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Matt Reeves Comes to Cloverfield
Cloverfield opens up a whole new world for Reeves
(Page 4)
MM: I always find it interesting when someone takes a typical genre movie and turns it into something much more. Yes, Cloverfield is a film about a monster taking over New York City, but like many of the great monster movies before it, it also serves as a bigger metaphor for the world we live in. Godzilla came out in the wake of Hiroshima, Night of the Living Dead dealt with the repercussions of Vietnam, The Host deals with the environment. What do you see as the larger message in Cloverfield? What does it say about the world we live in?
MR: I think many of the most interesting genre films reflect the anxieties of the time in which they were made. There is no question that Godzilla was a metaphor for the Atomic Age, and specifically Japan’s reaction to the horrors Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the terror of potential future attacks. In a similar way, I think Cloverfield probably reflects a kind of national nightmare that has invaded our consciousness in the wake of 9/11. A sense of helplessness. A fear of sudden, and incomprehensible violence and destruction in the heart of our most populated cities. In the end, of course, what we’ve really made is just a crazy, giant monster movie; but in a way, I suppose the monster is an attempt to give some form, some name, however ridiculous or absurd, to the unthinkable.
MM: Up until Cloverfield, your work has been very much character-driven, making this your first VFX-heavy project. Are you anxious to get back to something smaller?
MR: I am going to make The Invisible Woman, which has been a passion of mine for the last couple years. It is smaller, and a much more personal, character-driven story, but it also relies quite heavily on a kind of Hitchcockian narrative suspense. So as completely different as it is on the one hand, I suppose there is still a distant relationship to the sort of sustained tension and dread that I tried to create in Cloverfield.
It’s funny, having just had this crash course in massive VFX makes me look at filmmaking a bit differently. My favorite VFX shots in Cloverfield are the ones that I am sure people don’t even know we did—little shots you immediately accept as totally real, like simple street extensions, or when the choppers are landing right in the street at 40th and Park. So as I start to think about how to shoot my next film, suddenly I see all these opportunities for subtle, realistic VFX that could help me solve some of the real-world production challenges I’ll be facing—things I saw in my head while I was writing, but had no concrete idea how we would pull off on set. I suppose I’m talking about the kind of really effective, invisible VFX work you see (or don’t see) all the time in Spike Jonze’s films or Michel Gondry’s. But I never would have even thought to approach scenes like that before Cloverfield. It’s a whole new world for me.
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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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