00:00When you're in Playgrounds and you're younger, you know, somebody annoys you, you whack them.
00:05And as an adult, hopefully, you learn that you shouldn't be whacking people.
00:09How do you react and how far would you go if somebody takes your life away from you?
00:16Hi, I'm James Watkins. I'm the director of Clayface.
00:18Hi, I'm Tom Rees-Harris and I play Clayface and Matt Hagen.
00:21And we're here to talk about the new trailer.
00:27Show me.
00:30Show me.
00:36The movie is about an up-and-coming actor, Matt Hagen, played by Tom, who's a rising star.
00:43I know you. You're famous.
00:45Bad things happen to him. His face gets cut up and he gets disfigured and his life falls apart.
00:50And then he meets Caitlin Koch, who runs a company working in sort of nanotechnology.
00:57And she tries to help him fix himself, both on the inside and the outside, to this moment where it's,
01:03where you first start upon the journey, which is, right, let's do this.
01:06It's a sort of, it's a leap of faith between the two of you, isn't it?
01:08And their relationship is really interesting in that it kind of crosses over into lots of different relationship territories.
01:23Yeah, Max Minghella, the wonderful Max Minghella, plays Gotham Cop, salt-of-the-earth Gotham Cop, who is Naomi Aki's
01:31fiancée.
01:32Tragedy, what they did to him.
01:34This becomes a sort of triangle between the three of them.
01:36He's a good guy. He's trying to do his best in a corrupt world.
01:39I don't want to give away the story, but how their paths all intersect is probably the key sort of
01:46emotional puzzle within the whole film.
01:49What happens to Matt sort of takes the brakes off social norms.
01:54He's overcome a very tough upbringing, despite all odds, to achieve a level of success, and then that's taken away
02:01from him.
02:01It pushes him into a fairly primal, basic instinct kind of zone.
02:06It's very relatable, isn't it? That thing of, when we're wronged, we want justice, in some sense, or we want
02:12vengeance.
02:12How the sort of technology that's inside him, how that interacts with his emotions, and how that triggers primal impulses
02:20within him.
02:21What's happened to me?
02:22If you're harboring feelings of anger, you need to let them go.
02:27You want to know how I feel?
02:29He has a disproportionate response to the things that happened to him.
02:34What do you want, Miss Hagen?
02:36I want my life back.
02:37I spent a long time with my dialect coach.
02:39Some is Welsh, if you haven't noticed.
02:40I am Welsh. English is my second language, so you'll have to forgive me for any slip-ups.
02:46I'm a monster.
02:49What was interesting, I think, probably for both of us was the intersection between the horror world and the DC
02:54world.
02:55Body horror works best when it's tethered to emotion and things that are relatable, and I think there's a lot
03:00of relatable things that happen to Matt.
03:02I have no idea what side effects you'll have, or how to treat them.
03:11We had a lot of practical effects and prosthetics, so I got to know the amazing prosthetic artists very well.
03:21That did a lot for me.
03:22When you're turning on set and you haven't got your own face, I sort of just follow my nose with
03:28that.
03:28No pun intended.
03:29Is that fun?
03:29And when you look at the trailer, there's lots of shots in there that the effects are practical, and I
03:35think that was an interesting thing when we were discussing the acting, and how the prosthetics inform the acting.
03:39It's not that they do the work, but you've got to measure your performance, because it's not just your face
03:43as another layer.
03:44There was a breaking in period with the prosthetics where James would sort of feed back to me that if
03:48I was wanting to sort of be lighter in a scene with all these prosthetics on, if a smile is
03:54at like 30%, I'd have to push it to 80% for that to read through the prosthetic.
03:59Yeah, to push through the layer.
04:00Even if it kills me, I'll be better off than I am now.
04:06I also had this thing where there's a contact lens in one of the looks that Matt has.
04:11I had a contact lens that was sort of like this big, covered a lot of the white of my
04:15eyes.
04:15They'd fitted it wrong, so for about two weeks, I couldn't, I could barely see.
04:20But I was kind of just leaning into this thing, like, this is great, I can't see.
04:24And your energy changed, your energy changed when you walked on set with the prosthetic makeup on.
04:30Because I couldn't see.
04:33At a certain point, you kind of just lean into it, and it'll tell you what it wants to be.
04:37Yeah, it's the old Laurence Olivier thing of, you know, you find the character when you put it on the
04:42nose.
04:42Oh yeah, sure.
04:43And you had the clumpers in your mouth.
04:45Yeah, the clumpers.
04:46I lean into that generally.
04:48It's conversations I'd have with James Gunn.
04:50I know he does that even within massive, you know, movies where he tries to bring the sort of physical
04:55element into the green screen world.
04:57There wasn't a lot of green screen in the movie at all, really.
04:59It was very practical, very real.
05:01I think for actors, the more you've got to react to in the moment for your imagination to catch on
05:06to, it's just better, isn't it?
05:08Yeah, of course.
05:09I mean, it seems obvious to say that, but it does make a great deal of difference on set when
05:13you're not acting opposite a tennis ball.
05:15The ferry heading into the narrows, which is where Matt Hagen comes from, the sort of rough part of Gotham.
05:20The geography of Gotham, the world building of Gotham was something we were quite interested in.
05:24It has high, it has low, it has corruption, it has a darkness, and it's a place where Matt, where
05:29he tries to get justice within this world, he can't get it.
05:33The system is stacked against him.
05:35It just gives depth to the world that you're in, and the detail that James Price and his team have
05:40gone into on the whole movie is really incredible.
05:43James Price worked with him on my last film, Production Designer, and he did poor things.
05:46He's an amazing production designer.
05:48And we spent a lot of time just trying to build a really real world of Gotham that felt oppressive.
05:53It's a sense in which this is a city that's not really functioning.
05:58Matt!
06:01Matt!
06:03What?
06:04Well, we find Caitlin, who Naomi plays, in her circumstance with her work, where she sort of needs me to
06:11continue along that.
06:12Mm.
06:13Sort of pathway of development and discovery.
06:16Her lab that this is set in, we didn't want it to look super high-tech.
06:19We wanted it to feel like it was actually something that could exist in the real world.
06:33This little section in the toilet was just sort of cut away on a soundstage that was separate from it.
06:38On a gimbal, so it would shake, so it would move, so Tom had something to react to.
06:42But obviously, there's makeup, and then there's various variations of scissors, because those scissors are getting incredibly near his eye.
06:49I think we had real scissors, I think we had rubber scissors, I think we had scissors with a little
06:53bit missing.
06:54This was one of the times when you're on set and you're watching it, and you see people around the
06:57monitor going, ugh.
06:59Obviously, there's a body horror and there's a nick, there's a thing with people's eyes, and, you know, which I
07:04think we all have.
07:06And then, on top of it, there's turbulence.
07:09So I think that's quite triggering for most people in an audience.
07:12You can have a fancy gimbal, which is sort of like operated by some, like, pressure thing.
07:16That will be consistently moving.
07:19Each take, you can sort of get very detailed about how much it moves.
07:23This was not a fancy gimbal.
07:25This was a couple of crew members shaking this box.
07:29So I didn't know how much shake we'd get on each one, which adds to the hazard.
07:36That was all our methodology for this film, really.
07:38We're the little film in the DC universe, so we did everything in a very sort of,
07:42I come from a background of making films, low-budget horror films, low-budget movies.
07:46And so we brought that attitude to how we made this to try and make it, everything feel bigger.
07:50I certainly felt more connected to it being shaken about by crew members.
07:55The people I trusted betrayed me.
07:57The justice system failed me.
08:00They stole my career, my money, my life.
08:04We sort of did a bit of a deep dive into sort of Gotham lore.
08:07There's an Arkham Asylum comic that came out in 1989.
08:12And it is one of my favourite references that I'd go back to whilst we were shooting.
08:18It's a really amazing comic book.
08:20The idea of him sleeping in the bath is something that fans wouldn't know much about.
08:24And so we sort of wanted to riff on that.
08:26This felt to me fairly key as a kind of, like, there's a turning point.
08:30Yes.
08:30His sense of who he is, how much he's Matt and how much he's Clayface is starting to shift.
08:35One of the things we're trying to do is to track Matt's journey.
08:39How much he knows and what he's in control of and when he's conscious of it.
08:42The evolution of his superpowers, I suppose.
08:44And how that darkness overtakes him.
08:46The thing that we discussed a lot whilst we were shooting was something happening, maybe involuntarily.
08:52And then how does Matt gain a level of control over that?
08:56And then what he decides to do with that.
09:08I have no idea who you are.
09:11There's a whole thing about, like, masks and what you put on and what face you put on out into
09:16the world.
09:17And it's like how we present, how we're all presenting today.
09:21Tom's nothing like he is today.
09:23Nothing.
09:24That was actually on the day that Robert Pattinson was on set, wasn't it?
09:28I don't know.
09:28What?
09:29What?
09:29Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
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