Director Matt Reeves on How Let Me In Will Be Different and Why Cloverfield 2 Is Delayed
Posted 07.28.10 by Ryan
After finding success with Cloverfield, director Matt Reeves is directing a remake of the critically acclaimed Swedish vampire movie, Let the Right One In. Reeves, who's a fan of the original, wanted to expose the story to a larger audience with his version, Let Me In. "It's a very Scandinavian film," Reeves told MTV. He believes that the reason some Americans didn't care for the original is because "the relationships in Let the Right One In likely feel foreign and maybe keep you from identifying as much with those characters."
That doesn't mean that Reeves plans to wildly differ from the Swedish original, even though the movie is set in the U.S. It still takes place in the 1980s, in an apartment building where a lonely 12-year-old (Kodi Smit-McPhee) befriends the girl who moves in next door (Chloe Moretz) and just happens to be a vampire. Reeves says that the time period is a critical thematic element in the remake.
The idea of [former President Ronald Reagan's "evil empire" speech and that whole sort of school of thought was that evil was something that was outside of us. Evil was "Other," it was over there, it was the Soviets. [The young characters in Let Me In] would be grappling with these very, very dark feelings but being in a kind of American town where there was that sort of [Reagan era] mindset and religiousness. How would you fit in? How would you feel about yourself being confused and being 12 or 13 years old and not knowing what it means that you wish you could kill those kids who were terrorizing you every day? I'm interested in those sort of universal character themes, but also the specificity of the culture that it's from. But what I was really interested in doing was taking those same sort of themes... but putting them in an American context.
Reeves has also changed the tone of the movie, wanting to capture John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel as he experienced it.
I will say in terms of the tone that I was trying to ... as much as possible put you into the main character of Owen and the idea of experiencing all of this [through him]. I love ... the vampire story as a metaphor for this pain of his adolescence and the loneliness. The idea of being rooted to his point of view.
Reeves hopes he's created a "very tender coming-of-age love story" that is also a "a very suspense-filled and, in a way, dread-filled experience." Not unlike Reeves' Cloverfield, for example, which doesn't look like it is getting a sequel any time soon.
Reeves told MTV UK that Cloverfield 2 was "on hold."
Cloverfield 2 is on hold for now, J.J. [Abrams] is very involved with Super 8 and I've been doing Let Me In, so we have shelved it until we can get the team from the first back together.
With Let Me In headed to theaters on October 1, we can at least hope Cloverfield 2 is next up.