The horror filmmaker who wrote the DC project says he has not even seen it, crediting director James Watkins with taking the story to the finish line.
Mike Flanagan wants one thing clear before Clayface lands in theatres on October 23: it is not his movie anymore.
The filmmaker, who wrote the original script and holds a story credit, told ComicBookMovie that he has not even watched the finished film. "Clayface, you know, very much is not mine," Flanagan said. "It's James Watkins' movie. I wrote a script I loved and I turned it in and then that's the last... I haven't even seen it. I'm excited to see it and see what James did with it. But that's James' film, and I'm so excited to see what he made."
That is a fairly unusual thing for a writer to say about a project this close to release. But JoBlo, which carried the comments, reads it less as Flanagan washing his hands of the film and more as a credit where it's due situation. He got the ball rolling. Watkins, who also directed Speak No Evil, carried it across.
The screenplay itself is credited to Flanagan and Hossein Amini, with Flanagan listed separately for Story By. So his fingerprints are on the page even if he does not know how much of his original draft survived into the shoot.
DC boss James Gunn has his own version of how this started, and it is not flattering to his original plan, which was to not make a Clayface movie at all. "I didn't plan on making a Clayface movie," Gunn has said. "Mike came in. He pitched this wonderful idea. I was like, 'Damn, I can't believe you got me to want to make a Clayface movie.' But he's got to write the script and who knows how that's going to work. He goes and he writes the script. First draft is great. Second draft is even better. And then I'm like, 'Let's do it.'"
Gunn has separately called the finished film a "complete horror film," which tracks with the R-rating the movie has picked up, citing strong bloody violence, gore, language, some nudity and brief drug use. That is not the language of a studio playing it safe with a comic book property.
The plot follows Matt Hagen, a Gotham actor whose career and body are destroyed by a crime boss, who then turns to an experimental treatment that restores his looks but costs him his grip on reality. Tom Rhys Harries plays Hagen, with Naomi Ackie and Max Minghella rounding out the cast.
What remains of Flanagan's original vision in the final cut is, by his own admission, something even he does not know yet. He says he is looking forward to finding out alongside everyone else when Clayface opens on October 23.
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