Gotham City returns to the big screen in Clayface, yet the city’s most famous guardian stays absent. Director James Watkins reveals why he kept Batman away from Matt Hagen’s story, and why the film’s version of Gotham needed no caped shadow hanging over it.
Why Batman is never referenced in Clayface
Watkins never wavered on the decision. Asked whether he was tempted to slip in a Dark Knight nod, he told GamesRadar+: “I wasn’t.” He points to Todd Phillips’s Joker as his model. “Because I sort of felt, like the Joker is the story of one person in Gotham, so is this,” he says. “It’s a city of a very many million people, and this is Matt Hagen’s story. I didn’t want to get too cute. I just wanted to be honest to the story.”
That logic fits the film’s premise. Clayface is about Matt Hagen, an up-and-coming Hollywood actor, who a mobster horrifically disfigures after a drunken bad decision on a night out. Watkins keeps the camera on Hagen rather than on Gotham’s vigilante. Instead, the movie debuts Gotham in the DCU and hands the city a starring role. “I wanted Gotham to be a character,” Watkins says. He and production designer James Price, an Oscar winner for Poor Things, drew on 1930s German expressionist cinema, letting buildings loom over people. With cinematographer Rob Hardy, Watkins chased the grit of New York in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s: dirt, neon and what he calls the city’s “dirty poetry.”
The result is oppressive by design. “You barely can see the sky in Gotham,” Watkins says, adding that the crew framed out the sky most of the time. Coast City, where Hagen starts, offers the opposite: sun, blue sky and greenery. Watkins also studied past screen Gothams, from Joel Schumacher’s dayglow palette to Christopher Nolan’s grounded realism and Tim Burton’s production design.
The world-building convinced the cast. Tom Rhys Harries, “I’d had a number of pinch me moments.” Max Minghella, joining the GCPD, calls it a childhood dream come true.
View original article here Source