Q: What inspired the monster design?

Matt: The monster was designed by a man named Neville Page who’s a creature designer. He’s just amazing. I would go into his office and he had these computers and he would sketch on them, and on his wall he had all of these little photographs. They covered the entire wall and from afar you looked at it and you thought, oh, that looks interesting, you’d see little bits of red, and as you got closer you suddenly wanted to turn away because actually what they were, were photographs of intestines, photographs of eyeballs and body parts. I referred to it affectionately as his Wall of Terror. The idea was that the creature would have some kind of evolutionary biological basis. It wouldn’t just be random things coming out of its arm or some weird thing. There are actually things that he designed that are part of the monster that we never got to use. He had these feeding tubes which were just wild - he would come up with these crazy ideas that were just amazing and very creepy. Within the course of the movie, we could only reveal certain aspects of it, so that never got released. That was really fun and what was important to me was, again, thinking about things being based in a kind of reality. In the movie we’ll never know where this creature comes from because we have a limited point of view. We’re going to go through this experience with these people who don’t have the knowledge that someone from another perspective would have - they’re just trying to survive. We need to start describing the things that they are seeing. I can only understand that really from, I would say, an emotional point of view.

So the secret that we had was that the monster was a baby. Having just been born it was going through separation anxiety and had no idea where its mother was and was freaking out and was in a completely foreign place, didn’t understand a thing and that that would be sending it into a kind of infantile rage. Which was very frightening, but the thing that was also frightening to me was the idea that not only was it going through an infantile rage but, because it was suffering from this separation anxiety, it was spooked. It was really afraid. And as the military started shooting at it, I started thinking, like if you were attacked by a swarm of bees for the first time, it wouldn’t necessarily kill you but you’d be terrified, you’d be like, "What are these things doing?!" And for me there’s nothing scarier than thinking of something that big that’s spooked. Like if you’re at the circus and suddenly the elephants are spooked, you don’t want to be anywhere near that, you’ll be crushed. And so that just became a way to again find an approach to giving an emotional or a grounded point of view to something that was completely outrageous. I mean a giant monster is absurd, but you have to find a way to make it real. And part of it was the stuff that Neville was doing, and then the secret that it was a baby. When we were talking about that I said, "Well, can’t we communicate something in the eyes?" So he started showing us like the look that horses have when they have that spooked look, and all of that was to convey that kind of feeling. So those are sort of the sources of it. We also really loved the idea that the creature in contrast to other creatures you might have seen was sort of a pale, white and again because it’s a baby, it’s just been born and it has this ugly translucence to its skin.

A lot of people have compared the movie because of the Handicam style to Blair Witch. And the thing about Blair Witch is that they used that style very smartly to create suspense that will never be paid off because they can’t afford to pay it off. And the fun of this movie was knowing that we would be able to use this style to create suspense but that we were also doing these tremendous visual effects so that it would pay off, that you would get to see all that stuff. At the end of the day in the movie, you get to see everything, you see the monster, you actually have intimate contact with the monster, and you also get to see grand scale destruction, none of which would have been possible if we had no money. Another series of movies that affected that kind of thing was how it was so brilliantly done in Jaws or in Alien where you don’t see the shark right away, you don’t see the creature in Alien right away. And what that ends up doing is that it creates an engagement with the viewer’s imagination.

We had a terrific soundtrack the guys from Skywalker Sound did for us and the idea from the beginning was to try to come up with sounds that would conjure up images, and a kind of anticipation that would go into your subconscious and get into your primal fear and all of that is about withholding. You don’t immediately show people in a concrete way what something is because then it becomes containable, so the idea is to hold off on that kind of stuff so that the viewer’s mind can start to do the work.

 welshhoppo wrote:
Well..... I feel like an idiot now.

 whembly wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
Even more terrifying when you realize hes supposed to be a *baby*

Wut?

I must have missed that part in the movie... how did they figure that it was a baby?

 Medium of Death wrote:
I hated the Cloverfield monster, just looks ridiculous for something that's meant to live at the bottom of the ocean.

 Frazzled wrote:
He has a second brain in his butt?

Nevelon wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Can someone from the military explain this. Why would they send soldiers in(What I assume) is a halo jump, just waht looks to be a small handfull, against a fire breathing dragon? What will that small group do?

I can only assume they have a special rule letting them use melta bombs vs MCs in CC.

Kilkrazy wrote:It's standard tactical protocol to assault giant nuclear mutant killer lizards with HALO jumps.

Because the military is always preparing to fight the last war.

 Soladrin wrote:
I still think the american godzilla looked way better when it comes to creature design...

That said, the only redeeming factor of that movie was Jean Reno. Because Jean Reno.

 Soladrin wrote:
This is what godzilla evokes for me, giant dumb ass monster with nothing special going for it except low budget quality.