WORTH WATCHING

Final Breathless Cloverfield TV Spot - New Monster Footage!

by Alex Billington
January 10, 2008
Source: SlashFilm

We're just over a week away from finally being introduced to Cloverfield. I promise this is the last new footage or trailer we'll run before it comes out, and it's all because I couldn't pass this up. I want to continue to build the hype and get this back to the level that it was when Transformers came out and the trailer first debuted. I hope this final TV spot will help cap off the excitement for everyone else, too. There's just a quick glimpse of the monster and it's worth checking out. Although (of course) the actual monster won't be revealed until the film hits, this is the last bit we'll get.

LAist has a great interview with the film's director, Matt Reeves, and we've run a few quotes about the trailer and idea of the movie.

"The thing we talked about a lot was the trailer for Close Encounters. There was a great teaser trailer that sort of looked like weird documentary footage and there was this really scary, almost frontline-esque narrator and he was talking about different close encounters. When it ended you were like 'What was that?!?' The idea of having that experience where, as a moviegoer, you could discover something—before the age of Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight and all the websites."

"When it comes to modern trailers, a lot of the way that they sell movies now is to give you the whole thing right up front. This was a throwback. We knew that it was going to be on Transformers if we make it in time. We thought that it would be really interesting. Here will be this completely under-the-radar movie being previewed in front of a movie that they were already anticipating there'd be a huge audience. I think that the real reason there was all of that crazy reaction was that the trailer was so widely seen and so completely mysterious. I think that people began to project themselves into the mystery to figure out what it was, and that created this whole sort of engagement with the viewers. Anytime you're confronted with a mystery, you immediately need to have answers, and we were just really lucky. We did not expect there to be this level of reaction."

Another of the questions asked was about of the film was inspired by Godzilla, and his answer not only covers that, but also goes into a lot of great explanation behind J.J. Abrams' inspiration for Cloverfield.

"Here's the thing—there's been a lot of speculation, but J.J. has already answered the question. What really happened was that during Mission Impossible 3, J.J. took his son to Japan for the premiere. While they were there, they visited a toy store in Tokyo. They saw shelf after shelf, row after row, of Godzilla toys. Just this huge toy store filled with toys. The image was really striking to J.J. He said, 'Look at this. This is like a national monster.' He started thinking, 'You know, we need our own national monster.' Obviously King Kong is kind of a national monster but not really in that way. That's a great movie and he's a legendary figure in film lore, but it's not really the same thing. So the way that Godzilla was sort of a metaphor for the time, and for that place, the idea of creating a new monster for this time and place came about. It's an original monster, and a monster that was inspired, really, by Godzilla."

Cloverfield will land in theaters on January 18th! Be prepared for one hell of a show!

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