Director Matt Reeves has begun doing press for the upcoming JJ Abrams-produced monster flick Cloverfield. Here are some highlights from the various interviews:

On the Movie Poster: “The inspiration came from the poster of Escape from New York. The poster had an image on it of the head of the Statue of Liberty and that image was nowhere in the movie!”

On Seeing or Not Seeing The Monster: “People who have seen the trailer might think we are using this style to avoid seeing the monster, but that is definitely not what we’re doing. We’re using it to build dread and anticipation.”       “But in this movie, you do see a lot. At the end of the day, it still has that huge scale, it’s just that it’s shot from this point of view. So you’re going to see the monster, you’re going to see huge-scale destruction, you’re going to see a lot of crazy stuff!”

On Releasing the Teaser Trailer without a title: “Then Paramount said, ‘What if we don’t even put the title out there so people can speculate?’ We wondered if the MPAA would go with it, they didn’t even know how to respond at first. They were like, ‘That’s never happened before.’ But they let us do it. We knew people would be intrigued, but we had no idea the level to which they would begin to engage.”

On the movie’s title: “There were various titles along the way, but the first title and the end title has always been Cloverfield. When I read the outline it was Cloverfield. And ‘Cloverfield’ is the case designate. And when the first draft of the script came out it was Cloverfield. It’s always been Cloverfield.

On a Possible Other Title: “There was this other title that we really loved,” he recalls. “And it was again another title that had to do with an aspect of the movie… you would have to see the movie to understand what it was called. And so it was in a way another mysterious word.”

On the “it’s a Lion!” web controversy: “At the last minute, when we were shooting the trailer, we wanted people to know - ’cause we hadn’t created the monster yet - that it was a giant monster movie, we wanted a tease of that. I jumped to the microphone and said the line, “I saw it! It’s alive! It’s huge!” And one of the most amusing things is I had come home and someone on the web had taken that section and started to do an analysis on it and thought I said, “It was a lion.” The way I speak was too fast sometimes and they couldn’t make it out.”

On the difficulties of shooting a single perspective movie: “I’d have to shoot maybe 50 or 60 takes of the scene to try to get it in a one-er.”

On the weird Slusho viral tie-in: “It’s a connection, obviously, back to a reference to Alias and it’s part of the involved connectivity between that and there’s a - I don’t know what you could call it - a sort of “meta-story” that is part of - almost like an origin story - that is connected. It’s almost like tentacles that grow out of the film and lead, also, to the ideas in the film. And there’s this weird way where you can go see the movie and it’s one experience. It’s a big, really satisfying and really thrilling experience.”

On Comparisons to 9/11: “[It works] in the same way that Godzilla was really a metaphor for its time, and was a sort of movie about the A-bomb and Hiroshima and all of that,” he says. “The idea of it dealing with the anxiety of that time and that’s why it captured so much attention because it tapped right into people’s anxieties… I think that what was really interesting here was knowing that we were going to be dealing with the metaphor of what this was and dealing with the anxieties of our time. We thought that there would be something really sort of powerful about the idea”

On a Cloverfield Monster Toyline: “The was kind of the conceit for the whole story and now we’ve made this movie and one of the fun ideas was that, even though we couldn’t do all the tie-ins up-front, was the idea that there would be this toy that could be this monster once people are introduced to it. That, actually, has been going on and there will be a monster. It’s not going to be a big merchandising movie, but just for those people who are into that stuff and who are fans of that, there will be a toy. Like in the way that Alien had a toy - that was definitely a huge inspiration for this movie.”

On Star Trek Movie Trailer: And lastly, Reeves told MTV that the trailer for Star Trek will be attached to Cloverfield.

If you haven’t already, check out five minutes from Cloverfield right here. You can read the full interviews on ShockTillYouDrop IGN, and IESB.