Abrams Talks Super 8 Monster, Kids

In an interview with io9, the director J.J. Abrams discusses the Super 8 monster, working with kids and more. Below are a full segments, the full interview can be found here.

The monster is a tricky thing from the story [perspective] to make work. The reason it's in the movie is that it's a physical manifestation of the struggle going on inside this boy who has lost his mother. The idea of confronting this thing, the inevitability of having to confront this thing, really maps the inevitability of having to deal with that loss and figure out a way to get past it. And so having to see and confront this thing that's the scariest thing in the world, by definition, this creature has to be terrible.

...a huge question for me, which was how do we avoid just doing a greatest hits of the 70s, and part of it was literally to avoid just that kind of thing, stuff that was just there for the sake of being there. It's tricky, like what songs do you use? You kind of want to use like that second tier kind of song that was known but not necessarily the top ten [hit]. Though "My Sharona" made sense because it literally came out that summer.

As a father of three, the idea of wrangling these kids felt familiar to me. Steven gave me great advice, which was just to give them line readings, to tell them how you want the line read. And normally that's something I never think to do, but it was actually great advice. I used that a bit.