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Matt Reeves Comes to Cloverfield
Cloverfield opens up a whole new world for Reeves
(Page 2)
MM: The film also just happens to be one of the year’s most anticipated movies; people have been talking about it ever since Lady Liberty’s head rolled across the screens in the trailer before Transformers. The film didn’t even have a title yet and people were already blogging about it and trying to sneak on to the set. What sort of pressure does that add?
MR: Well, it was incredibly strange, because by the time the trailer came out, we were only about a week or two into shooting. So everyone was incredibly excited about a movie we hadn’t even made yet. Not only that, there was all this wild speculation about what the film actually was—in a way, the Internet fans were sort of writing their own scenarios, coming up with what they hoped it was going to be… So that was kind of scary because it’s very hard to compete with people’s imaginations of what something could be. But it was also exciting to know that people were already terribly intrigued by our little movie, which, up until that point, had been totally under the radar. So basically, we just put our heads down, shut out the noise and made the movie we set out to make.
Whether people would be satisfied with what we were doing, only time would tell. But at least we were excited about it, and in the end, that is all you can really use as a guide. The rest of the shoot was crazy because we had to keep changing the name of our production just so people wouldn’t find where we were shooting. But they kept finding us anyway.
MM: For me, there are two things that make all the difference in a movie like this: The “monster” and the camerawork. I know that these two things were really the very basic framework of the movie in the beginning. When you think of the great monster movies, which ones come to mind? Which films did you look to for inspiration?
MR: Jaws and Alien are two of my favorites—and John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing, which I think is also a terrific movie, very scary. The thing about those films is that they are very careful to hold off seeing the monster for a long time; they build incredible tension and suspense through that anticipation. I knew that would be critical. I really wanted there to be that terrible, building sense of dread.
But I also looked at a bunch of documentaries for inspiration, because I wanted the film to feel as real as possible. There is a documentary called The War Tapes by Deborah Scranton in which a group of U.S. Troops took handicams with them on their tour of duty in Iraq. The film is very compelling and frightening because the footage they brought back from battle was so extremely raw, and there is just something about being right in the middle of it all with them that is absolutely terrifying and emotional. I looked at amateur footage on YouTube, too. Getting a real sense of exactly what that stuff looked like was very important. I ended up showing the actors a lot of that footage to give them a feeling for what we were going for.
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by James Milford on 2/04/08 at 5:13 am
This was the worst film i’ve seen, pointless and a waste of £6.50. It gave me motion sickness and was very unrealistic!
james
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