'Book of Secrets' marks Cage's 1st sequel

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 18 (UPI) -- Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage, who had never made a sequel before, said he couldn't resist signing on for the follow-up to his 2004 hit "National Treasure."

"If you're going to do a sequel, it has to promise to be better than the original, or at least as good. Largely, the fear with sequels is that people get lazy and that they realize they have a winner and then they just throw money at it and they don't care," Cage said recently, while promoting "National Treasure: Book of Secrets."

Fortunately, he said, director Jon Turteltaub really cared about the story.

"And I wanted to make sure that we could go in a direction that would raise the stakes and also, hopefully, be more interesting (than the first one)," he said. "When they first presented the idea of the Civil War, confederate gold, John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln assassination, I said, 'Well, right off the bat, for me, that's more interesting.'"

Cage admitted there was a moment when he worried they might be going too far to top the first film but then, "I realized that that was the joy of it."