'Cloverfield' Director Q&A: Less Nausea, More Love, Same Terrifying Monster

Director Matt Reeves could have made his mark on the monster genre by placing Hank Azaria and Matthew Broderick at the feet of Godzilla, then filling out the plot with familiar cues and melodrama. But he didn't. Instead, Reeves' Cloverfield -- now available on DVD -- breaks from convention. It's a film that's subtly literary -- from the way that Reeves' characters direct the camera work, to the disjointed clips of a nuanced romance, to the overarching metaphor for terror and anxiety in the modern American consciousness.

While he can wax philosophical about the complexity of Cloverfield, Reeves tells Film.com that, in the end, it was still his intention to produce a shit-yer-pants thriller. And he succeeded. Reeves spoke to us this week just as his film hit our shelves on DVD.

When the film was initially released, how bad were the audiences' complaints of nausea?

MR: That ended up being a huge surprise. I remember we were doing press in New York on the opening day. The most exciting but completely baffling thing was something posted in the window by the time I got my ticket. There was a sign posted in the window of the theater warning people that the movie had the effect -- not unlike a roller coaster -- of motion sickness, and to be prepared for that. I think it was probably an 8 PM show. I was like, "This is very unusual." But I guess that was true for a lot of people, especially with the stadium seating, where you're seated closer to the screen, and that was different from the screenings that we had which were in a more traditional theater.

Do you think the small screen will be easier for audiences who experienced nausea the first time?

MR: I definitely think it's a big-screen, fun movie but I do think that this will, for anybody who was at all worried about that kind of motion sickness, eliminate that entirely. You're not going to get sick watching your television.

When we were making the film, I was very aware of this. I did a lot of research because I wanted it to feel authentic: amateur footage, a lot of stuff that was on YouTube, a lot of Handicam documentary stuff, and the film was all hand-held on purpose to create that feeling. But we were actually conscious of trying not to shake it in a way that was extreme. We just tried to make it appropriate to what was going on. In fact, in some cases [I] felt that it was steadier, much steadier actually than the YouTube footage. That being said, at a certain point things become so dramatic: Hud is holding a camera but literally also fending for his life, so sometimes he falls or he has to run and that makes the camera kind of crazy.

That leads well into my next question: I was watching the DVD's behind-the-scenes documentary and somebody was talking about how you watched a lot of the 9/11 footage, the home footage. Was there any discussion that it might have been too soon after the attacks to stage a destruction of New York City?

MR: Godzilla, or Gojira, the original made in Japan, was very much a metaphor and a reaction to the atomic age, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and about the fear at that time. The monster was a metaphor too, I guess in a sort of a safe way, to experience and explore the anxieties of the time.

That was at the forefront of our minds. The film is meant to tap into the kind of anxiety we all feel today. It was also part of the aesthetic, the premise for the movie being that somebody going through a crisis is videotaping it themselves. That is one of the biggest things people remember about 9/11 -- the way we experienced a lot of that day was through seeing footage of firsthand experience. It was really terrifying. That wasn't the only footage that I watched though. There's a great documentary called The War Tapes by Deborah Scranton. Basically, troops in Iraq brought Handicams with them -- brought them into battle, in fact -- and that produced some harrowing footage.

[Cloverfield] was much more about the idea of being in the midst of something as it was happening and [with the] participant trying to find some way to document it because of its importance. When they're witnesses to terrifying events, this is one of the ways that people get through it, so we were aware of that and tried to be sensitive to it. I believe that it's not exploitative, but certainly I can understand that some people do respond that way and I think that they might have no matter what, the same way that people responded to the destruction that they saw in New York in I Am Legend. In our film, there's no question that 9/11 is very central, but it ends up being a kind of entry point into the film, and then at a certain point the film is really about the survival of these characters and about the giant monster and it becomes something very different.

The monster is meant to represent the same thing here, but veiled in mystery, because I think even that's true of the moment, the kind of anxiety we feel now. I don't know that it can be placed in a quantifiable way. It's a pervasive terror and the source of it and where it might strike and what it is and what might come [of it] is not containable and definable, maybe [not even] as easily as the idea of nuclear war.

By the way, at the end of all this, I do hope this isn't sounding vaguely pretentious. The movie at the end of the day is a giant monster movie and we hope people just have fun with that experience. All of these things are aspects of the film, but it was ultimately meant to be a kind of thrill ride, a kind of fun experience.

I thought that whole love-story plot line on the DV tape was what really made it. As you're watching it a complete history is being erased and that's the real tragedy.

MR: That was one of my favorite ideas, the idea that as one horrific story was being written, another was being written over or erased, and that there were just these haunting glimpses into something [that] was and might [have been].

I got the DVD in the mail, popped it in the machine, and the first thing I went to were the alternative endings. This is the biggest surprise of the DVD, that the alternative endings are not about Hud suddenly surviving or about a last-minute rescue, but about this love story. Can you explain to me how important that was?

MR: The storyline I initially got involved with was a bit different. It was still meant to be Rob and Beth at the center, but it was a journey they took together and he actually wasn't going toward her; they were going through something together. When I got involved, we started talking about turning the movie into a story of regret -- the idea that if you suddenly realized that your priorities [must] shift immediately because mortality was questioned, the things that should be forefront in your life present themselves. So, Rob would have to go right the wrongs, to express to Beth how he felt.

I think that people are wondering, "Did they live or did they die?" What Drew [Goddard, the screenwriter] and I talked about most was that if we did it right it doesn't matter whether or not they lived or died because the point was that he would get to her and at least be able to express to how he felt. If you were going to go through something so crazy and potentially meaningless as a giant monster attack, and survive it (or maybe not survive it), if you were with the person that meant the most to you, that would create whatever meaning you could out of the situation.

The ending that you have there attempts to explore different ways of doing that. We had this footage of them running at the train station near Coney Island and there was something very beautiful and transcendent about the footage. It was actually, again, inside the point of view of Rob, the way it was at the beginning. So, in my mind the opening of the film -- once we started moving in the direction of trying to create a weird love story through-line within what is otherwise meant to be an evening of terror -- is that the camera represents Rob's gaze towards her. He's like "I'm in love with this person" and there's a loving gaze and that's what the Handicam is.

I think that's what home movies are. When you're looking at home movies -- someone filming their girlfriend or someone filming their wife or someone filming their husband or their child -- it's the gaze of someone who is in love with that person or has love for them. The interesting thing was when we tried the other footage, which was through this gaze again at the end, even though the footage had a transcendent beauty to it you didn't have the sense of them coming together, or a sense of completion that the footage out on the Ferris wheel had.

So, to answer [your] question, all the endings did have to do with finding some way to play out this love story and we ended up going with the one that we felt was the strongest. But that was the only change we ever considered. We never considered having there be more answers or having somebody who had died suddenly live. That was never part of it. That may be a surprise to people, but that was the way it worked.

Recommend (0)

|  Comments (0)

|  Email

|  Share

Share  Facebook Digg del.icio.us