From SciFi Wire:
Johnson Faithful To Ghost Rider
Mark Steven Johnson, director of the upcoming Marvel Comics adaptation Ghost Rider, told SCI FI Wire that he made changes to the original script by David S. Goyer to make the film more like the comic. “Its one of those things that there is no right or wrong to it,” Johnson said in an interview on the set in Melbourne, Australia. “He just chose a different story, and I really liked it. It just isn’t the story that I was going to tell. So they’re really completely different screenplays. I really like David’s writing a lot, though. [I’m a] big fan of him.”
Ghost Rider is the story of Johnny Blaze (played by Nicolas Cage), a motorcycle stunt rider who made a deal with the devil in his youth and is now forced to do his bidding. Johnson said that he wanted to stay as true to the comic as possible, a difficult task given that the mythology changed often during the course of the series. Johnson, whose last film, Daredevil, was also based on a Marvel Comics character, combined elements from different eras of the comic to create an original story that retained the feel of the comic.
“The fact that the devil made a deal with Johnny and gave him all these powers, and Johnny took those powers to go fight the devil, never quite added up,” Johnson said. “And so everybody over the years kept trying to solve that and change that. So it’s kind of actually a faulty concept in a weird way. So that was odd. That’s something that took me many, many months to finally crack it. And once I came up with the idea of the devil’s bounty hunter, that there’s rules in heaven and hell on Earth, [it made sense]. The idea is that Mephistopheles has to find the best rider in the world to become his Ghost Rider, that made sense to me. He has to give him this power, because he works for him. Then I got it. Then everything from there flowed. But at first it was tough.” Ghost Rider is scheduled for release in August of 2006. ”
So…he completely changed the story of Ghost Rider to make him “the devil’s bounty hunter,” something that never happened in the comics, and this in an efforts to…make the script more like the comics.
Huh?
Postscript: Actually it just hit me: This version turns GR into an exact rip-off of the Silver Surfer!
