Clayface director James Watkins explains the film's ending, Hagen choice and design

Mixed · 2Director James Watkins has given interviews explaining choices in Clayface, the R-rated body horror film from DC Studios, now playing in theaters. 1 2 Mixed · 2The film, with a story by Mike Flanagan, follows Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), an A-list actor disfigured by a gangster who undergoes an experimental procedure by Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) that heals him but slowly turns him into a clay monster. 1 3 Left · 1Variety says that by the end Matt kills everybody who wronged him, plus several innocent people, and is forced to live as a reclusive mud monster in the sewers. 1

Centre · 1Speaking to Collider, Watkins said the audience is with Matt through his revenge until the end, when it senses he has gone too far; he said Matt is motivated by love and overtaken by primal urges, and compared this to revenge thrillers like John Wick and The Equalizer. 3 Mixed · 2He said he wanted the final Clayface look to keep the man inside the monster visible, calling the heartbreak the core of the best monster movies. 3 1 Mixed · 2The accounts differ on how many designs were tried: Watkins told Collider about 13 or 14 versions and told Variety about 19 iterations. 3 1

Mixed · 2Asked by Variety why the film uses Matt Hagen rather than the first Clayface, Basil Karlo, Watkins said Flanagan's script chose Hagen, that Karlo is “a little bit too gothic or too hard to do in such a modern idiom,” and that Hagen is more relatable. 1 2 Centre · 1Screen Rant adds comic background: Karlo debuted in Detective Comics #40 in 1940 and Hagen in Detective Comics #298 in 1961, and it says that because Hagen was not an actor in the comics, the film drew on Batman: The Animated Series' version. 2 Left · 1In the Variety interview Watkins also discussed Aaron Paul's brief cameo as Matt's father in one transformation, saying Paul was living in Paris and agreed to appear, and said much of the shape-shifting was done in camera with prosthetics. 1

Left · 1Variety adds that the film gives the first look at Gotham City in the rebooted DC Universe, which Watkins said was styled on German expressionist cinema and 1970s–90s New York street photography. 1