Cloverfield Final Updates and Details

January 18th is only 14 days away and after months of waiting, J.J. Abrams' Cloverfield monster will finally be revealed. Some extra juicy details have arrived courtesy of Anne Thompson on Variety and they are all quite intriguing to read. The new details come from the film's director, Matt Reeves, where he talks about everything from the equipment they used to shoot to the theme and feel they were going for, including having to convince Paramount to let them do it, and to the crème de la crème - confirmation on contact with the monster.

For the sake of getting right to the good stuff, we'll just dive right in. To kick off the story of Cloverfield, Matt Reeves and J.J. Abrams "first met as 13-year-olds screening their early shorts at an 8mm film fest in Los Angeles." "They've been creative confidantes ever since." The script for Cloverfield first arrived as a 60-page treatment written by Drew Goddard. Reeves' first response was, "This is enormous. There was so much in it."

Reeves continues on with the details about convincing Paramount about the concept. "The filmmakers coaxed Paramount into letting them use no-name actors who could improvise, low-key natural night light, herky-jerky HandyCams (as opposed to SteadiCams, which can be artificially jerked around later; 'People would smell that in a second,' says Reeves), and no musical score at all — just source music and well-orchestrated ambient sound."

As opposed to using larger 3 lb. cameras for filming all of the scenes, Reeves used the small and lightweight minicam to shoot "intimate scenes among the actors." The scenes are so intimate the Reeves kept tweaking them, shooting upwards of 60 takes. "You see the reflections of the actor holding the camera."

We've already seen it in the trailers and footage, but the visual effects are a key part to the experience. Reeves and his team seamlessly combined all of the shots and worked with multiple visual effects studios, including a stop-motion effects artist, to create "massive effects" including "one five-minute shot incorporates 20 VFX elements."

And as for contact with the monster? Reeves promises "by the end you have intimate contact." Reeves emphasizes the importance of showing the monster, saying, "I didn't want to have all that anticipation and not reveal him. The fun thing is you do see everything over the course of the movie in several different ways, but it's filmed heavily from one point-of-view."

Do you need to be convinced any more? I'll see you in theaters on January 18th wearing my Slusho shirt and with my excitement at the extremes!

Jamie and Teddy Video 7

In this video jamie is just complaining like a normal bitch

Michael Stahl-David Talks Cloverfield Experience

Like the rest of the world, Chicago-born actor Michael Stahl-David was introduced to J.J. Abrams' furtive disaster movie Cloverfield wearing imaginary blindfold. "Man, I had no idea what this movie was going to be. I thought it was something I was going to be completely embarrassed of," he confesses to us with a laugh.

In director Matt Reeves' return to feature filmmaking (after 1996's so-cute-it's-sickening The Pallbearer, starring David Schwimmer), Stahl-David plays Rob Hawkins, a 20-something prepping for a big move to Japan. And as Cloverfield's trailers have shown us, a going away party for ol' Rob at the beginning of the movie is rudely interrupted by the introduction of something huge, something "alive" and something that essentially bends Manhattan over and gives it the ass-reaming of the century. Stahl-David is joined by co-stars Mike Vogel (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre '03), Odette Yustman and Lizzy Caplan; altogether, their respective characters careen through the city trying to avoid its latest monstrous resident and the Army in an attempt to find a friend. This dangerous journey is all told through a hand-held video camera.

"They didn't even tell us about the cinema vérité thing," Stahl-David recalls of his audition experience. The script sides he received when he went in required him to pretend he was filming a love interest. "I remember going into the audition and I brought a video camera with me because it made me feel shy and meek to be hiding behind this camera. That was a way into the character for me. I didn't get that nervous about it because I didn't know what [the script] was. When you know the story before the audition, you're like, 'Oh I'd do anything to be in this movie!' and that can put a lot of pressure on you. For this, I was like, 'Whatever.'"

That apathy immediately changed once he signed on board and a complete screenplay was presented, however. With Reeves leading his troupe into the thick of Cloverfield's giant monster melee, filming began in the former half of '07 in Los Angeles and, later, in New York. "It felt like we were on a search for truth together," the actors says commenting on the film's natural slant and the wiggle room for improvisation that opened up as a result during principal photography. "[Reeves] wasn't going to make me do something I didn't feel was real. If there was something on the script I didn't feel quite like it would happen in that moment, we wouldn't do it. I would say something else, do something else. It wasn't about trying to be clever and come up with your own stuff. It's not a very talky movie, it was more about questioning what would you do in this situation? What would I do?"

"I think in some ways it's as much a survival movie as it is about the monster," he continues. "The monster is definitely the problem, but you're seeing it the way we would, we don't pan back and watch it perfectly. It is going to be exciting. It is contemporary film vocabulary - this kind of first-hand account, something that could've been on YouTube or something. Someone just holds up the camera and starts filming, there are probably other accounts, [our footage is] just the one the government happens to find."

Cloverfield's challenges on set arrived, Stahl-David says, when he was asked to react to a creature that would later be added via CGI. He was privy to the beast's guise through early conceptual renderings, still, "Shooting that stuff was not easy. Honestly, the camera work helped sell the [monster stuff] 'cause the camera's going crazy too. I was always trying to get specifics about what the special effects were going to be. When I saw the teaser [trailer], you see me look down the street and I see something way in the distance coming. I was like, 'You know, I don't really buy that. That's not how I'd react to something that far away.' You just try to get something specific about what they were going to put in there."

Did the palpable public hype nearly suffocating the film make him feel like he was a part of something extraordinary? "We were speculating [ourselves] and wondering what the hell were we doing. We had never seen anything like this, it was weird and that made us uncomfortable at first," he says. "Then when we started filming and working with Matt - seeing he was open to us, then seeing the teaser, it gave us a boost from that. The style of what we were doing, seeing how the vision was being executed and how it was going to be cool and different and also the reaction we got from the public was exciting. It was the fruits of brave marketing."

Cloverfield New Year Special

A HAPPY NEW YEAR to all you Cloverfield fans out their 2008 is going to be awsome here is a video which was on tv at midnight last night