“Clayface” represents quite a few milestones for James Gunn and Peter Safran’s tenure running DC Studios. An R-rated horror movie about a minor Batman villain, the film is the first true test of their thesis that DC Comics mythology is diverse and complex enough to support a wide range of films in completely different genres. Its creative team has some serious horror bona fides: the film was pitched by Mike Flanagan, who wrote the original script that remained largely intact after revisions by Hossein Amini; and directed by none other than James Watkins, whose filmography includes spooky hits like “The Woman in Black” and “Speak No Evil.” But most notable of all, perhaps, is the fact that “Clayface” gives us our first look at the DC Studios take on Gotham City.
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The fictional urban epicenter that houses Batman and his many foes is the ultimate backdrop for comic book filmmaking. Directors ranging from Tim Burton to Christopher Nolan have each put their own distinct visual spin on the urban setting. And while Gunn and Safran have not announced a Batman of their own (the Matt Reeves/Robert Pattinson series is continuing, but exists separately from their interconnected universe), everyone knows it’s coming at some point. After almost two decades of cinematic universes dominating Hollywood, it would be fair to assume that every second of this film’s take on the city would be meticulously supervised to set up future projects.
But that couldn’t be further from Watkins’ experience. During a recent conversation with IndieWire on the Warner Bros. lot, the British director opened up about making his first comic book movie. As he tells it, working with some of the most valuable IP on the planet didn’t meaningfully change his filmmaking process.
“There weren’t mandates, there was no ‘You need to do this, you need to do that,'” Watkins said of designing his take on Gotham. “I’ve got a very, very, very brilliant production designer, James Price, he did ‘Poor Things,’ he won an Oscar. And we worked trying to design what we felt was the right version of Gotham for our story. This kind of overbearing, overpowering, the cities dominating the people, the slightly retro feel of it. We looked a lot of photography from New York, from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and tried to copy that in the light, and in the neons, and in the slightly dirty poetry of it. And so we just presented it and said ‘This is what we’re going to do,’ and people were excited by it.”
The process may not have been as seamless in every franchise, but Watkins credits the environment that Gunn and Safran have fostered at DC Studios, which prioritizes supporting filmmakers and treating each project as an individual work of art rather than a piece in a larger puzzle.
“I pitched my version of the movie and everybody signed up, and everyone was like, ‘Yeah, we all are aligned, we’re into this,'” he said. “It was just an incredibly supportive atmosphere of how to achieve it. They wanted to lean into that, and I think they try to be filmmaker-driven and they trusted me. And it was great… If you try and do things algorithmically, I just don’t think it works. People can smell it, or it just feels engineered in some way. It’s got to come from passion, it’s got to come from point of view, it’s got to come from ‘Here’s a story idea and a character idea that we’re chasing.'”
In this case, that story idea was a man with a face that might as well be clay. More specifically, it’s the story of Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), an actor whose one night stand with a mob wife makes him a powerful enemy. It isn’t long before the Gotham mob hacks up his face with a switchblade and spreads a series of false rumors that end his promising acting career and leave him with a hopeless future. His only hope is an experimental treatment developed by Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), which restores his money-making face but brings some unintended consequences. Matt might be beautiful on the surface again, but the vengeance in his heart and his newfound ability to shapeshift lead him down a tragic path towards becoming one of Gotham’s fiercest villains.
Watkins explained that he was drawn to the multifaceted nature of Flanagan’s script, which allowed him to incorporate Cronenberg-inspired creature design and old school effects (whenever Matt’s face isn’t moving, it’s practical), body-switching comedy (almost everyone in the cast eventually gets to play Clayface for a scene or two), and a classically dark corruption arc for the titular antihero.
“Obviously there was the body horror. But it was also a grounded, character-led origin story,” he said. “I don’t like just doing clockwork horror, I like the sense of a story that comes from character, comes from emotion. And so, the journey between him and between Matt Hagen and Caitlyn Corr, and their connection and the sort of weird love story of it all, the love triangle, the heartbreak, the tragedy… Matt is this guy that’s traumatized, that repressed pain comes back. So, I just took Mike’s script, and it was all there. It was just bringing out and just refining and bringing those things out.”
Much of the initial discourse around “Clayface” will revolve around how we classify it. Is it really a horror movie, or just a Batman villain movie with a bit more gore? Everyone will have to answer that question for themselves, but Watkins isn’t losing sleep over it. Much like beauty, genres are only skin deep — but the storytelling principles beneath the surface don’t change.
“I don’t know that it was that different. For me, even though it’s a comic book universe, it’s still real people,” he said. “I’m trying to keep it grounded, trying to keep within the emotion of those characters, trying to understand where they’re coming from, what they want. The more we can get under the skin of the people, I think the more you get under the skin of the horror as well.”
A Warner Bros. release, “Clayface” opens in theaters on Friday, October 23.