Michael Stahl-David, Lizzy Caplan, and Jessica Lucas in Cloverfield Sam Emerson/Courtesy of Paramount

Is that why, for the most part, the monster seems almost secondary at points in the film? It's always there, in the background, but not always the focus?
It's interesting because that was the genesis of the movie, but as the movie evolved the thing that we were all excited about was the handi-cam approach and telling this kind of epic-sized story in a very intimate way. You're in all this chaos, but you're in tight and close with these people. It's not the traditional monster movie of being in on the master plan and being in with the generals as they're figuring out what to do or that phone call that comes in from the President. This was going to be about everyday people and the fun of the movie is that, while you're sitting there, the feeling I wanted audiences to get was, if you were there, with your handi-cam, that you might have made this movie.

So was the "national icon" idea or the idea to make the monster more of a personality like Godzilla pushed to the background?
Obviously, it was inspired by Godzilla but the way in which I would say it is like Godzilla is that Godzilla was a metaphor for its time, and was very much a reaction and a reflection of the times in the wake of the A-bomb and Hiroshima and an age of realizing the immense destruction that man was now capable of and how that changed everything. And how there were anxieties and fears during that time that the movie spoke directly to, but through a monster. And one of the things that attracted me to the film was its potential to be a metaphor for our times. That the monster could really be a way of naming the unthinkable and the terrors that we all have now.

So in place of Hiroshima, we have 9/11, which the film clearly reflects.
I think that's really the point of entry into this movie. I think the genre movies that we all love, that's kind of the purpose that they serve. They're a way of reflecting and confronting and experiencing fears that we all in our daily lives. That we have difficulty even naming because it's too unthinkable. And then, at the end of the day, because it's this giant monster movie, it becomes kind of a safe place to experience some of that.

Were you aware of the rampant fan speculation going on once the first teaser trailer hit theaters? People were saying it was everything from a Lost movie to a live-action adaptation of the anime series Voltron — about a giant robot comprised of five robot lions.
[Laughs] That was crazy. Here's what happened: We did the trailer, and because we were shooting in such an unusual style — it was all single camera point of view, hand-held with visual effects — at the beginning, the visual effects people were coming to me saying, "You know, you may have to shoot the whole movie Steadi-Cam." And I thought, "No, we can't do that, because anyone who is watching this movie and who is really the audience for this movie, is going to feel in a second that that's inauthentic." These are people taping their lives and putting it on YouTube and out with friends and taking pictures on their iPhones, so they'd be able to smell that in a second. So one of the things that the teaser trailer was great for was that it was kind of a think tank to kind of figure out how to shoot in this particular style. And we learned a tremendous amount. So when we had the [sound] mix together, we were all excited about it, we thought it's be a great tease for people. But the thing we wanted to make clear was that we wanted to hint at the fact that there was this huge creature. And so we started adding these lines, little bits of dialogue here and there. It was about midnight and we were finally down to about the end of the mix, and J.J. came by and Brian [Burk, producer] was there and we were like, "You know, why don't you do one more?" So I got up in front of the mic and I recorded one where I was really panicked and I said, "I saw it! It's alive! It's huge!" And then the trailer came out and almost immediately there was this crazy speculation — Is it Lost: The Movie or is this a preview for Lost, for the upcoming season? And I was like, "Wow, how are you even getting that?" The one that really made me laugh was seeing that someone had done an audio spectral analysis of my voice in the trailer, which was a complete last-minute addition, and apparently I speak so quickly that instead of thinking I said, "It's alive" thought I'd said, "It's a lion!" And that started this whole Voltron giant robot speculation. It was amazing. We were very early on in the production at that point, so to know that people were already getting interested and excited about it, and had all of these theories.