull and the leather jacket. That’s the coolest image of all. I knew that when technology got to a level where it could become visually palpable that Ghost Rider would translate really beautifully to film.

HW: Did you hold onto your original Ghost Rider comic books?
NC:
I still have them, yeah. I kept those. I framed them and have them in a certain room in my house, because I knew that this was somehow going to happen. So I want to hold onto those.

HW: You’ve been attached to any number of comic book themed projects, from Superman to Constantine. Why was Ghost Rider the one for you?
NC:
It was because it was new. It’s no secret that I’ve been trying to get involved in a comic book film for a while and for whatever reason it just kept not coming together, and in this case it did. This was the one that was meant to be. I was really excited that it was this one because this one was personal for me…so I was thrilled to be doing it. I really loved the whole [Famous] Monster magazine stuff that was out there back in the ’70s and I wanted to bring that flavor to the movie as well, where I would get really excited that I was making a monster movie. I hadn’t done that before. It was something that was funny and scary.

HW: Was there any disappointment at all that the Superman project you had planned with Tim Burton several years ago never came to life?
NC:
No, I’m not disappointed in that at all. I’m a big believer that things that are meant to be are meant to be. I don’t hold onto things. I let things go when they don’t work out, and I also believe that the right cast for a movie is the one that usually winds up in the movie. I think that the ‘Superman’ movie that came out was a good movie and a very nostalgic movie. But I’m not interested in repeating things. I was going to turn that character on its ear which maybe wouldn’t have been – it obviously wasn’t what the studio wanted, because they went with a more traditional approach. Ghost Rider for me is a better match because it gives me a chance to do a unique approach to something the way that I want to do it and to maybe introduce a character to a wider audience. There is a hardcore group of ‘Ghost Rider’ fans and I want them to be very happy, but I also want to introduce Ghost Rider to the mainstream who don’t know who the character is.

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HW: Has this quenched your desire to do a comic book movie or has it only fueled a need to do more?
NC:
I’m satisfied. I think that this was the one, and I’ve done this now. So unless there was a really great script to a sequel, I’ve probably done what I’ve wanted to do in terms of doing a comic book movie. I would come back and do another one if there was a great script attached to it.

HW: As an avid automotive enthusiast, you’re no stranger to motorcycles – How much of the cycling in the film is you?
NC:
I did a lot of it, but I didn’t do all of it. I enjoy riding. I haven’t been riding for some time though, since my youngest son has been born. I really want to try – I don’t want to be the kind of role model that inspires him to get on motorcycles. I’m looking more towards him hopefully trying sailing or something like that. But I do enjoy riding motorcycles.

HW: Was there ever a point where Mark was saying, ‘No, you can’t do that?’
NC:
No, it wasn’t like that. The only thing was that my character was most only on Grace, the chopper, and that bike isn’t really my kind of bike. I prefer more of the race bikes like Ducati or Yamaha ones. I like that whole cyborg thing where you become man and machine and the bike does exactly what you think, but Grace is a ’70s chopper. It has a front rake that is really rigid and it doesn’t corner and it’s just a point and shoot bike. That doesn’t turn me on. I want to get into corners and I want to drag my knee and do all of that.

HW: Do you still collect motorcycles?
NC:
I used to. I don’t anymore. I used to have a pretty interesting library of motorcycles. I had something called a Bacher Barracuda which came out of the Netherlands which is really unusual. I had one of those, and then some of the early café racers. I don’t have those anymore, and then I really did like the Yamaha One, believe it or not. Then I have some Harleys that I really like. They were supposed to give me [Ghost Rider’s] Hell Cycle and I was going to put it in New Orleans and I never got it—I don’t know what happened.

HW: Do you still collect comic books?
NC:
I don’t, but I still like them and I still like the idea of them, and as you know Weston and I are developing that character. I want to be more involved with the creating of them as opposed to the collecting of them.

HW: Is your son Weston comic book crazy?
NC:
He likes comics, but we all do in my family. [My uncle] Francis [Ford Coppola] likes comics. My dad liked comics. It’s American mythology.

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HW: Will there be an action figure that looks like you or will it just be the flaming skull version?
NC:
I have no idea. We’ll see. I’ll probably get freaked out in Toys R Us one day.

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