Summary

Collider’s Steve Weintraub talks with James Watkins for Clayface.

Watkins discusses the cinematography and giving audiences something to fear.

He also shares the inspiration behind his design for the DCU’s Gotham City.

Clayface isn’t just an origin story for one of Batman’s most infamous villains, but our very first look at DCU’s Gotham City. Originally penned by horror master Mike Flanagan, this body horror was adopted and adapted by director James Watkins (Speak No Evil) and screenwriter Hossein Amini (Drive) to explore the heartbreaking story behind Clayface’s gruesome transformation, and is the first feature in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s cinematic universe to establish the world with “no mandates at all.” In the movie, relative newcomer Tom Rhys Harries steps into the role of Matt Hagen, one of Hollywood’s leading men, far from his humble beginnings in the streets of Gotham. But when a local crime boss’s actions leave Hagen badly disfigured, he submits to innovative procedures that seem to miraculously heal his injuries before sending him into a maddening spiral of revenge. In this interview with Watkins, the filmmaker discusses with Collider’s Steve Weintraub about his creative filmmaking decisions, why leaving audiences squirming from the violence and grisly imagery is actually crucial to the film, and how he designed Gotham City to “ground it in a real world, but a real world where you feel the corruption.” Don’t miss the full interview in the video above, with a transcript provided below.
James Watkins Explains the Vintage Cinematography Behind ‘Clayface’

Plus the hidden details fans might miss on their first watch.

CloseImage via Warner Bros. PicturesImage via Warner Bros. PicturesImage via Warner Bros. Pictures

COLLIDER: I’m super excited for you because you have a winner here. I’m very, very happy for you and DC. JAMES WATKINS: Thank you. I really appreciate that. I have a ton of questions. You shot this in a super wide aspect ratio. Can you talk about why you wanted to do that? WATKINS: Just to make it epic on the screen. We wanted to kind of have an old-school feel to it. We also shot it with 1970 C Series Panavision anamorphic lenses so it takes away from the sort of digital plasticity that you often have in movies now, and it roughs it up, and it gives it a vintage feel. And Rob [Hardy]’s lighting, we wanted that. But also, in the framing, you can create separations of spaces with people. You can tell the story when you’ve got a really wide screen. If you look at possibly one of my favorite filmmakers, Sergio Leone — Once Upon a Time in the West is one of my favorite movies — if you look at how he frames, just in the image, the depth of the image, the width of the image, sort of visual space as storytelling, it just becomes… I could get very nerdy about it. If I had more time, I would allow you to. Are there any Easter eggs that people should look out for the second time they see it? WATKINS: There’s a lot of stuff. James Price, my brilliant production designer… There’s a lot of little things baked in — names of places, street signage. Yeah, you could probably pause the film in quite a few places. The graphics department… There’s a lot of stuff I don’t even know.

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‘Clayface’ Introduces the DCU’s Gotham City

Watkins shares the real-world inspirations for our new Gotham.

This is the first time we see Gotham in the DCU, and it’s like a ‘70s, ‘80s kind of vibe. It’s dirty. It’s grimy. Talk a little bit about the Gotham City that exists in this film. Did James [Gunn] and Peter [Safran] give you any feedback, like, “This is what you can do, and this is what you can’t?” WATKINS: There were no mandates at all from James and Peter. I have a brilliant production designer, James Price. I’ve worked with him a long time. I worked with him before he won an Oscar for Poor Things, and we talked a lot about Gotham. We wanted to have this corrupted city, this dirty city where people don’t pick up the trash, and we wanted to see it from top to bottom. Matt starts off in a penthouse in the sort of Manhattan of that world, and then he goes through The Narrows, and I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but we end up underground. We looked a lot at German Expressionist cinema from the ‘30s, where the buildings loom over you. People are small in it. We looked at street photography from New York. I like references often that aren’t just from other movies, so if you look at New York before it was cleaned up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and the light from that world, the neons, the reflections that those neons have are kind of beautiful but grimy, but they kind of have a grimy poetry to them. The dirt. We shot in Liverpool. I didn’t want to make a studio-bound movie. I wanted it to have the life of real streets and then to augment that, and Liverpool has brilliant architecture. People went from Liverpool to New York, and they built New York in the image of Liverpool, because it had those buildings when it was a mercantile center. So, we kind of wanted to ground it in a real world, but a real world where you feel the corruption. So, for example, when he goes to the law courts to try and get justice, there’s the Lady Justice on the top of the law courts — there’s a little gold figure on the top of the building — but she’s covered in bird shit. Gotham City. WATKINS: Exactly.
James Watkins Wants Audiences to Squirm Watching ‘Clayface’

“You want to give people a reason to go to the cinema, right?”

Image via Warner Bros. Pictures

When I watched it last night, so many times, the audience freaked out. Did you know going in this is really going to make the audience squirm?

WATKINS: Yeah. You want to give them a delicious squirm, I suppose. You know when you hear that laughter, that kind of nervous laughter, and the squirm of being with audiences? It’s like a roller coaster, right? When you hear people giddily kind of giggling on a roller coaster, you take them to a place where it’s right on the edge, and then they need that release and that relief. You want to give people a reason to go to the cinema, right? And for me, the audience experience of this movie… This is a film that should be seen with a lot of people in a cinema. People talk about cinema; it’s not the size of the screen for me — everyone has huge TVs at home, and whatever — it’s the audience. It’s the animal of the audience and experiencing that. It’s kind of like at a live concert or something for music. You kind of have that collective feel, when you feed off other people, and you enjoy that thing, and then you’re adrenalized. That’s a joy. That’s a reason. It’s expensive taking a family out, so that’s a reason to go out. Clayface opens in theaters on October 23.

Release Date

October 23, 2026

Runtime

108 Minutes

Director

James Watkins

Tom Rhys Harries

Matt Hagen / Clayface

Naomi Ackie

Dr. Caitlin Bates