What does Cloverfield mean?
Hollywood Newsroom is now Buzz Newsroom! Visit and bookmark our new site. Buzz is bigger and better, including sports, world news, gadgets and the entertainment news that you're used to. Same staff, just more stuff! Why Fark, Drudge and Huffington when you can Buzz!?Ok, so we’ve seen the movie Cloverfield, shaky cam, monster and all, what what does the title of “Cloverfield” mean? We’ve heard different answers from producer J.J. Abrams (MI 3), writer (Lost) Drew Goddard, and director Matt Reeves, a childhood friend of J.J. Abrams. So we scoured the web, and here are the main people talking about exactly what the name and title Cloverfield means. Is it the name of the tape? Is the the government code name of the monster, a freeway exit or was it a temp movie title that stuck?
Here’s writer Drew Goddard from Entertainment Weekly:
Paramount exec Rob Moore had the idea to pique curiosity by forgoing a title and ending the trailer with only Abrams’ name and a date: 1-18-08. ”It was all about using showmanship to elevate the profile of a movie that had none,” he says. (In the movie, ”Cloverfield” is a military code name for the videotape that holds the film’s story. Goddard, who chose the title, declines to explain its significance. ”I’ve never told anyone my reasons — not even J.J.,” he says.) But has the teaser raised expectations that can’t be fulfilled? Abrams acknowledges that this kind of marketing risks inviting ”the din of Snakes on a Plane.” Indeed, immediately after the teaser’s release, the online world was rife with speculation about the movie’s plot — and skepticism about how cool the monster would be. ”If the worst thing that happens is that the trailer made people get too excited, I’ll take that over the alternative of nobody caring at all,” says Abrams. Adds Moore: ”What the teaser promised was a unique experience. When you see the movie, you will get that unique experience.”
From Yahoo Movies:
“To keep the movie a secret, the project was given the codename “Cloverfield,” after a street near Abrams’ office. The filmmakers had planned to release the movie as Greyshot, the name of a key Central Park location. But the temporary title spread through the internet so quickly that crew decided to keep it.”
Here’s Matt Reeves, Director of Cloverfield from LAist:
“When we started the project there was going to be an announcement in the trades. In this case, they wanted to keep everything under wraps. So the movie was going to be made under this outside corporation that was basically a property of Paramount. That corporation had a name that I don’t know the name of. I think Clover was the first part of it. Maybe it was Cloverdale. When Drew [Goddard, LOST writer] was putting a name to the project, there was supposed to be a name for the project like there was for The Manhattan Project. So he said, “I am going to use that weird mysterious thing,” and he misheard it. He didn’t even understand that it wasn’t Cloverfield, it was Cloverdale. Maybe that was because of the street by J.J.’s old office, but the truth is he just misunderstood it.”
Via Wikipedia:
“The film’s final title, “Cloverfield”, is the name of the freeway exit Abrams takes to get to his Santa Monica office.” However, that exit indeed is called Cloverdale.
Here’s even more from an interview from IGN:
“There were various titles along the way, but the first title and the end title has always been Cloverfield,” explains Reeves. “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. And then we started changing the name over the course of making the movie because the irony was that when we first started no one knew anything about the movie and there was no danger in people finding out where we were and stuff. But then there was such excitement, and we were just in the early stages of shooting when the trailer came out, and that excitement spread to such a degree that we suddenly couldn’t use the name anymore. So we started using all these names like Slusho and Cheese. And people always found out what we were doing!”
Reeves adds somewhat cryptically that there was another title that they almost used…
“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. And when it finally came down to it, we thought, ‘Well, first of all, it’s been Cloverfield in our heads for all this time. And second of all … everyone already knows that it’s Cloverfield, and we’re going to change it from one word that people think is mysterious to another word that people think is mysterious? What’s the point of that?’ So we were like, ‘You know what? The movie is Cloverfield.’”
As for that “case designate” reference, anyone who has seen the clips from the film knows that “Cloverfield” is the case name that the government has assigned to whatever or whoever is doing all that destruction in New York.
“In the way that the Manhattan Project was the name of that program, that’s what this is,” says the director, though he specifies that doesn’t mean that it was created by the government the way the Manhattan Project was. “And it’s not a project per say. It’s the way that this case has been designated. That’s why that is on the trailer, and it becomes clearer in the film. It’s how they refer to this phenomenon [or] this case.”
Lastly, from IMDB:
Filming in Los Angeles was done under the fake production title “Slusho”, while shooting in New York (in 33 days until August 8, 2007) was done under the fake production title “Cheese”.
The title “Cloverfield”; initially just a codename for the movie, is named for the boulevard in Santa Monica where the Bad Robot offices were located during the making of the film.