THE DEADBOLT: What was it about? Do you remember?

MICHAEL: Yeah. It was this whole speech about "You guys can't stop me. I'm gonna go look for her." But the movie doesn't have a lot of monologues, which is what makes it feel real and not like a movie.

THE DEADBOLT: That naturally leads to questions about the writing. Drew Goddard is a great writer, but with the natural style of a film like this one, people might think that a lot of dialogue would be adlibbed. Was it mostly locked in or did you guys improvise on-set?

MICHAEL: Drew wrote the script. The story was never changed. Sometimes the dialogue would be changed a little bit just to make it feel more comfortable in my mouth or because sometimes, for this kind of weird handheld thing, it felt like it had to be as clipped as possible. Other times I would be like "I don't know about this line" and I'd try something but, in the end, I'd end up going right back to exactly what he had written and that worked the best. He gave us a nice foundation from which to tweak things here and there if we wanted to.

THE DEADBOLT: Was he on-set regularly?

MICHAEL: He wasn't on-set that much.

THE DEADBOLT: What about J.J.?

MICHAEL: J.J. was on-set a couple of times only but he was watching the dailies every day and talking to Matt on the phone every night. He was filming something else at the time. But he was there during all of the auditions and when they were mixing the trailer. He was just kind of consulting. But he did make some critical input into what we were doing.

THE DEADBOLT: How intense was the secrecy on the project? So little has been revealed until the last week or so. What were you told and would you be thrown in jail if you told me the ending?

MICHAEL: I think the whole secrecy thing is kind of fun. J.J., Bryan Burk, and Matt Reeves have known each other since college or even younger and they're best friends. They come up with this idea they're really excited about but they're really serious too and you just don't want to mess it up for them. But, yeah, it was tight. They were really strict with extras not taking pictures and there was this one day where I was like "My script? I don't know. It was in my trailer last night but now I'm not sure where it is." And they were like, "What?!?!" It turned out the cleaning lady had put it in a drawer but there was this moment of like "Oh, no, no, no, I'll find it" met with (seriously) "You'll FIND it." And I was on-set about to do a scene and I was like "Oh sh*t." I think that they've managed to pull it off and they've had SO many people working against them to try and find out.

THE DEADBOLT: People are more excited about Cloverfield than any film in a while. Was there a film or films that you got fanboy about?

MICHAEL: Honestly, I'm more of a movie buff now than I ever was before. I didn't use to watch a lot of movies. I mostly went to the theatre. Actually, I was really excited to see There Will Be Blood the other day and I went to one of the first screenings of that.

THE DEADBOLT: Did you like it?

MICHAEL: I loved it.

THE DEADBOLT: Well, you might have just answered this but were you ever a monster movie fan yourself? Did you even see Godzilla?

MICHAEL: I didn't. I haven't seen Godzilla or The Blair Witch Project. I did see The Host last year. My girlfriend and their family are much more into pop culture. She's like this tough girl - really smart and really tough. She never loses her cool. But if you take her to a monster movie she's screaming louder than anybody. I think that's wonderful. She should be a paid screamer. So, we saw that and I really enjoyed it.

THE DEADBOLT: What's next? The Project? Is that done?

MICHAEL: Yeah. It's done and it will be screamed at the Slamdance Film Festival next week. I'm going out there right after the premiere. Hopefully, that will get some distribution. There's a trailer for it on YouTube. It's a pretty great movie.

THE DEADBOLT: What's it about?

MICHAEL: It's also filmed in a documentary-style. It's about these filmmakers who move to New York City and want to make a movie about cops and kids from the projects. They don't really know what they're doing and things get out of control. There are some amazing performances by kids in the movie and it has Juelz Santana in the movie. He plays one of the gangsters. It's got this new thing. It's weird to do two movies back-to-back that are this handheld documentary-style.

THE DEADBOLT: That raises a question. Do you find it easier or harder to work in that style? Some might think it easier because you can be more natural but it might be hard to pretend to be that natural.

MICHAEL: For me, it's easier. You can be messier with it. You look at a movie like Atonement where the acting is very crisp and stylized. It's not exactly realistic but it works in that context very well. Or There Will Be Blood, where there's amazing performances but also style. It requires holding still more than I naturally would at times to be effective. Where as, with this, it's like you really try to behave as completely naturally as possible.

In case you haven't heard, Cloverfield opens this Friday, January 18th.