From the interview article:

James Gunn reposted THR’s Clayface review on Instagram and captioned it by saying “what a pleasure” it’s been to work with you. Generally speaking, I’m sure you’ve heard all the horror stories about working within executive-controlled cinematic universes, so is it safe to say you had a pretty ideal experience by comparison?

"I had an excellent experience, and it’s really easy for me to say that. I’m not trying to fly the flag or do some party line; I genuinely did. Everything was straightforward with James, Peter, Matt [Reeves], Lynn Harris and everybody on the whole team."

"When I first read Mike Flanagan’s script, I really wanted to lean into and honor the fact that he called it 'a tragedy in three acts' — but still do everything you can to root for the character. So after I read Mike’s script, I pitched a version of the film that everyone signed up to do, and they supported me all the way through in trying to achieve that version. I say to people, if you don’t like the film, you can’t blame them. It’s on me because I had all the support."

It also sounds like they were human beings. Clayface is dedicated to your late father, Dr. George Watkins CBE, and James and Peter Safran were very accommodating when you had to step away during post?

"Yeah, they were. We were in the thick of it, and my dad died very suddenly. As you can imagine, it was difficult. James and Peter reached out and afforded me time and were very kind at a point when there was a film to finish. So I’ll never forget that. They were very classy about it."

I’m very sorry for your loss.

"Thank you."

As mentioned, you signed on at a time when there was a Mike Flanagan-written draft, and you eventually brought in your previous collaborator, Hossein Amini, for rewrites. But when people hear Mike’s name, they think, It’s Mike Flanagan. Why wouldn’t you bet on his screenplay?

"I understand that."

However, I’ve been doing this long enough to know that there’s no such thing as a “locked script.” If there isn’t an on-set writer making tweaks, then the filmmakers and actors are the ones tinkering. Then the edit is known as the final rewrite. So even if you stuck with Mike’s draft by the time cameras rolled, changes were inevitable.

"Correct. It is exactly that. The film we made is very much in line with Mike’s brilliant script. That’s why I wanted to make the film. I’d be stupid to sign on and go, 'Well, let’s just completely re-engineer it.'"

"Scorsese says a director’s job is to make the audience fall in love with their obsessions. I just did a Q&A with director Kevin Macdonald the other day, and as directors and as people, we perceive things slightly differently. If Mike would go somewhere naturally, I might go here and Kevin might go there. It’s just the nature of it."

"Then there’s the practicalities of production. You’re building sets, and if there’s seven scenes set in the science lab, you’re like, 'Well, can we compress those into four?' You’re also working with the actors on finding and refining things, so it’s always evolving."

"I’m reading Sam Wasson’s book on Chinatown at the moment, and if you read about the evolution of that film, it’s exactly that. There were so many iterations of Robert Towne’s screenplay before you got the actual finished film."

Sicario had a Taylor Sheridan script that the entire town bid on, and Denis Villeneuve, Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro still didn’t hesitate to rewrite scenes on the day. So I’m not sure people fully understand that a script is a living document.

"People don’t understand that. There are practical realities on set, and they just naturally evolve. There’s no shade on anybody or anything. It’s just a natural evolutionary process of discovering things. If the script says there’s a brick wall — and the [otherwise perfect] building you’re scouting doesn’t have a brick wall — then you’re going to have to change it."

I just spoke to a director named David Leitch, and he recently worked with Nicholas Hoult at a time when everyone knew that Nick had a torn ACL. You, on the other hand, apparently did not know that your lead actor, Tom Rhys Harries, was privately dealing with his own torn ACL. Was there a point during filming where you spotted the hitch in his giddy-up?

"There certainly was. There’s a moment in the film when Matt gets hit by a car, and that’s when it came out. Tom had a quiet word with the stunt man about it."

"For the car stunt, you do a bit of the stunt with Tom, and then you do a bit of it with a stunt man. So the stunt team would hit Tom with a crash pad to get the first reaction, and then you’d overlap it with a real car hitting a stunt man. But Tom was like, 'The worst possible thing you can do is hit somebody on the leg and take them out at that angle.' He still did the jump and the fall, but he was frank about it. We were like, 'Yeah, we obviously don’t want to create a lifelong injury for you.' So we had to finesse how we did the stunt, but it was quite straightforward."

"But it’s not like he was cast to play Premier League or NFL football. He’s acting, so [having foreknowledge of his injury] wouldn’t have made any difference to me. I thought Tom was absolutely the right actor for the role. I also suspect that some of these film medicals don’t go that deep."

Matt lost his career after his face was disfigured, and the actor playing him withheld a major injury to avoid losing a career-changing role. The parallels between life and art are quite striking.

"Absolutely. It was always quite meta. Tom just went on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to promote the movie, and he sent me a screenshot of him walking out on stage and waving at the audience. He tagged it with 'very meta,' because it’s literally the same shot as when Matt goes on The Vic Chissler Show. It was so uncanny. We had referenced all these late-night shows and stolen their iconography, so it came around full circle."

Well, Tom and Nick are going to have a lot to talk about at the DCU Christmas party.

"(Laughs.) Yes, indeed."

Speaking of body horror, I can’t imagine there was time or budget to reset the prosthetics umpteen times, so was there a lot of pressure to nail some of those moments in one go?

"It was never one go, but in prep with the ADs, the question was always, 'How many takes have we got? What’s the reset time? How long will it take to shoot this?' And usually they’d go, 'It’s a 45-minute reset.' And then we were like, 'Is there anything else we can shoot during that time? Can we turn the camera around on something else?' But often, when they say it’s 45 minutes to reset, they’re usually giving themselves a little bit of flex. It was usually 30 minutes to reset."

"Beyond the practicalities of budget and time, it’s also performance. If Tom has contact lenses and [prosthetics] on, his eyes or his skin might start to dry out after a certain amount of time. So there was a practical limit on it."

Matt’s lack of impulse control is the ultimate issue here, but I do appreciate the manner in which you utilized AI as the unpredictable activating agent in all this. Within the past few weeks especially, we’ve learned just how deceptive and unreliable AI can be, so your movie accurately underscores that danger.

"Any horror film, to be interesting, should tap into anxieties that we all have. Whether it’s social horror or technological horror, you want to get under people’s skin. In this case, we do it literally. So the body horror of it all relates to the real fears of our bodies betraying us and then the use of AI in medicine. Who knows, maybe it will be able to provide solutions down the line, but it’s a real fear that we have right now. What are the guardrails, if any? So [AI’s role in the creation of Clayface] was definitely one of the elements that appealed to me about trying to pull this cautionary tale off."

The third-act nightclub sequence is a showstopper. How complicated was it to piece that together given all of Matt’s shapeshifting?

"Practically, it was very complicated, and we tried to do as much of it as possible in camera. If somebody went behind a pillar and somebody else came out the other side, it required a lot of planning to capture a moment like that in camera. So it was most exhausting because I was still shooting other material and also trying to work out how to shoot and storyboard the entire sequence. We had storyboards in the corner of the stage, and I’d work on them during lunch or whenever I could. I’d even take them home to make tweaks during weekends. So I’m really proud of it, but it was probably the most daunting sequence I’ve ever shot."

"It came to me quite late in the process. I really wanted to beef up Matt’s journey upstairs [to confront mobster Markos Szabo]. I kept talking about capturing the feeling of Robin Hood movies, or a film like El Cid, where they storm the castle. Before the hero can reach the keep and rescue Maid Marian or whoever, they have to fight their way through the outer defenses. I also wanted to show Matt discovering and experiencing the dark glee that comes with his powers. He’s been on quite a tough ride to that point, and I wanted to give the audience permission to enjoy the payback."

Unless my eyes deceive me, how did you get Aaron Paul to show up for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot as Matt’s dad, “Jimmy One-Nut”?

"He is a very nice man and a wonderful actor. The team was talking about the casting of Jimmy One-Nut, and I said, 'Well, what about Aaron Paul?' It just so happened that he was between Paris and London. He was not on the other side of the planet from where we were shooting in England."

He lives in Paris now.

"There you go. So he said, 'Yeah.' And he was such a gentleman. I’d love to work with Aaron again. He came in, and it’s just the moment, right?"

Did he ever comment about the name Jimmy One-Nut?

"(Laughs.) He had a good sense of humor about it. He didn’t mind. [Writer’s Note: Minutes after this interview ended, EW reported that Paul actually filmed a number of flashbacks that hit the cutting room floor.]"

Is the idea behind the final fantasy with Caitlyn that he can not only turn himself into another person, but he can simultaneously mold himself into a second person if he so pleases?

"Yeah, there’s been some sort of growth [since we saw his remnants go down the storm drain]. If you look at the comics, Clayface gets quite big. He’s massive in some of them. So whatever happened during that kill-switch moment, there’s been this amplification of the monster. So maybe there’s just more of him, and he’s able to use a bit of him to create somebody else."

When he adopts another person’s being, he likely inherits their vocal properties to some degree, but I did wonder at first if the actor in him was just mimicking each voice. How do you see it?

"You can read it both ways, perhaps. When he first becomes Eddie Marsan’s Frank, he gets the voice wrong before he gets it right. Clayface is a character whose superpower is mutability, the ability to shapeshift, and Matt, the person behind him, is already a brilliant actor with a brilliant mimetic quality. So what I thought was most interesting was that the superpower has a superpower. There’s potentially a collision between the two, which makes it interesting. Of course, we have quite a lot of fun with it and lean into the idea of an actor playing different characters."

"Eddie Marsan told me his son asked who he’s playing in Clayface, and Eddie was like, 'I’m Clayface.'"

Hey, he wasn’t lying.

"(Laughs.) Exactly."

What did you learn and apply from test screenings?

"Jon Harris, my longtime editor, and I like to test informally before we test formally. We show the film to a lot of people and try to understand what we sometimes can’t see ourselves. First, there’s pace, then clarity, then point of view and character identification."

"You always learn something. Often, you learn what’s extraneous. If you’re hanging on to something, you’ll realize during a test screening that you don’t even need to wait for the cards to come back at the end. You’re already like, 'Yeah, we don’t need that.'"

"Someone said to me once that test screenings are a necessary pain for directors, but I don’t think so. It’s a really, really useful tool; it just needs to be used well. You get a fantastic amount of data, feedback and information — and then it’s about making sure the solutions are right."

"It’s the same with notes. Often, you’ll get a note on a script or a cut, and you’re like, What’s the note behind the note? Sometimes, you get notes with prescriptions. People will say, 'Oh, why don’t you try that?' And you’re like, 'Well …' But they’re scratching away at something. If ten people tell you you’re drunk, lie down."

Clayface has a couple Batman-related Easter Eggs. Matt’s penthouse coffee table is Joker’s coffee table from Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). And the chair on which he receives his plastic surgery consultation is the same barber-style chair that Jack Napier sat on during his botched surgery in Burton’s pic. But did you ever pitch a 'Where’s Waldo'-style shot where you insert a tiny silhouette of Batman on a rooftop in a wide shot?

"Now I’m slightly annoyed that I didn’t do that. I probably could have done it in the deep background of a massive wide shot. No one would probably ever know. But anything bigger than that, I just felt that this is Matt Hagen’s story. The idea of trying to crowbar in another character would feel too cute or too tricksy and somehow inauthentic."

Did everybody make a fuss about the Batman (1989) props?

"Yeah, there was a lot of geeking out on set. Everybody was going, 'Oh, wow, look at this.' There’s quite a lot of Brian De Palma references as well. The scene in the nightclub, when Matt, as Cadillac Sal, is forced to sit at the table, that’s very much an homage to Carlito’s Way. Carlito is trying to walk through his club, but he gets dragged back to a table. And the costumes are similar, very knowingly."

You shot in Liverpool where Matt Reeves’ The Batman movies shoot. Did you have to avoid any locational overlap since Matt’s movies are not a part of the DCU?

"I didn’t want to have the same buildings be the same buildings. It wasn’t so much about the DC universe; I just didn’t want to just copy somebody else. It feels lazy. There is so much great architecture in Liverpool. We had all the references, so we just made sure that if we were anywhere in the same vicinity that we put our own spin on it. James Price is an absolutely brilliant production designer. He’s really, really bloody good, so we had a good time."

When Matt disposes of Cadillac Sal, he says, 'And hell’s coming with me.' Was that a tribute to Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp in Tombstone?

"It’s a great movie line, but it wasn’t in my consciousness, initially. I’ve obviously seen Tombstone, but I didn’t remember that. There’s lots of other little movie references and nods in the movie. Corey’s death scene…"

“You broke my heart.”

"Yeah, that was very much stolen from The Godfather Part II. Some of the shots were also very much an homage to that moment and how Michael hugs Fredo. So there’s quite a few little moments that pay homage. You are what you eat, aren’t you?"

Have you spitballed any sequel concepts yet?

"Genuinely, no. I’ve been on a long, long road trying to make this film the best it can be. People ask, 'What are you doing next?' And I’m slightly starting to worry because I have no idea. I’ve been that immersed in Clayface."

What day best sums up that long, long road?

"There are so many. We were doing a lot of icky stuff, and when Matt overdoses and spits out these horrible things in front of Naomi’s character [Caitlyn], I’ll always remember Naomi’s laugh. It was just too much to take for her. I would also say the airplane sequence. We shot it with a gimbal in the airplane toilet, and Tom was in full prosthetics. He was getting chucked about the lavatory as he was digging the scissors into his eyes. People generally don’t talk on film sets for obvious reasons, but on a set with a hundred people, I heard 50 people at various monitors go, 'Oh my God!' So I do remember thinking at that moment, Yeah, this scene’s got a chance."

I still have some amount of sympathy for Matt, but his decision to murder Max Minghella’s cop character, John, is an awfully bitter pill to swallow. As I was watching, I kept thinking, Oh, John is not going to be able to collar Matt without implicating Caitlyn. Thus, he’s going to become the type of cop that he’s condemned throughout the movie, one who looks the other way. So it’s a shocking move because Matt probably didn’t have to go that far due to John’s Catch-22.

"That’s good in terms of misdirection. But you’re approaching it from John’s point of view. Matt’s point of view probably wouldn’t see it that way."

Yeah, Matt is probably not thinking about John’s legal dilemma. He just wants to be the object of Caitlyn’s affection in any way can, even if it means shapeshifting into her fiancé (John).

"It’s all quite interesting, and I think a lot of people share your feelings. There’s been audible gasps in the cinema when John’s death is revealed. Max brilliantly plays the character. He could have so easily been the third wheel and a bit of a sap, but he brings such humanity, warmth and humor to him."

"Looking at it in terms of Matt’s character motivations, he’s in the crosshairs. He’s under suspicion. But the nanos are taking over him, and these primal impulses are bubbling up within him. So, from a normal point of view, you might go, No, no, no. But from his point of view, it’s explicable. It doesn’t mean we have to like it, but he’s acting out of some combination of self-defense, love and a weird obsession. He’s just gone at that point."

From the article:

If you were paying close attention to all the shapeshifting chaos from the finale club-scene bloodbath of Clayface, then you caught a glimpse of a surprising (and brief) celebrity cameo.

As Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) makes his way through Vesuvius to take down mobster Markos Szabo (David Dencik) and his girlfriend, Mia Torrez (Joana Ribeiro), he confronts the gang member who killed his father, Jimmy "One Nut," by transforming himself into his deceased old man. The actor playing Matt's dad is Aaron Paul, the Breaking Bad and Westworld veteran soon to be seen on Fallout season 3.

Paul's casting was leaked in the months leading up to the release of Clayface. "He has a real brief Easter egg kind of moment," director James Watkins, also known for Speak No Evil and Eden Lake, confirms to Entertainment Weekly.

The final cut of Clayface features flashbacks to Matt's life growing up in the slums of Gotham City, well before he becomes a rising actor in Hollywood. Seth Thomas can be seen as a younger Matt, while Ishtar Currie Wilson was cast to play his mother. However, additional flashbacks were shot over the course of a few days with Paul playing the abusive father.

The team wasn't sure how much of that material would be used. Eventually, after further discussion, it was largely cut. A brief blip of Paul as Jimmy in that impressive fight sequence is the last remnant of what almost was.

"In terms of trying to figure out the character, it was, How much is Matt defined by his past and how much is he an everyman?" Watkins explains. "At one point, we were looking at it and thinking, Is it the 'sins of the father'? But actually, as we worked on the script, I thought that notion of revenge was more universal and more relatable to all of us. It doesn't matter whether you're carrying a trauma or any of that. If we're slighted, we carry this sense of being wronged and we all want to do something, but generally in life we can't do anything about it and we're powerless."

Watkins feels that sentiment is at the root of audiences' collective love for revenge movies, citing John Wick and The Equalizer. "With Matt, it's not that he's a bad guy trying to be good," the filmmaker continues. "He's a decent guy, but then like all people, we all have primal impulses within us that can be dangerous, whether that's impulses for love, whether that's impulses for retribution."

With that change in perspective came a change in approach to Paul's character. Instead of haunting Matt through flashbacks, Matt uses the ghost of Jimmy as a weapon against those who wronged him. "He's probably also saying, 'No, I'm not my father,'" Watkins posits.

The director calls that larger sequence in the Vesuvius club "the dark glee of the film." It's the point when Matt is flaunting the full range of his shapeshifting abilities. It was a balance — between the levity of a playful Matt mingling with the dancing patrons and the brutality of slaughtering his foes — that Watkins worked hard to strike.

"I hate it in movies when a normal person suddenly becomes like a Navy SEAL and they suddenly can be this ninja," he says. "I kept saying in that scene, Matt's superpower is his ability to shift and to change. It's his ability to disguise...and then earning a kind of complicity with the audience. The audience being locked in with Matt and enjoying it, saying we're all together on this ride, then when he starts going too far, it puts the audience in a queasy spot."

The casting of Paul in Clayface, even for such a brief role, reunites the actor with Max Minghella, playing Gotham P.D. Detective John Borrelli. The two worked on the 2016 mystery-thriller The 9th Life of Louis Drax. Watkins says that film could have "possibly unconsciously" made enough of an impression to cast them both for the DC Studios horror. "They're both amazing actors and really nice people and a delight to work with," he adds.

Clayface is playing now in theaters.

To put this into more perspective, she hasn't liked any of James Gunn's recent posts regarding Clayface, Lanterns, Batman Day, etc. This is the first post of his she's liked in months.

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“They turned me into a monster.”

Discussion of all reviews and reactions for Clayface go here.

The below may contain spoilers.

Rotten Tomatoes

Critics Consensus: TBD

Tomatometer |Number of Reviews |Average Rating
77% |94 Reviews |6.7/10 Metacritic: 62 (15 reviews)

Sample Reviews

Daily Telegraph - 4/5

“It cannot be overstated how much fun it is to soak up a film like this on what feels like its creators’ largely unhindered terms.”

Houston Chronicle - 4/5

“Watkins has created a more personal story that becomes surprisingly moving as Hagen wrestles with his newfound power, the compulsion for revenge and the desire to not be alone.”

Guardian - 2/5

“Even as a similarly new way in, as a relatively standalone horror movie for those who wouldn’t now rush toward a superhero caper, it’s a clumsily missed opportunity.”

Variety - Positive

“Perhaps the characters and conflicts introduced here would pall if given the franchise treatment, but in the context of a single, genre-melding romp, they’re fresh and ickily enjoyable”

Consequence - B

“The scariest, freakiest movie ever made based on a DC Comics property (insert your own jokes here about Gene Hackman's Superman wig).”

Indiewire - C+

“The uneven nature of the film, its plotting, its character motivations, and its aims only become bigger and bloodier as the film winds on. Malleable, sure, but this ambitious misfire can never conform to one shape, one final form, or one good idea”

HeyUGuys - 4/5

“Clayface is a gamble that pays off, and a reminder that the best comic-book adaptations are often those that remember their original pulpy credentials.”

RollingStone - Negative

“The equivalent of eating a handful of Play-Doh™, and twice as flavorless”

Here's the five-parter question but split into individual ones --

Q: "Will [DCU] Batman’s suit have the same texture as Superman’s suit?"

A: "Batman's suit isn't designed yet."

Q: "Is Wally West currently active or not yet?"

A: "Who knows?"

Q: "Since Blue Beetle is canon, was Ted Kord friends with Blue Beetle before he disappeared?"

A: "Blue Beetle the character is canon. We have not said the movie is."

Q: "Are you the one who will be writing and directing the Teen Titans movie? personally, I could see you doing it."

A: "No."

Q: "Black Adam, the Justice Society and [the] Shazam movie [are] canon?"

A: "No."

An additional separate Q&A --

Q: "I recall you saying at the announcement of 'Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters', that once a character is cast, they will be played by the same actor across every medium. Is that still true?"

A: "In most cases that will be true of major characters is what I said."

Did that heartbreak ultimately lead you to say no to Lanterns? Did one lead to the other?

No, it was just one of those things. Lanterns, I love those actors, and I’ve seen it. I hope that it’s killing it. If I decide not to do something, I never really think, Oh, had I done it, it could have been better. Birdman was that way when I saw what Edward Norton did with it. I was like, That’s excellent. It’s not necessarily what would’ve transpired had I done it, but there’s no comparison. Matt Damon was supposed to do Milk before me, and because it pushed, he had to go do something else that he was required to do. So I went in there and did my version of that. But Lanterns, I don’t know, maybe it was too close [to Outer Range]. I really loved Outer Range, and seeing what those actors — Tom Pelphrey, Lewis Pullman, Imogen Poots — have done since then makes me very happy. To me, it’s a great middle finger to those people who canceled that show. It’s like, You had gold. So that’s how I perceive it.

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