EXCLUSIVE: Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance will ride into theaters February 17, 2012

Nicolas Cage returns as Johnny Blaze in Columbia Pictures' and Hyde Park Entertainment's Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. In the successor to the worldwide hit Ghost Rider, Johnny - still struggling with his curse as the devil's bounty hunter - is hiding out in a remote part of Eastern Europe when he is recruited by a secret sect of the church to save a young boy from the devil.

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Idris Elba, Ciarán Hinds, Christopher Lambert, Anthony Head, Violante Placido

Director: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor

"Getting concrete information about Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance from the team behind it is about as easy as, well, battling with a demonic motorcycle rider whose skull is on fire. So let’s start with what we do know.

Sequel or Successor?

 
Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance is the follow up to 2007’s Ghost Rider, starring Nic Cage (Face Off, Leaving Las Vegas) as the eponymous Johnny Blaze, a stunt rider who is condemned to live as the devil’s bounty hunter in the form of a flaming, motorcycle-riding skeleton after selling his soul. But donot call it is a sequel.
 
“I feel that we got up to something really interesting with the first movie and I’m very happy with [it], but it really ends there,” says Cage.
 
But, if Cage is reprising his role and Spirit of Vengeance takes place after Ghost Rider, then what is it? Well, according to director/writer Brian Taylor (who is co-directing/writing with Mark Neveldine, his longtime partner on such movies as the Crank series and Jonah Hex), Spirit of Vengeance just follows in the tradition of the Ghost Rider comics, which gave different takes on the Ghost Rider myth. And this one promises to be a much darker take than the previous film, which Taylor jokes is a “Disney version of the Faust story.”

For the story, Taylor and Neveldine mostly went out on their own, creating entirely new characters (like the alcoholic priest Moreau, played by Idris Elba)—although they do say they took some inspiration from the darker Garth Ennis/Clayton Crain series of Ghost Ridercomics. “We’re picking up this character five or six years later, and he’s in a much different place. He’s a much different guy—he’s in Europe, it’s a different bike,” explains Taylor.

“The physical transformation that happens to him has progressed where he doesn’t look the same, the skull looks different, everything looks different….Think of it like an illness and it’s progressed, and this is the final stages of that illness.”

 
The main plot of Spirit of Vengeance centers around the battle between Johnny Blaze and the Devil (aka Roarke) played by Ciarán Hinds (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II, Rome), who wants to transfer his soul into the body of a young boy named Danny (Fergus Riordan). “It’s a race against time to see if [Roarke] can transport his dark soul into the child that he himself has created as his perfect ‘time capsule’ to be continually on Earth,” Hinds explains.
 
Johnny, who has been hiding out in Eastern Europe, teams up with Moreau and Danny’s devoted but far-from-perfect mother Nadya (Violante Placido) on the quest to save him – with the promise that in so doing Moreau may be able to lift his Ghost Rider curse forever.

Location, Location, Location

The movie, which was shot in 2D, but will be converted to 3D in post-production, was filmed on location in Turkey and Romania--an experience the cast agrees informed their performances. We spoke to Cage and the rest of the cast and crew at the Castel Film Studios, just outside of Bucharest, on a cold, gray February day. “The location is definitely a character in the movie,” says Cage, who took a foray to the Hoia Baciu Forest, a part of Transylvania that is supposed to be haunted with aliens/ghosts/anything else that could haunt you in Transylvania.
 
“I asked someone… ‘Is this place haunted?’ Cage says in the dim light of a Romanian soundstage. “He looked at me and paused for about four minutes just staring at me and he said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘In what way?’ He said, ‘Have you seen the people who levitate with no legs?’”
 
It was easy to see how shooting in Eastern Europe could seize the imagination. The sets built inside the soundstage were entirely enclosed, so once inside it felt like being transported to a subterranean world—where the combination of rudimentary cave walls and a modern array of weaponry made total sense. Elsewhere on the lot, extras in battle gear shot their part of a fight scene under the starry winter skies.

And of Course, the Stunts

 
Neveldine and Taylor, known for their high-octane shooting style, feel very strongly about using as many real-world locations as possible. “We like real places even if they’re repurposed locations,” says Taylor. That includes sending actors zooming around on the film’s ubiquitous motorcycles down Romanian roadways, where they were often allowed to do their own stunts. “The title character is a CG guy in the last movie,” says Taylor. “It was played by stunt guys. So the big thing we wanted coming in before anything else was the Ghost Rider needs to be played by Nicolas Cage, always, all the time.”

 
Cage says his stunts were made easier by his bike. In Ghost Rider, Cage drove a raked front-end chopper, which didn’t always perform under the pressure of 400 sets of eyes watching him during filming. But he has nothing but praise for the Yamaha he rode during Spirit of Vengeance. “Maybe it’s because the company makes musical instruments, but it’s like this artistic relationship, man and motorcycle, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to get that bike to do what I want it to do while filming.”

 
Even Hinds was gearing up for some stunt shooting when we talked to him. He was going to be in a harness and he wasn’t looking forward to it. “It’s gonna hurt, you know?” he laughed. “People are gonna pull you on wires, and when you reach a certain age, you’re like, ‘Oh, don’t do that! Agh!’ And then they do it again…They have to get the shot!”

 
But this should come as no surprise, given the directors’ reputations—particularly Neveldine, who is known for shooting on rollerblades. “He’s literally 40% stuntman,” explains Cage. “He’s routinely risking his life to get these extraordinary, high-adrenaline shots.”

 
The result, Cage promises, is a “really trippy, mess-with-your-mind, freaked out, high-adrenaline, wild energy” take on the Ghost Rider story. Fasten those seatbelts, it’s gonna be a helluva ride."

By: Heather Huntington
Fandango Film Commentator

info source:www.fandango.com, photos source: facebook.com/ghostridermovie