Drew Turney
Brit Gareth Edwards went from cutting his underground sci-fi drama Monsters on the PC in his bedroom to helming a big budget redux of Godzilla, and will soon be behind the second movie of the Star Wars universe’s third wave. If there could ever be a more visible example of an overnight success, he’s it.
You never know when filmmaking royalty will come calling, as 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg found out. After a career of short films and grips/set assistant positions (including the attention grabbing Portal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4drucg1A6Xk), Trachtenberg got a call from no less than JJ Abrams while the latter was off in the UK doing some little sci-fi movie, asking if he (Trachtenberg) wanted to step behind the microphone of an erstwhile sequel to the Abrams-produced/Matt Reeves directed Cloverfield.
Described by most people involved as being in the same ‘universe’ as 2008’s found footage monster movie, 10 Cloverfield Lane has been shrouded in as much secrecy as most productions from Bad Robot (JJ Abrams film company), and Moviehole caught up with the director in New York while he was putting the finishing touches on it.
How did you get from short films to working for JJ Abrams?
I started out making movies in my backyard with my action figures. My brother’s a few years older than me. He’s an editor – he actually just edited Me, Earl and the Dying Girl.
He started out editing commercials, so when I was very young I saw the world of commercials as this really awesome possibility. I loved guys like Johnathan Glazer and Ridley and Tony Scott.
Anyway I really wanted to make movies and as we know there’s not really a ladder to climb to being a movie director, but it seemed like doing commercials, or music videos back then, felt like a more unique way in.
Now it’s a very well traveled path but at the time it was more interesting. So I started out doing commercials, and a lot of them were very slice of life, emotional, documentary style, not big and thematic and ultimately the kind of movie that I wanted to make.
So, I honed in on doing this short film, based on this video game Portal that really spoke to the kind of movie I wanted to do. I loved the idea of doing something that had a special effect in it but wasn’t giant robots and aliens. It was a morbid, interesting puzzle to solve.
On the one hand, the movie is interesting and intellectual, but it’s also very visceral and exciting and that helped me get 10 Cloverfield lane, which operates in very much the same way. Hopefully, this movie is very meaningful, and compelling, and thought provoking, but it’s also totally exciting and awesome at the same time.
How did you and JJ connect and what was his involvement?
He and his company developed the screenplay. It came to them as an original idea that they then developed it into something that would fit into the Clover-verse and then it became this open assignment looking for a director.
I was attached to another movie that fell apart right when this movie was looking for a director. So, they sent me the script and I loved it. I made it wet with sweat as I was turning pages, and I met with JJ and his team and pitched my take for it and got the movie.
Was he involved during filming?
He was shooting Star Wars but somehow he amazingly managed to watch all of our dailies. I would wake up in the morning to emails from him saying, ‘Great inserts! Loving the inserts’ and stuff like that.
It was so cool and really encouraging, and really, just key moments would put wind in the sails and be very encouraging. It allowed me to make the movie my own but we also had a great eye for details and wanting to make sure we were getting what we needed to get. He was great.
Now you’ve made a film for Bad Robot, does it feel like you’ve made it as a director? It’s a bit of a magic factory.
It is a magic factory. The thing that I was inspired by about JJ as much if not more than filmmaking is how he runs his company. He’s sort of a magnet for talent anyway, but he hires really good hearted people and I’ve made such great friendships with the people that work there. I’ll be so upset when we’re done making this movie – not because I’m done making the movie, but because I won’t be working with them any longer.
You can have the most talented people in the world but if you don’t connect, if you don’t compute things the same way, if you’re not well-intentioned, then anything you’re making with them will suffer. It’s not just about finding talent, but about finding the right people and his company is very much that way. They’re very familial over there.
That place is very secretive and you’d think it’d be like the Willy Wonka thing. It’s not a weird thing. He’s not drowning Oompa loompas. It’s a really good place. It’s a really comfortable place that celebrates the people that work there.
What’s the biggest challenge been in directing this film?
The hardest thing was before doing it. The hardest thing was the idea of it. It’s a first, right? Any first thing … The first day of school, the first anything can be very scary, but the joy for me was just how fun it was.
I realised that I had spent so much time thinking about the movies that I wanted to make and I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about the making of the movie. I found the prep period to be one of the most fun phases because we’re going to an office everyday.
I’ve always dreamed of dressing in a suit and going to an office and I chose a career where that is not a part of the equation at all. I’m sure I would actually hate that, going to an office and showing up in that environment that you imagine would be used for typing in numbers and being sterile, or whatever.
But, going to the office and being with very smart, creative people and having conferences, lunches, meetings, discussing with bright men and women, taking very seriously the idea of make believe, was so much fun, because it’s the same conversation that I had with my friends as a kid in the backyard making my movies.
We’re talking about the same stuff, but I’m talking about it with adults. We all have to be very serious about this, but it’s the same stuff. That was such joy and I was obviously intimidated by it, but it drifted away very quickly when I realized how fun it was. I’m excited to have more of that, hopefully.
It feels like the whole film is going to rise and fall on the relationships between the three actors [Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Gallagher, John Goodman), so casting must have been three quarters of the battle.
Yeah, absolutely. Could not have been luckier and John Goodman, I feel so privileged to have him in the movie because that character was very menacing on the page and very intense, but John really brought out his peculiarities and idiosyncrasies and brought a lot to it.
The character in particular can be scary, but you can enjoy being scared by him. To be terrifying and hilarious at the same time is not something every actor can do and he did it very well.
And the main thing with John Gallagher was having a very grounded sense of humor, because we have some very heightened things happen in the movie, so to be pulled back down to earth with a guy who’s so relatable is important.
I think JJ and I both responded so strongly to Short Term 12, loving that movie and his role in that. He’s very funny in that, but very naturalistic. That was a big thing for that role and John’s so awesome.
And for Mary, a lot of this movie is non-verbal, and we’re with her in moments where we don’t have words to connect us to her, just physicality. She brings a wonderful physicality, not only to those emotional scenes, but also to the action scenes.
I’m big on swashbuckle and she brings a real gritty swashbuckle to everything that’s really cool. Casting was a big deal and I’m really happy with who we got, for sure.
John Goodman seems like such a big cuddly sweetheart, but he’s got this quality, where he can just turn into a scary psycho at any time.
Totally. In between takes he’d pull faces toward the camera and try and make our camera assistant laugh, then all of the sudden be in this intense zone. It was pretty cool to watch.
So is this a sequel, a side-quel or something else?
It’s its own free-standing story. It’s not a direct sequel but it shares the same tone, the same spirit. I think, just like Cloverfield was a familiar genre, but told in this very unique way, we also are in a familiar genre but told in this unique way that will be discovered once you guys see the movie.
We’ve actually heard the word Clover-verse a few times already. Is there thinking about expanding the franchise if this works?
No one wants to be presumptuous at the moment, because right now there’s just the two, but that certainly would be a cool thing and even the title, for me, what I love about it is it really sounds like a Twilight Zone episode, and this movie is very much a giant Twilight Zone episode.
Was there a whole bunch more ideas thrown around the table that you guys fell in love with?
Not for me, because I’m just making this movie. That’s a question for my boss.
JJ Abrams loves the Twilight Zone too.
He loves the Twilight Zone. One of his big influences for this is The Hitcher, with Rutger Hauer. It really connected to him as a kid. For me, I loved this movie called Break Down. Remember Break Down with Kurt Russell? I remember walking out of that screening with a friend. He looked at me and he’s like, ‘My palms are sweaty’.”
I was so thrilled by that movie and I remember wanting to recapture that. Like, having a movie really move you physically, like it’s really affecting your physical state. That is so cool.
Footage in the trailer was very claustrophobic and tense, but Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Gallagher have both talked about how much fun and how breezy the shoot was. Did you leave the tension for the editing and keep things on set light?
We had a good time making the movie. I didn’t think to do any manipulative stuff like tricking them into being claustrophobic. I mean, the only thing I did that was sort of like that was keeping the set from them as long as possible, so that when they first walked through it, they could always draw on that experience of seeing it for the first time.
Other than that we had a lovely time making it and it was just in the power of the filmmaking and the score and the editing, that all the craft really comes through. We’d try genuinely scaring Mary in some moments, not telling her when a certain thing was going to happen, but nothing too much beyond that.
