Director Matt Reeves confirms once and for all what the Cloverfield monster's deal was
The Batman's Matt Reeves had his first breakout hit directing Cloverfield; 15 years later, he spells out exactly what the film's central creature was up to
15 years later, the name most closely associated with 2008 ground-level kaiju movie Cloverfield—and the weird little patchwork assemblage of pseudo-sequels it’s acquired over the years—is pretty clearly that of producer J.J. Abrams. After all, Abrams was already a big name when the movie deployed its surprisingly powerful viral marketing push in the summer of 2007, having already scored big wins with Felicity and then especially Lost—whereas his long-time collaborator Matt Reeves, the film’s actual director, was still more than a decade out from becoming something akin to a household name with movies like the Planet Of The Apes revivals, and then especially last year’s The Batman.
Still, it’s Reeves who’s most consistently stepped up to promote Cloverfield over the years, waving the flag for his unlikely early blockbuster as the film’s various anniversaries have come and gone. Take, for instance, a new interview with Syfy this week, in which he talked about the film’s breakneck production speed, as well as finally, definitively, confirming the various hints the film (and its elaborate marketing apparatus) dropped about the movie’s monster.
Addressing the first point first: It turns out that, yeah, Cloverfield really was as rapid-fire and improvised a project as you might expect: Reeves reveals that Abrams tasked him to begin filming before writer Drew Goddard was even close to finishing the script, as they embarked on an ambitious 12-week shooting schedule with a director who’d never worked on anything of this scale before: