Cloverfield's Lizzy Caplan Had No Idea What She Was Getting Herself Into
During the Second World War, the Nazis found the body of a British Royal Marine floating in the sea off the coast of Spain. To their surprise, they discovered that the case attached to the dead man's wrist contained top-secret documents related to the Allies' imminent invasion of Sardinia and Greece. Hitler jumped right on it and diverted troops and tank divisions to the region to ward off the attack.
The siege never came, however, because the Allies invaded Sicily instead. It was all a big fake out — British intelligence had dressed the corpse of a deceased homeless person as the mysterious messenger and deposited it near the Spanish coast by submarine in the hope that the Nazis would find it and take the bait. The elaborate ruse was named Operation Mincemeat.
In 2007, a similarly covert viral marketing campaign teased the latest project from producer J.J. Abrams. Making its debut before "Transformers," the first trailer showed us good-looking people at a party, an explosion on the New York skyline, panic in the streets, and the Statue of Liberty decapitated by an unknown force. It didn't even tell us the movie's name.
The buzz was huge and a few months later we found out the title, "Cloverfield." Wow, we all said to our friends, what's a Cloverfield? In early 2008, we found out. It was a routine but a fairly effective found-footage movie about New York under attack from a huge generic CGI creature. It turned out that "Cloverfield" was the military codename for the disaster, and it all felt like a letdown after such an innovative marketing campaign. But that's the great thing about codenames — you can call your operation just about anything, so long as it maintains secrecy and keeps the outsiders guessing until you're running up their beach.
The auditions for Cloverfield were just as secretive
As the teaser for "Cloverfield" suggested, the first 20 minutes of the movie are spent meeting a group of attractive young Manhattanites at a farewell party before all the monster stuff kicks off. One of them is Marlene (Lizzy Caplan), who Hud (T.J. Miller) — our cameraman for the evening — has a crush on. Marlene doesn't know many people at the party very well, including the guest of honor, Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is off to Japan to start a new job. When New York suddenly comes under attack from a vast city-stomping creature, she ends up tagging along and trying to survive.
Caplan had her breakthrough role a few years earlier in the hugely successful "Mean Girls," and her part in "Cloverfield" doesn't come up that often in interviews. When she does get the chance to speak about it, she seems to remember the production with fondness, including the unorthodox audition process devised by producer J.J. Abrams to maintain secrecy. She went in to read for her part thinking it was a role in a romantic comedy, she told MovieWeb:
"The scenes that they gave us for the first part of the audition were just in the party scene, so it was like 'We've gotta get this place ready for a party!' That was like the biggest drama going on, so we just assumed. We saw character breakdowns and the characters were there but it didn't say anything about a monster anything like that. It was just, 'We've gotta get this ready in two hours, so stop messing around.' It was totally lame."
Caplan and the other candidates were not provided with scripts ahead of the clandestine auditions, and she only found out that "Cloverfield" was a monster movie after she got the part.
Lizzy Caplan was relieved when she found out what Cloverfield was
Lizzy Caplan says she was relieved when she found out the true nature of "Cloverfield." Not because she was glad it wasn't a "totally lame" romantic comedy, but because it was an original story rather than a part of a venerable franchise that J.J. Abrams would soon revitalize for a new audience. Caplan added:
"I was kind of relieved that it wasn't 'Star Trek,' not because I think 'Star Trek' is going to be anything less than awesome, but just because I think that would be really strange to have no idea and then be in such a recognizable franchise."
Caplan's audition scene may have helped obscure the true nature of "Cloverfield" but it still fed into the opening of the film. The home movie footage introducing the characters is convincingly bland, and that's not necessarily a criticism. Most home movies are bland, and adopting that style lulls us into a false sense of security before all hell breaks loose. Caplan has plenty of praise for how director Matt Reeves handled the physically demanding shoot:
"Everybody was pretty stressed out and he was also trying to figure out this brand-new style of filming. He was literally putting a camera in a box and throwing it down [the] stairs, cameramen were quitting or hurting themselves, the crew was in flux, a really great group of people, but nobody knew what we were doing. There was running and then 50 takes more of running then we'd figure it out and kind of change it up a little bit. It was just madness and he totally pulled it off."
Ultimately, "Cloverfield" is remembered more for its marketing campaign than the movie itself. But at least Caplan got one of its most memorable moments with an unexpectedly nasty death scene. That certainly wouldn't have happened in "Star Trek."