8 things about Cloverfield

Cloverfield finally opens in the UK tonight. Hurrah! If I had my way, everyone I know, and everyone I've ever met in my entire life, would go and see it, and love it as much as I do. I'm definitely going to go and see it again while it's on its theatrical run here; probably more than once. I'm just that obsessive.

Anyway, to mark the occasion, I'm going to sum up some of the more interesting things director Matt Reeves said at the Cloverfield press conference last week:

# Those echoes of 9/11 are intentional

"It's a horror movie of its time in the way that Godzilla was a reaction to the anxieties of that time - post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki. We felt that, in doing a monster movie for our country and our time, it would definitely be reflective of the anxieties we all feel since 9/11 and so that was definitely something we were aware of from the beginning. Although, at the end of the day, we were aware that what we were making was a fantasy. I think that all really interesting genre films tend to reflect the anxieties of the time in which they were made – horror films and sci-fi films reflect our deep-seated fears and are often very reflective of the time in which they were made."

# Cloverfield was the first movie to put out a trailer without a title on it.

"We went to the MPAA, who are the people who rate trailers and determine whether or not it's suitable for an audience, and we said "We want to talk to you about not putting a title on. What are your regulations regarding that?" And they said "Regulations? No-one's ever done a teaser trailer or trailer without a title." They're advertising. It's like putting out a commercial without actually what the thing is."

# It's really more about the characters than the monster.

"The idea was to take something completely outrageous, something that was enormous, but do it from a very intimate point of view, and a very naturalistic point of view. Even though it was a visual effects movie and it had a 350ft tall monster that was going to destroy New York, it was also going to be from the point of view of one of the people who would be running down the street in a Godzilla movie. I mean, in a Godzilla movie, all those screaming people, one of those people would have a Handicam and they'd make this movie. This isn't about the president who puts in the call to the military and says "We're going to take this strike and take out the monster"; it's about people and the experience of it."

# But the monster's fun too. And there are lots of elements of its design that you won't even see in the movie.

"The monster was designed by a man named Neville Page who's a creature designer. He's just amazing. There are actually things that he designed that are part of the monster that we never got to use. He had these feeding tubes which were just wild - he would come up with these crazy ideas that were just amazing and very creepy. Within the course of the movie, we could only reveal certain aspects of it, so that never got released."

# And another thing about the 350ft monster that destroyed New York - it's only a baby...

"The secret that we had was that the monster was a baby. Having just been born it was going through separation anxiety and had no idea where its mother was and was freaking out and was in a completely foreign place, didn't understand a thing and that that would be sending it into a kind of infantile rage."

# ... but it's more frightened of you than you are of it.

"The thing that was also frightening to me was the idea that not only was it going through an infantile rage but, because it was suffering from this separation anxiety, it was spooked. It was really afraid. And as the military started shooting at it, I started thinking, like if you were attacked by a swarm of bees for the first time, it wouldn't necessarily kill you but you'd be terrified, you'd be like, "What are these things doing?!" And for me there's nothing scarier than thinking of something that big that's spooked. Like if you're at the circus and suddenly the elephants are spooked, you don't want to be anywhere near that, you'll be crushed."

# The viral marketing got out of control.

"We never guessed that there would be this level of response so early. In fact, we all turned to each other and said, "This is building so fast, we better shut up. I don't think we should say anything for a while because if we do people will be incredibly sick of us by the time the movie comes out.

"We had people at Bad Robot who had been working on some of the creative side stories that do connect in because they did have the script and they did know all the conversations we had about the sources of things so there is some viral stuff that does connect into us, but a lot of the stuff didn't have anything to do with us, it was just because people were so interested to make any connection they were making connections to things that didn't have anything to do with us. So the thing started to take on a life of its own, much bigger than we had anticipated."

# Finally - it's not a lion.

"In the teaser trailer, we wanted to let people know that it was a creature of some sort. So we put in some references on the roof, somebody saying "What kind of animal sounds like that?" And I jumped up to the mike to put one last one in, and I said "I saw it, it's alive, it's huge!" Apparently, I speak rather quickly and even played slowly I guess it sounded to some people like I was saying "it's a lion". So there was all this speculation that we were making a giant lion movie. And I thought, "there's no way people think we're making a giant lion movie!"

You can read the full transcript of the press conference at Den of Geek.

Cloverfield (2007) (virtually spoiler free!)

Back in 1999, there was a lot of buzz about a movie which claimed to be true. It featured a group of kids who went out into the woods to investigate an urban legend about a local witch - and never came home. Some time later, their footage was found, edited, and broadcast to audiences around the world; websites were set up detailing the mythology of the Blair Witch, or about the lives of these poor, unfortunate young filmmakers.

Surely not many people could really have believed that The Blair Witch Project was real. But it was a massively successful film nonetheless, imitated and parodied endlessly for years. The film divided audiences; some people loved the rough, handheld camera footage and improvised dialogue, while others were frustrated by the ambiguous ending and always wobbly visuals. While no-one is going to believe that Cloverfield is a true story, that whole debate is about to kick off all over again, because this is another film shot entirely with handheld cameras with an extensive viral marketing campaign behind it. Clues about Cloverfield have been dropped for months now, none of them actually giving very much away, so anticipation is pretty much at fever pitch right now.

And within the next couple of weeks, everyone's going to find out whether the hype was justified.

Honestly, I think some people are going to be disappointed. Cloverfield is a very, very simple story based around a very, very simple idea, so anyone who's been following a series of clues on a series of viral websites might feel somewhat short-changed. There's not a lot to work out in Cloverfield; it just is. But what it is, is brilliant.

The plot is that of your basic monster movie - a monster attacks, and people run away. In Cloverfield, instead of being handed an omniscient view of the attacks unfolding, you're only given the perspective of one small group of people. The genius, though, isn't in the storyline, or even really in the technique - it's in the writing. Cloverfield's script is word-perfect. The film introduces a group of characters, all but one of whom are impossibly gorgeous young people (but it's okay, the one who isn't attractive mostly stays behind the camera). There's half an hour's worth of not much happening as we figure out who's who, and what their relationships to one another are, and then, suddenly, everything kicks off. There's a huge explosion in Manhattan; the Statue of Liberty's head goes flying across the sky; the streets are in chaos. The only available escape route, across the Brooklyn Bride, is quickly cut off. Things get scary, and fast.

What really sets Cloverfield apart from all the other horror movies that use exactly the same elements - a group of people, an isolated place, and something scary lurking around the corner - is that it makes so much sense. The characters are brilliantly observed; they're not all likeable, exactly, but they all seem real. They all act like people - rational, reasonably intelligent people, at that. Most horror films feature at least one moment, if not several, where you want to scream at the characters to stop being so bloody stupid. Cloverfield manages to avoid that. Every decision they make, makes sense. Maybe I'm over-stressing this point, but it seems so rare that a film gets something this right. And in order to be scary, you need that. It's no good throwing monsters into a film with characters so stupid they constantly run into danger; the audience can't empathise, can always see a way out, and get frustrated when the characters don't take it. When you feel like you'd do everything in the same way as the people onscreen do it, that's when it starts to feel scary.

It's also useful that the characters act like real people when the film tries to make you feel something. There are so many moments I want to write about, at length, and describe how great they are, but at the same time, I don't want to spoil them for everyone else. So I'll just say that there are several absolutely heartrending moments in this film. There are also some brilliantly funny lines along the way - my favourite, I think, is when someone asks of the monster "What's that?" and gets the reply "That's a terrible thing." Everything just works; the conversations flow like you'd imagine real conversations would, in the circumstances.

There is, admittedly, one moment where you'll roll your eyes in disbelief. Something happens (I know, I'm being annoyingly vague, I'm sorry) that you know, from having seen films before, has to happen, but at the same time, you can't actually believe that would happen in real life. It's okay, though, because there's only one moment, and it's not so outrageous that it couldn't happen. It's just one ever so slightly faltering step in what is otherwise a note-perfect script.

(Actually, there's one more thing - why is everyone in this movie so bloody gorgeous? It's the Lost effect - how come there just so happened to be a plane filled with people with movie star looks? I guess we'll never know.)

Another part of what makes this movie so great is that the monster design is completely unlike anything you've ever seen. (Unless, maybe, you've seen The Host.) It's not a recognisable monster of any particular existing type; it's just something weird. (And terrible.) It's scary because it's so weird - it's just a monster, and it doesn't have any obvious weaknesses, and it's huge, and it wants to eat you. Having glanced at the credits on the IMDB, I'm not sure who to congratulate on creating that thing, because there seem to have been an awful lot of people involved, so you can all give yourselves a good pat on the back. And then give Drew Goddard a good pat on the back, too, for writing such a great script. And maybe Matt Reeves. And the entire cast.

Weirdly, I think Cloverfield will play just as well, if not better, on DVD as it does on a cinema screen. Because it's all shot on handheld cameras, it sort of feels like a small screen movie, even though the production design and sheer scale of the monster and the destruction it wreaks makes it feel like a big screen movie. It's hard to categorise Cloverfield, actually, but then, why bother? It's brilliant. And that's enough.

Originally published at Den of Geek.