Fired Up on the Ghost Rider DVD
June 20, 2007

“Nothing ever gets lost these days, when you’re shooting a movie.” So says Mark Steven Johnson, director of Ghost Rider. “The picture will have another life on DVD.”

Johnson was present at the Sony Higher Definition Preview Event at the Xchange in NYC on June 6, to discuss the Blu-ray DVD release of Rider. I spoke with him in a rather unique set-up: Sony rigged up two bucket car

seats in which the interviewer and Johnson could hang out and look at scenes from the Blu-ray version of the film on a movie-screen-sized TV.

An incredibly friendly gent, whose past work includes Simon Birch and Daredevil (and the scripts for the Grumpy Old Men films), Johnson couldn’t contain his enthusiasm for the release. “The detail on this disc makes me so happy,” he declared. “I didn’t work on the Blu-ray transfer, I let the tech people do their thing. I only checked on the color timing for the film. What is different here, though, is that so much of the visual detail couldn’t be seen when the film played in theaters. The animators spent so much time on subtle visual effects, and they just couldn’t be seen. Another problem, a big one, was that Nick Cage’s character has a light source on his head, those flames, and when the film was projected poorly, his face blew out everything else on screen.”

Johnson admits that he’s a new convert to Blu-ray technology, but he has been very careful as a director inspect every portion of his on-screen compositions. “You have to be aware of everything in terms of the compositions. When a film is seen with this much detail,” he said, indicating the large TV image we were viewing at the moment, “anything that was even vaguely in the frame will be visible.” When asked if he’s had any embarrassing items appear on camera, Johnson responded with a general answer about makeup. “You can see every pore on a person’s face with this kind of digital detail. The actresses end up suffering the most, because you see their makeup in detail, and sometimes the result is not so flattering!”--Ed Grant

Posted by Laurence Lerman on June 20, 2007 | Comments (0)