Long before his acclaimed entry to the Dark Knight’s onscreen adaptations with The Batman, director Matt Reeves essentially revived the found-footage genre with 2008’s sci-fi, Cloverfield. Nearing the film’s 15th anniversary, Collider’s Steve Weintraub spoke with Reeves about the experience of making a monster movie so unlike anything out at the time, and one that would go on to spark a franchise within the “Cloververse.”

Over a decade ago, with Reeves working off a script penned by Drew Goddard and J.J. Abrams producing, Cloverfield offered its fans a unique experience from the very first mysterious teaser. The standalone movie would introduce audiences to a group of friends in New York City celebrating their friend’s going-away party, all being documented on a handheld camera. Midway through the festivities, the power surges and NYC is suddenly under some sort of attack. The horror of the night’s events is all caught on film as we watch Manhattan evacuate its citizens under the threat of some massive, otherworldly creature.
COLLIDER VIDEO OF THE DAY
To celebrate the 15th-anniversary milestone, Cloverfield is getting a limited-edition 4K Ultra Steelbook on January 17, the day before its original theatrical premiere. Ahead of this special release, Reeves spoke with us about the groundbreaking marketing that led up to Cloverfield’s debut, and how impossible it would be to recapture that cryptic promotion in today’s social media frontier. He reveals how they cooked up that insane first teaser (with imagery of the Statue of Liberty’s head rolling down the city street forever burned to memory) before ever filming the actual movie, and how he fought for the iconic handheld camera point of view. Reeves also discusses that rumored Cloverfield sequel – the one from the Brooklyn Bridge – and how he, Goddard, and Abrams have some unexplored ideas.

Image via Paramount Pictures

COLLIDER: First of all, people nowadays won’t realize or remember the way you guys marketed the release of Cloverfield, and I believe it could not happen today because of social media and everything else that goes on.

MATT REEVES: Because you think that [with] social media stuff would leak? Is that what you think?

Yeah.

REEVES: Or why do you think it couldn’t happen today?

Because I think if a filmmaker like you were to be making a movie, everyone would know about it. The town would talk. I think it could happen with an unknown director and an unknown cast, but with any name person now it would leak.

REEVES: Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. I mean, I remember even just on Batman, the idea of– the stuff that would dribble out in little details here and there. I did everything I could to keep it secret. And I mean, I was showing the script to no one. I was doing all kinds of stuff, but still. I was so terrified when we had the few test screenings that we had. I was like, “Is this going to work?” And they said, “You know what? These things always leak and it doesn’t matter. The movie will be what the movie is, and they [will] love the movie.” And I was like, “Okay.” But you’re right, it’s very hard to keep something secret today.

Image via Paramount

It’s actually impossible. And that’s the thing. Can you talk about the initial days? Because no one knew about this movie. And then when the marketing started, that was the beginning of the internet sleuth thing, trying to figure out what Slusho was, and all these different things.

REEVES: Well, I mean that was the thing, is that the idea from the beginning was they knew that we could have this prime spot on the Transformer’s release. So the idea was if we could put together the trailer to have it ready for then– and the weird thing was that the trailer was, for us, it was [a] twofold thing. Well, it was threefold. One was, it was a trailer that would be on Transformers and everyone thought, “Well that’s probably going to be huge.” That would be an amazing spot. But the other thing was that it was actually a test to see if we could make the movie. Because it was a Handicam movie that was handheld with VFX. And at the time, the VFX people were saying, “I think you’ve got to shoot it on a steady cam, and we’ll add the shake later.”

And I was like, “That’s never going to work. The audience is going to know, it’s going to look totally inauthentic. That’s terrible.” I was like, “We have to do this handheld.” And so that was a test to see if we could do that. And the other thing was, our budget was so tight that we were like, “Well gee, we’re going to do the head of the Statue of Liberty. This has to be the shot from the movie.” But the movie wasn’t written yet. So it was this crazy thing where that moment was realized, but the rest of the shot was not even conceptualized. And so what ended up happening was we go, “Okay, so here’s what we have to do.” We [had] to shoot it, so we could do it and then hide a cut so that once the script [was] done, and we’re actually shooting, we could continue the shot because we wouldn’t be able to afford to do that shot within the budget that we had. We borrowed some of marketing’s money to use it for the movie. So it was a crazy process.

And then when the trailer came out, I remember going to see it, it was the 4th of July. And I remember going to the Cinerama Dome and going to watch the trailer. And watching the reaction going like, “Wow, this is so amazing.” It was so exciting. And then my first feeling was that I was thrilled, and then suddenly I was like, “Wait, this is horrifying because we’ve shot a week and a half on this movie, I don’t know what the movie is and everybody else is going, ‘what is the movie?’” And I’m like, “Wait, I hope they like what this movie is because we don’t even know what the movie is fully yet.” I mean, we had a script, but we were shooting very, very early on.

So the whole thing was very, very unusual. I would say that it’s probably one of the few experiences that could be described in that way. I mean, to make a trailer for a movie that you haven’t shot yet, that hadn’t actually been written yet, and have it come out on Transformers and have the whole world react and then to know, “Oh God, now we have to make the movie.” That’s a pretty weird high-wire act.

They did it for Tron: Legacy, they showed that footage at Comic-Con, and they were just seeing if the audience cared. I think it was a test and Comic-Con went crazy. And then they made another Tron movie.

REEVES: Wow. That’s amazing. Here though, we had a date and the whole thing. So it wasn’t like, “Gee, you know what? If they’re not interested we’re not going to make it.” It was like, “Well this is a trailer for the movie, we’re doing it.” And it was like, “Uh oh, what if nobody wants to see that?”

So for many years you guys have talked about doing a sequel. Did you ever come close to making one, or was it one of these where the story just was never right, and it never felt good?

REEVES: Our schedules just didn’t quite line up in that way. We absolutely, right afterwards, were talking about it. I had a bunch of ideas. I know (writer) Drew [Goddard] had ideas. And I’m sure (producer) J.J. [Abrams] had ideas. And we were talking about stuff, but then we got swept into some other things, and we thought, “Well maybe we’ll come back to it.” And then obviously we ended up finding other ways to do other iterations. But one of the things about the movie is, when we were shooting, I was really excited about the idea of the fact that we were in this restricted point of view of this one group, this one Handicam. And so when we’re on the Brooklyn Bridge, there’s actually a moment where I have somebody filming Hud (played by TJ Miller), and Hud filming that person, because then you realize, “Wait, there’s another story from that night.”

Yes, this is so many people’s story of survival. And so there was part of me in the back of my head that was thinking, “Gosh, is that another movie, or whatever?” Just the idea that there are other perspectives and that the other perspectives could be other stories. That was kind of what was going on at the time we were making the movie. And then we talked about some things – some pretty cool ideas, actually, we talked about – and then it just didn’t… that part didn’t come to fruition. But then we did other things and who knows what will happen in the future.

The limited-edition Cloverfield 4K Ultra HD Steelbook is available beginning January 17. The SteelBook includes new artwork reviewed and approved by both Abrams and Reeves, the film on both 4K Ultra HD Disc and Blu-ray™, access to a Digital copy of the film, as well as a wealth of legacy bonus content on Blu-ray, including alternate endings, deleted scenes, director commentary, and much more.