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Recently Released In Theaters Reviews
Public Enemies Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs The Hurt Locker Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen The Proposal Year One Whatever Works Dead Snow The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 Away We Go The Hangover Land of the Lost Up Drag Me to Hell Night at the Museum Battle of the Smithsonian Recently Added Spotlights Paul Rudd Jason Segel Nicolas Cage Rose Byrne Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore Jared Padalecki Amanda Righetti Clive Owen Naomi Watts Joaquin Phoenix Steve Martin Renee Zellweger Liam Neeson Maggie Grace Dustin Hoffman |
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 Lizzy Caplan
Interview By: Michael Dance Spending just a few minutes with actress Lizzy Caplan gives you the distinct impression that she’s quite similar to the sarcastic, matter-of-fact Marlena, the character she plays in the new Blair Witch-meets-Godzilla flick Cloverfield. A little less of a hipster, maybe, but the humor is still very much there. “I was actually really hoping that I got this role,” she explains, “obviously because it was J.J. and all that, but also because I needed a concrete reason not to do this other film that would’ve required me to fly to Prague two times in two weeks and show my boobies.” The J.J. she speaks of is of course producer J.J. Abrams, one of the minds behind Lost and Alias, as well as the director of Mission: Impossible-3. During publicity for that movie, he found himself in a toy store overseas lined with row upon row of Godzilla products – and wondered why the U.S. didn’t have a giant monster they could call their own. Thus, Cloverfield was born – an account of a monster’s attack on Manhattan as seen through the video camera of a group of frantic twentysomethings. The master plan that Abrams came up with involved absolute secrecy on the project – which meant that the actors didn’t even know what the movie was about when they auditioned. “We were given one scene that was just kids in their twenties, and they’re going to this party, and they don’t get along,” Caplan says. “It seemed very much like this coming-of-age, twenties, urban movie. Then for the callbacks, we had to do that same scene coupled with a new scene where we were in France, and the girl was plunging an adrenaline shot into the heart of the guy. Then they asked us what we thought this movie was about, and we kind of guessed, and then they laughed maniacally at us because we had no idea. And then we later found out that scene was from Alias and was not going to be in the movie at all, and they were just trying to throw us off.” One of the film’s subplots – in between all the screaming and the monster attacks, of course – is the relationship between Caplan’s Marlena and the guy holding the camera, Hud, played by T.J. Miller. “T.J. is in love with me, in real life as well, so it was probably easy for him,” she says. (Miller, who’s in the room: “That’s not true at all.”) “So it’s easier, for him, to force an attraction, a real connection. But that’s why I call myself an actress,” she deadpans. In all seriousness, they both seemed to enjoy having something to do in the film besides scream in terror – and the handheld-video, super-realistic format helped them get into it. “We really tried to make a relationship between these two characters that carries throughout the film,” Caplan says. “There are so few scenes of them ... |
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