“I mean, a giant monster’s absurd, but you have to find ways to make it real.” Director Matt Reeves smiles as he recalls the moment when childhood friend and Lost co-creator JJ Abrams approached him with an idea for a modern, thoroughly American monster movie, inspired by the enduring Japanese cultural resonance of Godzilla. Reeves was understandably cautious, as would anyone who had never directed a feature before, much less a feature that was so effects-heavy, calling for the wholesale destruction of New York City at the hands of a 350-foot beast. But Reeves soon found a hook that compelled him to commit to the challenge. “I think what’s different about the movie is really the point-of-view,” he explains, adding that the production mentality became to “try and find the way this would be shot if the person finding the camera was going through the experience.” Taking inspiration from the personalised home-movie style so abundant on YouTube, along with sources such as Deborah Scranton’s The War Tapes, a war documentary shot by National Guard troops serving in Iraq, Reeves decided that all the action would be filmed from a single viewpoint, with a character simply picking up the camera and shooting the experience. “This movie is very much made for an audience that does this daily,” Reeves says. The resulting story centres on a group of twenty-somethings whose party is interrupted by an apparent earthquake and then an explosion in downtown Manhattan. Given the task of filming the party, the amiable Hud (TJ Miller) ends up documenting his friends and the resulting chaos as the city comes under attack. Cloverfield marks the first time this style of shooting has found its way into a big-budget production, although of course the micro-budgeted Blair Witch Project employed a similar idea way back in 1999. “The thing about Blair Witch,” Reeves observes, “is that they use that style very smartly to create suspense that will never be paid off because they can’t afford to pay it off.” While there’s the argument that Blair Witch was effective because it lead the audience to create the largely unseen horror in their own minds, it’s undeniable that Cloverfield presents a gripping big-budget alternative to the intimate point-of-view format which, for better or worse, leaves little to the imagination.
While a rough-and-ready shooting style may come more naturally to independent filmmakers strapped for cash, Reeves found instilling a similar sense in his team of professionals was something of a challenge: “When we have a focus-puller and, you know, somebody walks in and hits their mark, and if that person isn’t sharp, then that person (the focus-puller) loses their job! This all has to be messy.” A solution was that TJ Miller shot much of the footage himself as Hud with an actual handy-cam, as did Reeves as he also qualified for the job by being, well, not qualified for the job. Of course, the pros did some of the work too. “Some of it was that we got our professionals to try and shoot to look as bad as what we were doing,” smiles Reeves, adding, “I’d put our professional camera-operators, with their 50-60 pound cameras, in TJ’s clothing so that whenever you saw his feet, that was TJ’s feet, supposedly, or his hands. And basically it was this giant experiment.”
Of course, the cinematic destruction of New York brought its own concerns, in the post-9/11 climate, and this was something that Reeves and his team were acutely aware of throughout. “I think that all really interesting genre films, for me, tend to reflect the anxiety of the time,” Reeves notes, “They reflect our deep-seated fears.” With Godzilla originally presenting such an overt manifestation of nuclear anxieties, released only a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it is perhaps inevitable that the first big-budget disaster movie since the 9/11 terror attacks should focus so significantly on individuals merely reacting to a crisis. Indeed, many of the images in Cloverfield strongly recall home-movie footage of the tragedy, including people staggering through dust-covered streets and taking cover in shops as the monster passes them by. As producer JJ Abrams has previously said, “We live in a time of great fear. Having a movie that is as outlandish as a massive creature attacking your city allows people to process and experience that fear in a way that is incredibly entertaining and incredibly safe.”This article was first published on Close-Up Film
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