SCI FI PI

Even before its release, Cloverfield was a pop culture phenomenon - now it goes down as one of those rare movies where the term 'instant classic' applies, beyond first weekend hype.

But the film isn't all that it appears, there's a little bit more it than some kids and a handycam and the Hollywood juggernaut that is JJ Abrams.

We managed to track down the film's million-words-per-minute director, Matt Reeves, in his LA office, just a day after he arrived back from the film's final theatrical release - in the home of Godzilla, Japan. He gave us the low down on the film's creation, production, and of course, whether there will be a sequel or not.



Because I'm the director, that's why!

HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER MOVIE ON A HANDYCAM

Hello there Matt!
It's a pleasure to speak with you!

The film's success has been phenomenal, you'd have to admit!
The whole experience for me has been pretty stunning. When I got involved there was no script, there was just a concept and an outline. From that point that I got involved to when it was released in the US, it was less than a year. I mean it has just been a crazy ride. Crazy.

I'm still just reacting to the madness of it. We just got back from Japan were we opened and we were number one. The response there's has been very good. It's just starting to set in for me now that the whole experience has happened.

To me, making this movie was fun, because Paramount (with in a box) let us do what we wanted to do. It was like a studio tent pole movie that was made like a garage band indie film. To have it come out and be received and do so well has been a great experience.

The film had a budget for $35 million, I believe?
Actually, we made it for just under $25 million.

You did have a big crew and everything, didn't you, but you just ended up with the focal point on a handy cam. Was it a struggle trying to wedge the giant crew into the handy cam experience?
Actually it wasn't so much of a struggle. The studio, it's so remarkable, we had such creative freedom. I guess because we were making it for that budget, they were willing to take a lot of risks. When we began, we discussed as to whether it was all to be steadycam, but the whole point of the movie was to do it in the style that anyone who was watching the movie could watch it and think that this is what they would do.

That was such a fun way to approach it. It wasn't so much the studio but the special effects people who had never done special effects with the handycam style, and they suggested that we use steadycam. All the research that I've done, all the things I've watched, it was the authenticity that was the key. I saw this thing called the War Tapes by Deborah Scranton where they gave these handycams to soldiers in Iraq. I watched YouTube footage of people watching each other - I just watched everything on the internet I could find. I really wanted it to feel authentic, and the moment we started playing too much with it, I felt that people would starting to read it as inauthentic, and then the thing would lose its charge.

In that way there were struggles with how would we make this movie with basically just on handycam. The solution was that we didn't! I'd say we shot about half the movie with handycams. I shot a lot of the film myself. It's the closest experience I had when I was 8 and was shooting 8mm films with my friends - and we're making a feature film for Paramount!

I also gave the camera to the actors. So that they'd be able to shoot each other, so that when they would talk and relate to each other the other actor was right there, just holding the camera. And that was kind of thing we were allowed to do, just because we were under the radar. And that was so exciting!



Okaaay. We could do it your way. But let's not.


Hud is an interesting character to have as a cameraman. The audience has this feeling where they want to look at the monster but Hud's a little too dense to focus on it!
Yeah, he's not really one step ahead of the thing, he's a few steps behind! It's also, in a weird way, it's the truth of it. It's in a lot of the footage that I saw that when you're in the condition that you're in and trying to record it the actual action, it's not a good time to stop and start filming, so that sort of obscurity really made things terrifying.

The footage that I saw on the internet of the bombing of a camp in Iraq, where the soldiers where filming as mortar shells were getting closer and closer and all the soldiers could do was put the camera on the ground in the tent, and you saw one soldier's boot, and an over-exposed flap of the light coming in to the tent and the leg of a table. It's something I literally could have filmed in our production offices, it was like nothing, yet, hearing them react and hearing the sounds get closer made such an impression on me. It was just harrowing. Fortunately no one was hurt, but this really says something about the terror that I thought the film could have. So Hud is a little dense, but you've got to give him some credit - he's terrified!

You deliberately got unknowns for your roles, but - Chris Mulkey, Hank Jennings from Twin Peaks, also appeared. Was this deliberately awesome, as a fan, or what?
(laughs!)To be quite honest, we had all these unknown people coming in for all these roles, and he read, but I just loved him. Well, people know him, but some people don't know him. I thought maybe there'll be a little reward for people who do know him, and for those who don't, he'll be just as authentic as the other actors in the film. He felt like a real person. I just loved him!

MONSTER MOVIES I HAVE KNOWN

Cloverfield is a monster movie for monster movie buffs, but before this, you've been a 'Mr Relationships' movie maker.
Everything I've done has been kind of intimate, it's been about the actors and their relationships from an intimate point of view. I guess what really excited me about this idea was that while on the one hand, it was a giant monster movie, sure, you could read it in outline form and think it was just a Roland Emmerich-sized Independence Day kind of movie, but this point of view actually made it intimate. And the idea of being one of these people, running on the ground in one of those Godzilla movies, with everything as realistic as possible, as ridiculous as that sounds, was really exciting to me. It was more in the vein of the kind of stuff that I related to. So yes, while the movie was meant to be a monster movie that appealed to monster movie fans, it was this fresh point of view that was exciting.

By the way, I am HUGE monster movie fan. I love Jaws, Godjira, Alien. But I also watched amateur movies, documentaries, things like that.

What other kind of movies have influenced you?
Alien is one of my very favourites, I'm, a huge fan of John Carpenter's The Thing. What I love about those movies is they have this great sense of eerie suspense. The good thing about making this kind of film with this kind of budget where you can't see the monster full time, was to be able to draw on the same thing that made those kinds of movies so fun to watch, which was that sense of what you CAN'T see. Doing atmospheric sound, the idea of just your imagination starting to create something, which in a way is much scarier than what you see in the objective sense. So that part of it was really fun. I also loved Children of Men, which isn't a monster movie, but it's a really cool Sci Fi movie. I also loved The Shining, Jack Nicholson was a really great monster in that movie!

What I loved about Children of Men was that it has a very detached feel. The camera may be handheld and right there and in the thick of the action, but it's not part of the action, it's very Kubrickian. It's eerie. I watched it and was so taken by the style, but what I knew what would be fun about this movie was that the camera would never be detached. It would be like "He's gotta run! He's gotta duck under the car! He's gotta roll over!" This is a cameraman who's also going through this evening, and that was going to be fun.

JJ ABRAMS LENDS A HAND!

Some people will look at the film and it's style and say 'wow, young director breaks into Hollywood' but that's not entirely the case, is it? You've been friends with JJ Abrams for a long time, you co-created Felicity together. But you did direct this film. How do you feel when it's got JJ Abrams all over the marketing? Do you feel like you're part of a team, or do you feel like you're being overshadowed by some egomaniac?
(laughs) Well JJ is my friend, literally since childhood, and he actually produced my first film, The Pallbearer, and we worked on Felicity together and I love working with him.

In the case of the movie we were making this totally under the radar with unknowns, and the one thing that JJ has really done in the last 8 years is to create this brand around him self, this sense of mystery with Lost and Alias and to some degree MI:3, there's a kind of style that especially the fan boys have kind of got into, that having him - but basically, no franchise, no actors and me not being known at all, then there was no question that the selling point was going to be JJ.

That was so much what I expected as the entry point, but I hoped that as people see the film they realise that I directed the film, and that one of the things now after it's out that people can go 'oh, JJ didn't direct it, that's right', but you know, the whole thing was such a crazy experience - JJ's name is part of what we had to market. Frankly, in that combination, the thing to sell to get people intrigued, was JJ.





With the intriguing and clever marketing campaign, were you involved in that as well?
Yeah. I directed the trailer. What that whole first part was, the teaser trailer, was a way for us to learn how to make the movie. We had a 12 week prep, and for the first 8 weeks of that I still didn't have a script. Drew (Goddard, the film's scriptwriter)and I would talk on the weekends and Drew was still writing on Lost, and JJ was directing a pilot (Ed - That would be the new X-Files style TV series, Fringe). It was madness. I would pitch the story as it was evolving to our crewmembers so they could prepare.

The one thing I could focus on was making this teaser trailer that ended up getting everyone so crazy excited. Really, the big value of that was how to make this kind of visual effects movie, because normally you wouldn't shoot this kind of movie with a hand-held handycam camera style. So while visual effects were new to me, the handycam style was new to the visual effects people. So it ended up this weird think tank, and it actually was the thing that enabled us to shoot this movie. We actually managed to use the footage we shot in the movie. It was sort of a weird thing, that process.

INTERNET, EH?

Were you involved with Slusho and Tagruoto stuff on the internet?
Well the Slusho stuff - there are a lot of really smart young people working at Bad Robot and those guys, we had conversations with them, and they were apprised of the situation and there were a couple of guys that put together some great stuff in particular that was parallel to what was going on. A lot of it was planned, but then they came up with this great crazy stuff.

Do you have any idea why people got so excited about Cloverfield before it came out?
First of all, I think we live in an age where culture is so saturated by media that there's almost nothing left to discover. By the time something's come out, you've heard about it in so many forms and venues that there's no surprise. We had this opportunity that we could come out and surprise people. To have a project like this and not give people information - not even the title of the movie - it creates a very intriguing thing. Two things happened for us - we knew that if we could make the teaser trailer in time, we'd be attached to Transformers. We knew that would be big, but we didn't know it would be as big as it was - that was very lucky. And also this 'style' is very much an internet style.

To go to a movie and see a trailer that gives you the response 'I can relate to this because I could've made it myself' - and you present someone with a mystery - people just want to find out!

For all those internet pundits - have you seen The Host yet?
I have to admit I haven't. I really didn't want to see it before the film, and after we made it, I've just been so hectic. We literally just got back from Japan this week and we're just finishing up the press now for the DVD, and now my life will finally return to normal - but I really want to see it - I hear it's great.

SPOILER ALERT! SPOILERS BELOW

At the very end of the credits, there's that wonderful line, "it's still alive"
Which is actually me! I was still alive. It was really just about me being alive after this process!


Which begs the question - where to next for the sequel? We know from the DVD that Clover's a baby, but what can you tell us, if anything? Obviously 'parallel' stories of people going through the different things on the same night have been bandied about.
The truth of the matter is that it's too early. They do want us to do another one, but we have to come up with something.

The thing is also, the film was so unusual in style, that freshness of the experience is something that you really can't do again, so what we're trying to figure out is another angle. We promised ourselves that unless we can come up with something equally as exciting to us, then we won't press to go ahead with it. We have a few ideas that are starting to percolate that we hope will turn into that.