The deeper DC universe continues to be mined with this fall’s Clayface which is making a big, though secret (shhhh) splash here at San Diego Comic-Con this morning in DC’s Jim Lee and Friends panel taking place at 11:30am at Room 6DE in the Convention Center.
The jumping off point here for another R-rated take on a DC villain post 2019’s Oscar winning The Joker arrived in Doctor Sleep Mike Flanagan’s screenplay which was an ode to the Matt Hagen version of the Batman bad guy in The Batman Animated Series two-part episodes “Feat of Clay”. The origin follows Hagen, a struggling actor, who is injected with a chemical Renuyu to reform his face. The drug was created by evil businessman Roland Daggett who manipulates Hagen to take over Wayne Enterprises.
DC co-Boss Peter Safran calls Mike Flanagan’s screenplay “amazing, a great analysis of superficiality and celebrity culture, the story of how one bad decision can change everything.”
Safran and DC’s co-Honcho James Gunn courted genre filmmakers to deliver what is arguably the first horror film for the DCU, and were won over by British filmmaker James Watkins who delivered a ratcheted thriller in the Blumhouse remake of Danish-Dutch film Speak No Evil starring James McAvoy. Watkins also has a knack for delivering high-end genre pics at responsible prices, read Speak No Evil was quite profitable netting $50M off a $15M production cost and $76.7M global gross. He also directed the Daniel Radcliffe $16M 2012 spooky movie, The Woman in Black, which made close to $129M worldwide. As such, with Clayface, which comes at a reported cost of $40M, it’s a means for DC to make movies of different shapes and sizes, not just $100M+ superhero movies. “We want our slate to be something for everyone –the genre fans, the Batman villain fans, but not everything has to be for everyone,” Safran tells Deadline.
In the big screen take of Clayface, Hagen is a matinee idol on the rise, but his face gets slashed by thugs. His given the saving grace to have it repaired with an injection formula.
As San Diego Comic-Con kicks off, here’s our conversation with Watkins on his Clayface:
DEADLINE: Did DC approach you for Clayface or did you approach them?
JAMES WATKINS: They came to me. They sent me the script by Mike Flanagan, which I read and thought, this is really interesting. The journey of this, the bones of this is a monster story, a story of identity, of who we are, and how we define ourselves. This is a story of a guy who had built up this career, and then it gets smashed away, and how he tried to get it back. It’s a very relatable human thing. But also sort of mythic, almost going back to classic storytelling, this sort of shape shifter story, and Frankenstein story of it all. I had lot of conversation with the guys at DC. They came to me, but then I sort of had to prove my proof that I had something they could work with.
DEADLINE: Did you have to go full-out slideshow and vision reel in your pitch, or were you like, ‘No, here’s my James McAvoy film.’?
WATKINS: I came on board with a whole lot of stuff that I threw at them. I’m like ‘Here’s the Gotham world, this is what I would do with it.’ It’s sort of the same conversation I had with Couper Samuelson and Jason Blum at Blumhouse when I did Speak No Evil. I’m like ‘Look, this is the place where I would go. If this is the place where you think you actually want to go, then we should all go there together. But if you don’t, there’s no point really taking me on the journey, because it’s going to be bad for all of us, right? It’s always good to go, ‘This is how I see it,’ and let them decide because it’s their property. I remember having this conversation on zoom and showing all sorts of really icky imagery and James Gunn looked away at one point, because he was so grossed out. But he was also like, ‘Yeah!’.
DEADLINE: Flanagan’s screenplay I understand was inspired by The Batman Animated Series episode “Feat of Clay” which tells the origin stories of Matt Hagen, but did you go full-on Clayface in your prep? Did you submerge yourself in the Alan Moore story, and everything? What did you pull from?
WATKINS: Everything, the Basil Karlo, Matt Hagen and all the variations. There’s a lot of inspirations from a lot of the various comics. For fans who want to do a deep dive, there are a lot of references. For me, I wanted to dig into the emotion of the character in a deeper way. What I really responded to in all the previous iterations was the sadness, the melancholy, the heartbreak, and give it a tragic dimension, trying to find that journey about Hagen being rejected and trying to find his way. The duality of Clayface is really interesting, he’s antihero but not wholly a villain.
DEADLINE: We’ve seen Gothan several times before, but what did you want your Gotham to be?
WATKINS: I wanted it to feel real. So, we shot on the streets of Liverpool. When I look back at films I really admire, like Croenenberg’s The Fly, they take a guy who turns into a fly. It’s impossible, but it creates a truth and a believability and proudness to it immediately. I wanted that. When I look at Gotham, James Gunn, (production designer) James Price and (DP) Rob Hardy and I looked at a lot of street photography from New York in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. You realize the palette of it, not just the Kodachrome, but the life, the texture, the costumes, the colors. And the city has a certain sort of corruption to it. Rob doesn’t use LEDs in a way that other people do. We wanted this kind of doomy romantic (look). He can shoot digital and make it look like analog. There’s a lot of sodium, dirty, orange light that diffuses and plays through the whole film and creates a rich atmosphere.
DEADLINE: The trailer has a Brian De Palma feel to it. Was that intentional?
WATKINS: There is one moment –I mean, we are what we eat, and I love De Palma– but there is one moment which you will certainly note, which is very much De Palma and a reference to Carlito’s Way. We talked a lot about De Palma, Rob and I, the way he moves the camera is always motivated and economical. There’s a brutality to it.
DEADLINE: We recently had The Substance, an award-winning body swap film, and Todd Phillips’ R-rated Joker. When it comes to making a R-rated comic book movies and a body swap film, did you feel that the bar was so high, that it’s hard to succeed? Did you feel pressure?
WATKINS: Those are both great films, but this is a very different story and a very different universe. It creates its own atmosphere, it creates its own vibe, and the story of Matt Hagen is its own story and I think it’s a compelling one and it takes people on a real roller coaster journey. It’s going to give people a lot of ick and a lot of gore. But there’s also an emotional core that gives it a dimension. When you sit and watch this, and you feel the anima of an audience responding to the film, there’s some comfort in that, I suppose.
DEADLINE: How did Tom Rhys Harries become your Clayface? What did you see him in?
WATKINS: We saw so many people and Lucy Bevan is a fantastic casting director. But Tom came in and I didn’t know his work at all, but he just gave a really interesting read. I probably put him through about four more auditions, including reading against people. There’s something slightly Clayface about Tom’w face. Clayface is a shapeshifter and I had this with James McAvoy who is a master actor, and can just shift with such a sort of microscopic gradation between being cheeky and devilish. And those sorts of shifts I felt within Tom, between being this kind of urchin, orphan quality of vulnerability that sometimes you can play, but also by a shift a manic smile that can become slightly unnerving and could do all of that within a register of keeping it real. He just felt like Matt Hagan, and when you sort of have that, it’s very hard to get beyond it.
Warner Bros and DC’s Clayface comes out on Oct. 23.
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