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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: Cloverfield (1-18-08) » Cloverfield: General / Updates
[SPEC]Art-house movie...?
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Kingpin
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pegassissy wrote:
"The greatest fear mankind has is of the unknown. Knowledge brings power, and without knowledge there is no power. This is what human kind fears the most, being powerless."
Ive used this quote before, but still cant remeber exactly who its by. Im gonna say something that some of you wont like to hear, but its my opinion, and in my mind im right.

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
The only truly satisfying monster would be a monster we never see. I hope to JJ Christ (sorry for the blasphemy Jesus) that we dont see the monster. This is much like the Blair witch craft, which i personally loved. The greatest fear we have is of the unknown. My guess is, JJ's smart, hell show us the monster but only because hell make more $$$. In his heart he wants it to remain a mystery.

And, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO this cannot be a daydream, JJ's smarter than that.


I hear that, a lot of the more successful horror movies never actually showed the violence or gore, we simply imagined it or were only given a hint of it. One prime example is the shower scene from Psycho when we never actually saw the knife penetrate the skin. Nothing Hollywood can create is more terrifying than the power of imagination... it's something the film industry had forgotten a lot of recent.

I admit... I'd also be disappointed if at movie's end it turned out what we'd seen was only an 'idea'... a virtual picture show... that the consequences and trials were just a set of mental games...

But we'll just have to see how things go.
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 9:30 am
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SV18
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 		Re: Good point
tygr20 wrote:
SV18 wrote:
Since the budget is $30 million and the release date is in January, I think it's right that the movie simply cannot be a spectacle at the level of Godzilla/Independence Day. However, I don't think this suggests any particular plot device; instead, it suggests that there's a real limit on the amount of destruction/action one should expect to see.


Maybe the $30M budget is why the lead actors are not Tom Cruise and Jennifer Garner? I'm sure you can make a much cheaper picture without cutting costs everywhere else if you don't have to give half of your budget to your lead character, know what I mean? Smile


Eliminating talent costs helps but the big tentpoles all include extravagant budgets for effects and post production. "War of the Worlds" might have budgeted anywhere from $25 to $40 million for Tom Cruise (and who knows how much for Spielberg), but the budget of that movie was over $150 million wasn't it? $30 million is close to the budget of "Superbad," which I guess you could say had moderate talent costs. Even assuming J.J. Abrams is taking a producing fee of $-0- for "Cloverfield," this is still a tight budget. It's foolish to speculate in detail about what the movie will ultimately be like based upon this single piece of information and I'm certainly not trying to do that, but it just seems relatively safe to assume that we aren't going to be seeing a "Transformers"-like spectacle.

PostPosted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 1:39 pm
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Be@rbrick
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 		Re: Good point
SV18 wrote:
tygr20 wrote:
SV18 wrote:
Since the budget is $30 million and the release date is in January, I think it's right that the movie simply cannot be a spectacle at the level of Godzilla/Independence Day. However, I don't think this suggests any particular plot device; instead, it suggests that there's a real limit on the amount of destruction/action one should expect to see.


Maybe the $30M budget is why the lead actors are not Tom Cruise and Jennifer Garner? I'm sure you can make a much cheaper picture without cutting costs everywhere else if you don't have to give half of your budget to your lead character, know what I mean? Smile


Eliminating talent costs helps but the big tentpoles all include extravagant budgets for effects and post production. "War of the Worlds" might have budgeted anywhere from $25 to $40 million for Tom Cruise (and who knows how much for Spielberg), but the budget of that movie was over $150 million wasn't it? $30 million is close to the budget of "Superbad," which I guess you could say had moderate talent costs. Even assuming J.J. Abrams is taking a producing fee of $-0- for "Cloverfield," this is still a tight budget. It's foolish to speculate in detail about what the movie will ultimately be like based upon this single piece of information and I'm certainly not trying to do that, but it just seems relatively safe to assume that we aren't going to be seeing a "Transformers"-like spectacle.


I still wouldn't rule out the power of a small budget. As said previously, the clips they show of the monster (assuming that happens), could be fairly minimal a la JP and focus more on suspense. They've already exploded buildings and thrown the SOL's head across the city. I guarantee the buildings and most of the people in that seen are CG as well. Don't put it past them to create detailed scenes of an actual monster on this budget. From what we've all seen so far, it would irrational to assume they don't have the budget to show the monster in its full glory.

Its common in the entertainment industry for people to do things on spec in exchange for part ownership rights, which if the movie does well, would be worth way more in the long run. Its certainly a gamble, but it happens all of the time in hollywood on low-budget films. Its a classic example of a lottery winner choosing between taking a smaller lump sum payment or taking smaller incrimental payments that total up to more money in the long run. The creators of this movie might feel that it has the potential to be such a huge smash and are willing to forgo upfront payments in exchange for pieces of merchandising and DVD sales, where the real money is at. They figure they'll get their money, so let's focus our budget on what counts...making an amazing movie. I don't think its that hard to believe that $30 mil of the budget isn't dumped into special effects.

Let's also not rule out any of those smaller, unknown companies that might be looking to get their foot in the door. Who knows if the special effects company is taking a loss on this project in order to set themselves up for the next X-men movie? There will always be someone willing to do something for less then the other guy.

Point is, there are plenty of ways to make a small budget work for a big monster movie, you just have to be creative.

PostPosted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 2:48 pm
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SV18
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 		Budget
Quote:
Point is, there are plenty of ways to make a small budget work for a big monster movie, you just have to be creative.


No doubt. Like I said, I feel kinda silly speculating.

PostPosted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 5:10 pm
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i_c_weiner
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 		Saying a $30 million budget can't get you a nice looking film these days is silly, to say the least. With CG technology available to the general public for semi-affordable prices, people can make nice looking CG at home. If this a professional, Hollywood movie, the CG will look pretty nice. The SoL head from the trailer looked real enough, and when one considers that that is from the trailer, you really can think about what a $30 million budget could translate to with CG.


If this turns out to be art-theater, it would go against everything JJ's said thus far. However, I wouldn't put it past him to screw with us all. However however, he's built it up to be a great American monster movie on the scale of Godzilla in Japan. If it turns out to be a art-theater, he's going to piss off a whole lot of people, especially those of us who are online trying to solve this mystery. How would you like it if you devoted hours on hours on months of your time trying to decode a Myspace page and a faux Japanese drink company site just to find out that it's all just in somebody's head? If the monster tricks with people's minds, that'd be cool, but if the whole thing is somebody's mind playing tricks on itself, that'll be just a little anti-climatic, though I'd probably do the same thing if I were him. Razz

So, overall, I'd say not art-theater. The rumors swirling around this movie are too much for it to (a) be an art-theater movie, and, if it were one, (b) that we don't already know about this. We know call sheet information, dialogue has supposedly been released, and some plot details have also supposedly been released (the clean-up workers looking at the tape). These are minor details that might not even be in the movie, but I'd expect some loony to have come along by now saying this if it were true or close to being true. However, it is true that this has been a close-mouth production. We don't know what the monster is, what's going on, or even the movie's name. We basically only know it's a monster attacking New York City on 1-18-08. Yes, you could say I'm contradicting myself; I say I'm pointing out all sides of the arguement.

PostPosted: Fri Sep 21, 2007 8:21 pm
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brettoniasam
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i_c_weiner wrote:


If this turns out to be art-theater, it would go against everything JJ's said thus far. However, I wouldn't put it past him to screw with us all. However however, he's built it up to be a great American monster movie on the scale of Godzilla in Japan.


No...WE'VE built it up to be a great American monster movie on the scale of Godzilla in Japan. All on the basis of an interpretation of a very vague Comic-Con quote: "We need our own monster." By OUR, he could've meant Americans; Jews; this generation; his son and him; Paramount Pictures; anything. He NEVER used the words "American" or "original" in his Comic-Con speech.

And for the record: he spent all of 5 minutes discussing 1-18-08. He spent HOURS discussing Lost and Trek. So he's not building it up *at all* outside of the online viral marketing. This movie is one of the LEAST-hyped in the mainstream media.


Quote:
If it turns out to be a art-theater, he's going to piss off a whole lot of people, especially those of us who are online trying to solve this mystery. How would you like it if you devoted hours on hours on months of your time trying to decode a Myspace page and a faux Japanese drink company site just to find out that it's all just in somebody's head?


Why would anybody be pissed off about it? If you spend, say, an hour and a half watching a giant monster trash NYC and think "this movie totally rocks," it's not gonna matter a damn if the last half-hour reveals that the monster was just an illusion/drug trip/mindfuuck. Hey, you paid $8.50 to see a monster trash NYC, and that's what you got -- doesn't matter if it was "real" contextually or not.

PostPosted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 12:50 am
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Euchre
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brettoniasam wrote:

No...WE'VE built it up to be a great American monster movie on the scale of Godzilla in Japan. All on the basis of an interpretation of a very vague Comic-Con quote: "We need our own monster." By OUR, he could've meant Americans; Jews; this generation; his son and him; Paramount Pictures; anything. He NEVER used the words "American" or "original" in his Comic-Con speech.

If the transcripts of that commentary he made are accurate, he was talking about Godzilla in the very same statement. To speak of that specific type of monster and then talk about 'our own monster' pretty much nails what he means. I also don't think any of your list of potential 'monsters' are quite up to tossing the SoL's head around NYC. We KNOW the trailer is his, for the movie he was talking about. Same is true for a poster with claw marks on the SoL.
Quote:
And for the record: he spent all of 5 minutes discussing 1-18-08. He spent HOURS discussing Lost and Trek. So he's not building it up *at all* outside of the online viral marketing. This movie is one of the LEAST-hyped in the mainstream media.

That was Comic-Con after all. The mindset of the crowd that gathers probably wouldn't be too keen on having a new amazing movie totally spoiled for them, and would likely want to hear about all the stuff he'd already done on Lost and Trek. Another thing is that Trek and Lost are largely 'out of the bag', as in not any real secret at all. This movie still is.
As for not speaking much about meaning he's not building it up - how much more intrigued could we be by him giving so few clues in his words and having these enigmatic hints in the form of websites and trailers to a nameless movie?
"Speak softly, for those who cannot hear an angry shout may strain to hear a whisper."
(a Gold Star to whomever can cite the source of that Wink )
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 1:18 am
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Oniduo
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 		Yeah now and days, considering there arent any like extremely uber famous actors in this movie, 35 million is perfect to make a good scary movie. They used less to make The Host and it was still awesome.

PostPosted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 1:27 am
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IronJ146
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Euchre wrote:
Another thing is that Trek and Lost are largely 'out of the bag', as in not any real secret at all. This movie still is.
As for not speaking much about meaning he's not building it up - how much more intrigued could we be by him giving so few clues in his words and having these enigmatic hints in the form of websites and trailers to a nameless movie?


This is a good point. To be less than 6 months out, we really don't know jack squat about the plot of the film sans what they're slowly telling us. No "making a long story short".

PostPosted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 10:33 am
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Euchre
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IronJ146 wrote:
This is a good point. To be less than 6 months out, we really don't know jack squat about the plot of the film sans what they're slowly telling us. No "making a long story short".

That's just it about viral marketing. It begins with whispers and gossip around some event and grows into something that looks more like a genuine 'grassroots' movement. The difference between a real grassroots movement and viral marketing is of course that the whole thing gets intentionally seeded by the creators of the marketable item. I have to wonder how much of the whole discussion of the trailer on the internet was incited by a guerilla marketing tactic.

Flooding us with information isn't how viral marketing works, that'd be something else we generally call spam. Spilling all the beans would destroy a viral marketing campaign, and as we are seeing a 'tell all' clue that suddenly emerges tends to be a fake put out by someone basically trying to be a 'party pooper'.
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 12:45 pm
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InAFieldofClover
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 		If the spoilers are correct (police crew finds the footage, no record of any of it ever happening), then 1-18-08 reminds me a lot of House of Leaves. Wasn't it Beth who was having a conversation with one of these board members about the book?

I doubt it's that. But if House of Leaves was ever made into a major motion picture, JJ would definitely be one of the prime candidates for bringing it to fruition...

PostPosted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 1:15 pm
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brettoniasam
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InAFieldofClover wrote:
If the spoilers are correct (police crew finds the footage, no record of any of it ever happening), then 1-18-08 reminds me a lot of House of Leaves. Wasn't it Beth who was having a conversation with one of these board members about the book?

I doubt it's that. But if House of Leaves was ever made into a major motion picture, JJ would definitely be one of the prime candidates for bringing it to fruition...


Lil is the one reading "House of Leaves." She's very intelligent and very well-read -- as expected, since she works at Penguin Publishing.

The "House of Leaves" reference is probably a clue towards this movie being something very weird, surreal, even abstract, with false storylines...just like that book.

PostPosted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 9:20 pm
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Kingpin
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brettoniasam wrote:
InAFieldofClover wrote:
If the spoilers are correct (police crew finds the footage, no record of any of it ever happening), then 1-18-08 reminds me a lot of House of Leaves. Wasn't it Beth who was having a conversation with one of these board members about the book?

I doubt it's that. But if House of Leaves was ever made into a major motion picture, JJ would definitely be one of the prime candidates for bringing it to fruition...


Lil is the one reading "House of Leaves." She's very intelligent and very well-read -- as expected, since she works at Penguin Publishing.

The "House of Leaves" reference is probably a clue towards this movie being something very weird, surreal, even abstract, with false storylines...just like that book.


Well, not neccessarily... I admit, it's interesting the number of films or stories that deal with false or altered realties... but those things could also have just been added in their for padding... I doubt Hawk's interest in fantasy football will end up being a major plot point.
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 9:23 pm
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