JOHNNY Blaze sells his soul to the Devil in the first movie. In the sequel, things get darker. But how do you make the story of a man who hunts souls for the Devil even darker? Well, you make him even more badass.

In 2007’s Marvel comics-based Ghost Rider, Nicolas Cage played stuntman Johnny Blaze whose skull and motorcycle go up in flames whenever he’s on the hunt. In Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance, Johnny comes back meaner than before – everything from his attitude, to the blazing skull, to his jacket even, is edgier, say directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (the team that did high octane action flicks Crank in 2006 and Gamer in 2009).

According to an interview, the directors were very much inspired by the work done by award-winning comics writer Garth Ennis on several mini arcs in the Ghost Rider universe. So they threw out everything from the first movie, except for Cage, and started with a clean slate on Spirit Of Vengeance.

In production notes provided by Warner Bros, the directors said “We wanted to change everything – the way he looks, the way he dresses, the bike. We wanted souls to be burned and dragged to hell. And lucky for us, the studio said, ‘That’s great; that’s what we were hoping you’d say.’ And that became the start of our process. What we were really going for is a mood, a feeling, an aesthetic – to make him badass.”

To add to the edgier tone, the directors wanted to make action sequences as real as possible, using stuntmen and real motorcyle action rather than depending on CGI effects. Well, they didn’t actually set the stunt rider’s head on fire! That was added later.

But the story’s the thing, as they say, and Neveldine and Taylor made sure a relatable story is the movie’s driving force and not the action sequences.

Spirit Of Vengeance picks up a year after Ghost Rider, with Johnny wanting nothing to do with his old life. So he takes himself out of the equation by going into hiding somewhere in Eastern Europe with the hope of trying to find his soul. But trouble soon seeks him out in the form of a monk (played by Idris Elba) who wants him to protect a child that the Devil is paying special attention to.

For Cage, Spirit of Vengeance was “like starting from scratch in many ways. It’s a whole new John Blaze – by now he’s been living for a while with the Rider.

“In the original film he was always trying to calm down – by avoiding alcohol, listening to Karen Carpenter ... stuff that wouldn’t make his head ignite. It’s now years later; his head has ignited and he has to live with that. So it’s an entirely different Johnny hiding out in Romania.”

Approaching the character as two people – “the Ghost Rider is not Johnny Blaze” – Neveldine and Taylor could go in different directions while making one film. One part of the character is a man with no soul and the other is a demon who is back from hell. Cage had the challenge of imagining what it would be like for this demon to walk and move when he’s in a human-like form.

Cage explained: “Brian and I thought that he was like an ancient pharaoh; he has a regal quality about him, and he’s not something you can relate to. And I also thought about animals that I could draw on; I had two pet cobras at one time in my life, and I remember watching them move and what they would do when they turned their back to me.

“If you look at the back of a cobra, there’s a pattern on it that almost looks like an occult eye. They would start dancing and then turn and just lunge and bare their fangs. That became a motif for Spirit Of Vengeance, that sort of hypnotic movement to try to put you to sleep, and then attack.

“Those were some of the little ways of trying to create an entity that would be unlike anything you’d seen before, that would, hopefully, scare and entertain you at the same time.” – Mumtaj Begum

  Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance sets cinemas on fire nationwide from Friday onwards.