'Clayface' Trailer Breakdown with Tom Rhys Harries & Director James Watkins

[00:00:00]When you're in playground and you're younger, you you know, somebody somebody annoys you, you whack them. And as an adult, hopefully, you learn that you shouldn't be whacking people. How do you react and how far would you go if somebody takes your life away from you?

[00:00:16]>> Hi, I'm James Watkins. I'm the director of Clayface.

[00:00:18]>> Hi, I'm Tom Rhys Harries and I play Clayface, and Matt Hagen.

[00:00:21]>> And we're here to talk about the new trailer.

[00:00:27]>> Show me.

[00:00:30]Show me.

[00:00:37]>> The movie is about an up-and-coming actor, Matt Hagen, played by Tom, who's a rising star.

[00:00:43]>> I know you. You're famous.

[00:00:45]>> Bad things happen to him. His face gets cut up and he gets disfigured, and his life falls apart. And then he meets Caitlyn Cole, who runs a company working in sort of nanotechnology, and she tries to help him fix himself both on the inside and the outside.

[00:01:02]>> There's this moment where it's where you first start upon the journey, which is, "Right, let's do this." It's a sort of It's a leap of faith between the two of you, isn't it?

[00:01:08]>> And their relationship is really interesting in that it kind of crosses over into lots of different relationship territories.

[00:01:16]>> What? [gasps] I'm okay.

[00:01:19]>> You okay?

[00:01:20]>> I'm okay.

[00:01:22]I feel great, actually.

[00:01:24]>> Yeah, Max Minghella, the wonderful Max Minghella, plays Gotham cop, salt-of-the-earth Gotham cop, who is Naomi Ackie's fiance.

[00:01:32]>> Tragedy what they did to him.

[00:01:34]>> This becomes a sort of triangle between the three of them. He's a good guy, he's trying to do his best in a corrupt world. I don't want to give away the story, but the how they how they're paths all intersect is is probably the key sort of emotional puzzle within the whole film.

[00:01:49]>> What happens to Matt sort of takes the brakes off social norms. He's overcome a very tough upbringing despite all odds to achieve a level of success and then that's taken away from him. It pushes him into a fairly primal basic instinct kind of zone.

[00:02:06]>> It's very relatable, isn't it? That thing of when we're wronged, we we we want justice in some sense or we want vengeance. How the sort of technology that's inside him, how that interacts with his emotions and how that triggers primal impulses within him.

[00:02:21]>> What's happened to me?

[00:02:22]>> If you're harboring feelings of anger, you need to let them go.

[00:02:27]>> You want to know how I feel?

[00:02:30]>> There's a disproportionate response to the things that happen to him.

[00:02:34]>> What do you want, Mr. Hagan?

[00:02:36]>> I want my life back.

[00:02:37]>> I spent a long time with my dialect coach.

[00:02:39]>> Tom is Welsh if you haven't noticed.

[00:02:40]>> I am Welsh. English is my second language, so you'll have to forgive me for any slip-ups.

[00:02:46]>> I'm a monster.

[00:02:49]>> What was interesting, I think probably for both of us was the intersection between the horror world and the DC world. Body horror works best when it's tethered to emotion and things that are relatable and I think there's a lot of relatable things that happen to to Matt.

[00:03:03]>> I have no idea what side effects you'll have or how to treat them.

[00:03:11]>> We had a lot of practical effects and prosthetics. So, I got to know the amazing prosthetic artists very well. That did a lot for me. When when you're turning on set and you've got you haven't got your own face, it's sort of just follow my nose with that, no pun intended.

[00:03:29]>> And when you look at the trailer, there's lots of shots in there that that are that the effects are practical and I think that was an interesting thing when we were discussing the acting and how the prosthetics inform the acting. It's not that they do the work, but you've got to measure your performance cuz it's not just your face, there's another layer.

[00:03:44]>> There was a breaking-in period with the prosthetics where James would sort of feed back to me that if I was wanting to sort of be lighter in a scene with all these prosthetics on. If a smile is at like 30%, I'd have to push it to 80 for that to read through the prosthetics.

[00:03:59]>> Yeah, to push through the layer.

[00:04:00]>> Even if he kills me, I'll be better off than I am now.

[00:04:06]>> I also had this thing where um there's a contact lens in one of the looks that Matt has. I had a contact lens that was sort of like this big.

[00:04:14]Covered a lot of the white of my eyes.

[00:04:15]They'd fitted it wrong. So, for about 2 weeks I couldn't I could barely see.

[00:04:20]>> Mhm.

[00:04:20]>> But, I was kind of just leaning into this thing and I was like, "Oh, this is great. I can't see."

[00:04:24]>> And your energy changed. Your energy changed when you walked on set with the prosthetic makeup on.

[00:04:30]>> I couldn't see.

[00:04:32]>> [laughter] >> At a certain point you kind of just lean into it and it'll tell you what it wants to be.

[00:04:37]>> Yeah, it's the old um Laurence Olivier thing of, you know, he you find the character when you put on the nose.

[00:04:42]>> Oh, yeah. Sure.

[00:04:43]>> And then you had the plumpers in your mouth.

[00:04:45]>> plumpers.

[00:04:46]>> I lean into that generally. It's conversations I'd have with James Gunn.

[00:04:50]I know he does that even within massive, you know, movies where he's tries to bring the the sort of physical element into the green screen world.

[00:04:57]There wasn't a lot of green screen in the movie at all, really. It was very practical, very real. I think for actors the more you've got to react to in the moment for your imagination to catch on to, it's it's just it's just better, isn't it?

[00:05:08]>> Yeah, of course. I mean, it seems obvious to say that, but it does make a great deal of difference on set when you're not acting opposite a tennis ball.

[00:05:15]>> The ferry heading into the narrows, which is where Matt Hagen comes from.

[00:05:18]It's a sort of rough part of Gotham. The geography of Gotham, the world building of Gotham was something we were quite interested in and it has high, has low, it has corruption, it has a darkness.

[00:05:28]And it's a place where Matt, where he tries to get justice within this world, he can't get it. The system is stacked against him.

[00:05:35]>> Which just gives depth to the world that you're in and the detail that James Bryson and his team have gone into on the whole movie is really incredible.

[00:05:43]>> James Price worked with him on my last film, production designer, and he did Poor Things. He's an amazing production designer, and we spent a lot of time just trying to to build a really real world of Gotham that felt oppressive.

[00:05:53]It's a sense in which this is a city that's not really functioning.

[00:05:58]>> Hey.

[00:06:01]Hey.

[00:06:02]>> [panting] >> What?

[00:06:04]>> Where we find Caitlin, who Naomi plays, in her circumstance with her work, where she sort of needs me to continue along that >> Mhm.

[00:06:13]>> sort of pathway of development and discovery.

[00:06:16]>> Her lab that this is set in, we didn't want it to look super high-tech. We wanted it to feel like it was actually something that could exist in the real world.

[00:06:29]>> [panting] >> This little section, the toilet, was a sort of cutaway on a sound stage that was separate from it.

[00:06:37]>> On a gimbal, so it would shake, so it would move, so Tom had something to react to.

[00:06:42]But obviously, there's makeup, and then there's various variations of scissors, because those scissors are getting incredibly near his eye. I think we had real scissors. I think we had rubber scissors. I think we had scissors with a little bit missing. This was one of the times when you're on set and you're watching it, and you see people around the monitor going, "Oh."

[00:06:59]Obviously, there's a body horror in his neck. There's a thing with people's eyes, and and, you know, which I think we all have.

[00:07:06]And then, on top of it, there's turbulence. So, I think that's quite triggering for most people in an audience.

[00:07:11]>> You can have a fancy gimbal, which is sort of like operated by some like pressure thing.

[00:07:16]>> Yeah.

[00:07:16]>> That will be consistently moving.

[00:07:19]>> Yeah.

[00:07:19]>> Each take, you can sort of like get very detailed about how much it moves.

[00:07:23]Um this was not a fancy gimbal. This was a couple of crew members shaking >> Shoving it about.

[00:07:28]>> shaking this box. So, I didn't know how much shake we'd get on each one, which adds to the hazard.

[00:07:35]>> That was all our methodology for this film really. With a little film in the DC universe, so we did everything in a very sort of I come from a background of making films, low-budget horror films, low-budget movies. And so, we brought that attitude to how we made this to try and make it everything feel bigger.

[00:07:50]>> I certainly felt more connected to it being shaken about by crew members.

[00:07:54]>> [laughter] >> The people I trusted betrayed me.

[00:07:57]The justice system failed me.

[00:08:00]>> [music] >> They stole my career, my money, my life.

[00:08:04]>> We sort of did a bit of a deep dive into a sort of Gotham lore.

[00:08:07]>> There's an Arkham Asylum comic that came out in uh 1989. And it is one of my favorite references that I'd go back to whilst we were shooting. It's a really amazing comic book.

[00:08:20]>> The idea of him sleeping in the bath is something that fans will know much about. And And so, we sort of wanted to riff on that.

[00:08:26]>> This felt to me fairly key in a as a kind of like there's a turning point.

[00:08:30]>> Yes. His sense of who he is, how much he's Matt, and how much he's Clayface is starting to shift. One of the things we're trying to do is to track Matt's journey, how much he knows, and what he's in control of, and when he's conscious of it. The evolution of his superpowers, I suppose, and how that darkness overtakes him.

[00:08:46]>> The thing that we discussed a lot whilst we were shooting was something happening maybe involuntarily. And then, how does Matt gain a level of control over that, and then what he decides to do with that.

[00:08:59]>> [music] >> I have no idea who you are.

[00:09:11]>> There's a whole thing about like masks and what you put on and what face you put on out into the world. And it's like how we present >> Mhm.

[00:09:19]>> how we're all presenting today.

[00:09:21]>> Tom's nothing like he is today.

[00:09:22]>> I think.

[00:09:24]>> [laughter] >> That was us shooting on the day that Robert Pattinson was on set, wasn't it?

[00:09:29]>> [laughter]