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

So how did you go about shooting this movie so that it would look like a camcorder in the hands of one of the characters?
We started testing handi-cams, and we tested a $1500 camera — a pro-sumer HD camera that literally fits in the palm of your hand. And we filmed it out, and we looked at what it looked like when we transferred it to film and our first reaction was, "Oh my god, it almost looks too good." It's amazing that you can make something that looks this good on a handi-cam. So that convinced me that we had to shoot significant parts of the movie on handi-cam, but the visual effects people told me that in order to do the visual effects you need a much higher resolution camera. We used this camera called The Viper and another camera called the F-23 — Miami Vice, I think was shot on these cameras — basically these cameras are the same size as a 35 mm camera, so one of the challenges was to make it feel like one of those big heavy cameras were light and could fit in the palm of your hand. So one of the ways was to shoot a significant part of the movie on lighter cameras and I also felt that it was important to give the camera to the actors at certain points so that they could be playing to — if they were talking to T.J. [Miller's] character, that they could actually be talking to T.J. behind the camera. So we used four cameras — we had a small handi-cam, which could fit in the palm of their hand, and that is the stuff you see at the beginning of the film. There are places where you see reflections and in the reflection you can see that someone's holding the camera, so I felt it was important to establish that that's what it was. But then we used a medium-sized, but still a pro-sumer, handi-cam, that weighs about 5 pounds, and that had higher resolution, so we shot an even larger amount of the movie on that. So I would have T.J. operate stuff, and I would operate stuff, and the DP would operate stuff. J.J. and Brian and I made 8 mm films when we were kids, and in certain moments in this film, in a lot of ways, this was the first feeling I've had working professionally that was as completely analogous to that situation, of picking up a camera and going out and making a movie. So there was that kind of fun freedom to it. And then we also had our huge professional camera — what I would do in that case was, I had the operators wear T.J.'s clothing and I had them read the script and I wanted them to think about how his character would be responding in that moment and be able to think in that way. And then the other challenge, which was really difficult, was to get them to operate those cameras which weighed 50, 60, 70 pounds as if they weighed about a pound. It was grueling. And one of the reasons why I grabbed the camera was because I knew I could operate it the way a professional wouldn't, because I'm not a professional camera operator. So we could get that kind of amateurish vibe. Still planning the angles, but making them seem accidental.

Finally, what does the title "Cloverfield" actually refer to?
The movie, from the very beginning, was always called Cloverfield. It was always the case designate. The same way that "the Manhattan Project" was the name of the A-Bomb project. We thought, "OK, the military always gives these kinds of banal names to these terrifying projects and cases, whether they're just numbers or really innocuous names." To us, it was intriguing and amusing to think you'd have such a serene name like Cloverfield for such a terrifying case. So that stuck to us. And that's how we referred to the movie. But in the back of our minds, I think we thought that the title would probably change [at some point]. But then the title got out there and we said, "Well, this is interesting. People are referring to the movie by the case name, Cloverfield." For a while, we had a different title — but people, rightfully said that we were just trading one obscure refrence for another — but for a while was going to be "Greyshot." And that's because we wanted there to be some reference that you could look at in retrospect. Where that came from is there's all this stuff [in the movie] about the footage and where it was found and how it was found in the area formerly known as Central Park. And [two of the characters] are under a bridge at the end, and the name of the bridge they're under is Greyshot Arch. And so we thought that it might be a fun, intriguing title. But we ended up going with the title that we all fell in love with and that people had already begun associating with our project.