10 years later, the original writers of 10 Cloverfield Lane look back: 'A lot of stuff changed'

Until that death, the first two-thirds of 10 Cloverfield Lane are a tense thriller where Michelle (and the viewer) tries like hell to figure out whether Goodman is lying or telling the truth. This is only further complicated by how strange and temperamental Howard acts towards Michelle, who he creepily treats as a surrogate daughter. Then again, the film’s title provides an unsubtle clue as to what may be happening above ground.

The purposefully claustrophobic movie was a radical pivot in both tone and technique for the then-nascent Cloverfield franchise, and a big reason why is because 10 Cloverfield Lane wasn’t originally written as a follow-up to the J.J. Abrams monster movie at all. Instead, screenwriters Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken crafted a script titled The Cellar, which Abrams’ production company Bad Robot acquired and changed significantly — not that the original writers are complaining.

“To get a good movie made is angels dancing on the head of a pin,” Campbell tells Polygon. “So when we saw the first cut before the movie came out, we knew it was really good and we were thrilled because it's just so easy for these things to go wrong.”

For 10 Cloverfield Lane’s 10th anniversary, Campbell and Stuecken join Polygon to discuss the making of their film. While the duo says they signed a non-disclosure agreement at the time that prevents them from saying anything negative about Bad Robot, they could still speak freely about the origins of their script, how exactly it changed during production, and why John Goodman’s prepper character was a glimpse of the future we’re living in today. Check out the full conversation, edited for clarity, below.

What was the genesis for 10 Cloverfield Lane?

Josh Campbell: Matt and I had known each other for years. I used to be a film editor, and Matt used to be a production executive for Steve Sommers. We had left our previous careers. I moved back to Los Angeles from Prague and convinced Matt to play on my soccer team. One morning we're kicking a ball around, and he's like, "Hey, I've got this idea for a movie," and he pitched me the opening scene. "Girl wakes up in a cellar. She doesn't know how she got there and there's a man who says there's a catastrophic event that happened outside and if she leaves, she's going to die." He's like, "I don't know what happens next. Do you want to write it together?"

From that day to the day Bad Robot bought the script was seven weeks.

From that point on, it took about four years to get the movie made. Damien Chazelle came on to direct for a while, then he got Whiplash financed, so he went off to do Whiplash. Then Dan Trachtenberg came on and he did an incredible job.

Matt Stuecken: The thing that we both identified in just that opening is, you have a great engine for mystery. We built the whole thing around "Who can you trust?" and "Where does the truth lie?"

In the spec version we wrote, the John Gallagher Jr. character was much more adversarial. The circle of conflict was threefold instead of the final production version, which gave [Michelle] a little bit of an ally, so it didn't always feel like you were on pins and needles. But once you have conflict, you have drama, you have a story. It was always, "How do we play with this to keep the audience pinging back and forth and just dying to know where the truth is?"

Campbell: You think: Oh, clearly John Goodman's lying. Then something happens and you're like: Oh no, maybe he's not.

In terms of that character, Matt grew up in Minnesota, and I grew up in Montana, so we were probably more aware of prepper culture than a lot of people when we wrote this in 2012. We thought there was this really delicious irony of a prepper who turned out to be right. So much of what drives Howard is, "I was fucking right and everybody else was wrong." That belief in himself and being right is why he continues to make the decisions he's making down in the cellar.

Did you guys see Howard as the a villain?

Stuecken: That changed over the course of development. In the spec version, it was very much, either he's good or he's bad. The altercation builds until the third act climax where she's forced to take him out and she escapes. In the script we sold, she's cresting a hill and way in the distance is a devastated city, just completely wiped out. You watch as she pulls her hazmat suit back down over her face and we roll credits. In that version, he was telling the truth. He wasn't all good, but he wasn't responsible for killing other people.

Campbell: The dramatic question of the movie in our early drafts was, "Is Howard telling the truth or is he about to do something terrible to her?" In our early drafts, he was telling the truth, but because he's such a fucking weirdo, she didn't believe him. And so there was just a tremendous amount of irony there. The way Matt and I thought about this as we were writing it was, the secret of the movie is Howard's the protagonist, but you don't know that until the end.

A lot of stuff changed over the course of development, but that helped us a lot with writing it. You want antagonists to feel like the protagonists in their world, like they're doing the right thing.

Stuecken: Just to make it clear, it wasn't like, "Oh, he was actually a warm, fuzzy guy." He ran her off the road because he knew this impending danger was coming and he claims he did it to save her life. He still had a lot of weird stuff. He had lost custody of his daughter due to being a little off-kilter, and there was a little bit of subtext that she was the surrogate daughter he lost. He was damaged goods, but he wasn't necessarily a murderer.

In the final version, where it’s uncovered that he’d killed a girl before, he’s much more explicitly villainous. Did you guys support that change?

Stuecken: It's the nature of the film industry. I mean, they could have done the version that we wrote without changing a word, and maybe it works or maybe it doesn't. It's the magic of a collaborative process where you hope enough decisions are made that are the right decision, and "right" is so subjective. So I don't think we can play a game of "What if?"

Campbell: Matt and I having worked in the business for quite a while before we got together as writing partners, we understand just getting a movie made is an absolute miracle.

By it becoming a Cloverfield movie, it does kind of tip it off that something did happen in the outside world. Did you guys have any reservations about it becoming part of that franchise?

Stuecken: You're torn as a writer. You want it to be your own thing, but the second it became part of the Clover-verse, you're like, "Oh my God, they're going to do a huge push in marketing. They're really going to get behind this." It's easy to play Monday morning quarterback and guess, "Maybe had it come out under the title of The Cellar, it would've become its own thing." At the same time, maybe it wouldn't have gotten noticed. But then I think of A Quiet Place coming out a few years later and being its own thing.

Campbell: It's worth talking a little bit about why we wrote this movie and what our thoughts were. If you want to make a career in Hollywood, it’s very important to get a movie made early in your career. There used to be a time when writers could work for decades in this town, never get anything made, and make a very good living. Those days are long gone. So Matt and I were very mindful of that, and we thought we should write something very contained that could be made for very little money, potentially even under a million dollars.

We knew when we wrote this that we had good characters, a compelling story, but we also knew you could do it for nothing. So when it got picked up by Bad Robot, we're like, "That's great, we'll see what it becomes." But getting it made was the crucial thing for us.

How did Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s character change?

Campbell: She didn't change much from the first draft to the final movie. The character that changed the most was the John Gallagher Jr. character, and that's simply because he became more of an ally to Michelle than a third kind of area of conflict.

What was his original role?

Campbell: He's not in there to begin with, and when he shows up, Michelle thinks, Thank fucking God. There's a normal person here who can help me. Then she realizes, Oh no, he might be in cahoots with Howard and this is all part of a master plan, but then it's like, Oh, maybe not.

Stuecken: We had it set up where it was the first act turn. Howard was so upset with her he basically is like, "You know what? Screw it. I'm not going to let you kill me. Here are the keys. Get the hell out of here." So she's walking up the steps going, "This is a trap. What's going on?" and right as she pushes the door open, a guy in a hazmat suit comes flying in going, "Get back, get back, get down!" That's how we introduced him. And to be fair to the development process, I think Bad Robot was like, "Never coming out of that cellar just creates more tension and mystery.”

That character’s death is so shocking. Was that always there?

Campbell: Emmett always died. Howard always killed him. The way it happened in the original version was: Michelle finds the body when she's trying to escape. The way it happens in the final version was probably a Dan Trachtenberg idea. I'm not sure, but the way he executed it is just so stunning and shocking and compelling and just keeps you on the edge of your toes. You don't know what's going to happen next, which is why the movie works so well.

How did it feel for you when you heard that John Goodman was going to play Howard?

Campbell: When we got Goodman, we were over the moon. He has so much range. He can be the cuddly uncle or the really creepy, off-kilter guy. He brought so much to that. There's stuff in there that we did not put in the script, like him shaking his butt when he plays the song on the juke box.

Stuecken: He can do that warm, teddy bear vibe and turn on a dime to have your knees knocking because you're afraid he's going to murder you. He has a track record of being able to do that. It's really quite remarkable.

Since 2016, prepper culture has become more well-known, making the movie even more relevant than it was when it came out. Is there anything you’d like to say about that?

Campbell: I don't want to get political, but there's a certain kind of character, like we wrote for John, that has become more and more prominent in the country — this highly paranoid, distrustful, conspiracy-driven person. In some ways, the movie saw the future a little bit. That was partially by accident, but I think it was also partially because Matt and I knew people like this growing up, and we could sense that it was becoming a bigger thing.

Especially in your original draft where he was less villainous, what made you want to make that kind of person the protagonist? You must have thought those guys were nuts, right?

Campbell: They were nuts, but they were also our neighbors. We live in LA now and there's just not very many people like that. And if you're not exposed to a certain kind of person, it's really easy to either villainize or just judge and not see them with their full humanity. But I went to school with these guys, they were my friend's dads and I know Matt did too. So I think we had an understanding. I mean, Howard is a deeply traumatized, damaged individual who probably is on the spectrum, who probably has a really hard time connecting in a real human way and fell into the prepper conspiracy/4Chan world because he felt like he belonged or understood it or it justified or reflected his worldview and his life experience. We've known a lot of those people.

Stuecken: It's sort of that journalism trope where "Dog Bites Man" is not that interesting a story, but "Man Bites Dog" is. So a prepper who turns out to be right is inherently more interesting than just a crazy prepper doing crazy prepper things.