Matt Reeves Interview

IGN.com interviewd Matt Reeves and posted the article yesterday. The article is below and the direct link is on the bottom.

Cloverfield director talks potential sequel.

by Christopher Monfette

April 23, 2008 - With Cloverfield now on DVD shelves across the country, we were recently able to sit down with director Matt Reeves to discuss the blockbuster phenomenon. So keep reading for Reeves' thoughts on making a modern-day Godzilla, as well as a few juicy tidbits on a possible Cloverfield sequel.

IGN: As a director, what challenges were associated with doing a large-scale, effects-heavy monster film in this very low-budget, Blair Witch-style patina. How do make it feel raw and real and hand-held and still have to plan for sets and green-screens and transitions?

REEVES: That was both the challenge and the joy of it. We're making a movie for Paramount, on handy-cams, with special effects and improvisation…We're doing this kind of garage-band movie, but at the end of the day, it's still a mainstream monster movie for a major studio. The challenge was to find a way to always make it feel real. Very early on, because of all the footage I watched, I could see the way that people used cameras – their cell phones, their video-cameras – and that shoots in a very particular way. The way that camera moves is very different than the way an eighty-pound professional camera moves…So through the process of making the teaser trailer, we learned how to hide cuts and bridge different takes together. Normally, when you go into a movie, you have certain tools. You know that you can get a certain amount of shots and stage things in different ways. And I've always seen shooting as a kind of hunting and gathering process, where you go out and explore different things with the actors, knowing that you can cut everything together through editing. But on this movie, I knew that we wouldn't have that…So that meant that we had to get things often in one take. Instead of covering multiple angles, I would do one angle and shoot it 50 times. I'd start by shooting the rehearsals, and then introduce improvisation, and go on this epic search for what seemed real.

And the same was true for the camera – throw it, drop it. I'd know I wanted the camera in certain places at certain times and the trick was to invent "accidental" ways of it getting there. When we were down in the subway, there was a moment when Rob falls down trying to help Lilly, and the reason he does this is that when we were shooting on the day, he actually fell. So I wanted to build the rest of the sequence off the fact that he fell, largely because as we were working, we were constantly looking for ways to make him look like the un-heroic hero. It was enough that he was doing this – that he was going back for her – that he didn't need to seem like Tom Cruise doing it.

IGN: With a movie that's supposed to look this spontaneous – which includes improvisation in both the acting and directing – what does the first draft of the script look like in comparison to the film itself?

REEVES: When we started prep, the script still didn't exist. When I first got involved, there was only an outline. Drew [Goddard] was working on Lost at the time and he'd only just started writing…And one of the critical things that happened was that I went to the production designer and I said, "It starts in this part of town and moves here and moves there," and he said, "Okay, we're going to New York with a camera and we're going to take the paths that you're telling me, and we'll be able to identify what has to be shot in New York and what can be done here." But it also told us some stuff about the story. So as we were doing research, I'd seen this footage from Iraq of a guy hiding under a table in a tent that was being bombed, and it was terrifying. The sounds kept getting more and more intense, but the image was very obscure. And I said to Drew, "We need to get this into the movie." So there was a constant interplay between what was happening story-wise and what was happening with the production itself. We finally had a draft about a month out of shooting, so we essentially had a month to put together what we should have had twelve weeks to develop…

But the interesting thing about the process was that the fundamental underpinnings of the story – because we'd worked on them and developed them – that the basis of what happens, the structure of the story, is very much the structure that you see now. And the improvisation that we did had much more to do with, "Would he really react this way at this moment?" Or would a camera really move this way in this moment? And I was trying to communicate through a kind of short-hand that they had these relationships. One of the things I did with the actors was to say, "Listen, the most important thing you can do since we have no script is for you guys to hang out. Get to know each other and trust each other." And by the time we were shooting, they'd developed a rapport that I was able to call on in places. And TJ, who plays Hud, came from a stand-up background, so he'd come out with these great lines, and I'd go back to Drew, and he'd have an idea for a pay-off line later in the film…So the way things developed was very free-form, but the foundation of what Drew wrote was very strong.

IGN: What were your initial thoughts on the viral components

REEVES: There are a bunch of really smart young guys at Bad Robot who followed very carefully everything we were doing…And the whole idea of the movie is about this phenomenon of an age where everything we do is documented by those going through the experience…It's a way of dealing with chaos. Like, "This is a terrifying thing, but it becomes less terrifying if I become a documentarian instead of a victim." So in terms of the viral stuff, I always thought it fit well because it is so much about the same idea. That there are other points of view on the same event. When you look at a news event on CNN, the footage you see of critical stuff is coming from amateurs. So the idea of the internet being a news source – the website of an oil company, or Slusho – a fragmented prism focusing on the same central object: to get at the truth by piecing together a puzzle from all this condensed media.

IGN: Is there a flipside to that coin – as a director, watching all of that peripheral material define the cannon and the mythology of the "Cloverfield" event? In planning a potential sequel, do you feel at all beholden to or limited by that?

REEVES: There's nothing in the movie that we did that was driven by the viral stuff. All of that emerged from the story and the script and the footage as we were filming…I don't think we'll be as slavish to the viral stuff. I think that stuff was only meant to enhance, but not to drive the experience. The thing that's important to all of us as we're talking about what the sequel could be is that it's incumbent upon us to do something different. We can't just do a repeat of the experience. We're not 100% sure that there even will be a sequel, because we promised ourselves that if we couldn't come up with something new, it's not worth making. That being said, there are a couple ideas that are starting to build. But I think it's critical that there be something different. Part of what was exciting about the movie was how fresh it was. That was a throw-back, in our minds, to a period when you could go to the movies and really discover something. You see a trailer now and you know almost every scene in the movie. This time, we're not going to have that level of surprise. And some of it will be about point-of-view, but we're going to have to find new ways to build upon the story.

Whether it would be literally another person in New York going through the experience, I don't know if that would be substantially different enough. You can't continue to have no information. The idea was that Cloverfield is what it would feel like for somebody who was thrust into a situation with no idea what was happening. But the idea of being able to make a film that sheds more light on the story through a similarly fractured point-of-view will be important to a possible sequel.

Original found here.