James Price tells Mr. Know-It-All how Clayface built Gotham in Liverpool without a backlot

Clayface never had the money for a Gotham backlot, so production designer James Price and director James Watkins built their city out of Liverpool instead. I sat down with Price, who has now made The Ipcress File, Speak No Evil and Clayface with Watkins, to ask how a lower budget DC horror film ended up looking the way it does, what survived from the pitch, and how the creature was found.

For me, the result doesn't look cheap at all. It felt like an excellently well-crafted film, and much of that comes down to the choices Price describes here.

Why Liverpool keeps coming back for James Price and James Watkins

When I asked what Liverpool gives him that a stage can't, Price first pointed out that Croatia keeps coming back too, since all three projects with Watkins shot there. On Liverpool itself, he said: "Liverpool is a really versatile city. It's a kind of can do place." You can go to the film office and ask to shut down George Street, he explained, and the answer is fine, as long as you do it on a Sunday. He said Glasgow has that same capacity, and that both are places where you can do business if you're making a film.

The other reason is history. Price described Liverpool and Glasgow as a blueprint for what happened on the east coast of America. Many emigrants left from Liverpool, he said, including people from Ireland who traveled there first, and Bristol to a certain extent. Many passed through the Cunard Building next to the Liver Building, and the production shot the back of it.

Those emigrants built American cities in the image of the ones they left, according to Price. He said the first seven or eight stories of Liverpool's buildings match the first seven or eight in New York, and Chicago to a certain extent, before American technology and money let builders go higher and higher.

James Gunn and Peter Safran wanted an R-rated horror film for less money

Price said James Gunn and Peter Safran's mission statement to Watkins was to make a horror movie that could be R-rated from the word go, and for far less than superhero films usually cost. Because he and Watkins come from lower scale filmmaking, they were able to adjust accordingly.

He knew straight away they could never afford a backlot, which he described as an outdoor area of a studio lot where you build a street scene. With the resources of a Batman, Superman or Marvel film, he said, you'd build the center of Gotham there. Instead, they decided early on that they couldn't go to both Liverpool and Glasgow, so they put all their eggs in one basket with Liverpool. Interiors went onto stages at the Warner Bros. lot at Leavesden, which he called a fantastic studio facility, and the money went into those sets rather than into moving the unit around the country or abroad.

The one exception was Manchester, where they shot the exterior of Renew Labs. Price said the two cities are about 15 minutes apart, so the crew could stay based in one and travel to the other. He added that even with four times the resources, nobody could have built a Gotham at the scale they got by closing down George Street and other parts of Liverpool. The DC side apparently kept asking how they'd manage it for that money. Price's answer: "We got loads of money. What are you talking about?"

The Clayface subway set and the Funland sequence that was cut

Price said Watkins knows exactly which story beat he needs, is very organized, and that "no director works harder than him." The subway scene is his example. Everything you see is a set they built, offering only a side and an end, which meant Watkins had to shoot it a certain way. The special effects team put it on a rocker rig, and Price said Rob Hardy, the director of photography, did some poor man's process with lights. They covered it in graffiti, and Price said it looks great.

Not everything survived. He said there was plenty they shot that never made the final cut, because it always comes down to story. In New Brighton, across the estuary from Liverpool, there's a 1930s arcade front he compared to Coney Island. They turned it into Funland, a deserted place in Gotham, but the sequence shot there didn't make the film.

One piece of it did reach the trailer. Price created a hall of mirrors attraction called Twisted Memories, and he said you can spot it in the trailers where Matt is beneath a ghoulish figure with big red eyes. He thinks they were shooting at that location for two and a bit weeks, and they got as much as they could for the money.

What survived from James Price's original Clayface pitch

Price helped Watkins build the pitch before Watkins had the job, and he said he'd recently looked back at it. Matt's posh apartment and his slum apartment survived, along with the feeling of Matt's rundown home and Renew Labs. One idea didn't: he wanted Victorian tenements with wooden fronted verandas, like those on the eastern seaboard, but they couldn't do it.

He recalled Watkins asking for help, saying he felt bad about it and worrying the studio might not let him have Price. Price said he told him they'd probably let him, and that it would seem ridiculous otherwise.

Watkins was keen on grounded realism, Price said, because the technology is almost there. They looked into nanotechnology and nanobots. When the first Hulk was made in the early 2000s, he said, that kind of science seemed far away, but a quarter of a century later some of it felt like it could happen. Because "she hasn't got the resources of Iron Man," they didn't want a ridiculous workshop. They wanted it cutting edge, with everything really there for a purpose.

A medical expert who works in cell reproduction and regrowth, whose name Price couldn't remember, laid out the whole Renew Lab, telling them which equipment wouldn't be there and how skin grafting would work. Price said they spent a long time with the makeup designer studying how Matt's face would be cut when he's held down, and looked at early skin grafts for the discoloration, working closely with Legacy on the prosthetics. The mask is based on burns masks. They worked out its opacity, 3D printed their own versions, and Stuart's team, who handle Price's miniatures, did the vacuum forming.

Correcting the record on Gotham's geography and DJ Halfprice

I put three claims to Price, one of them false: that Gotham's map follows Liverpool's real geography with the Mersey splitting rich from poor, that the DJ on the Vuvius nightclub posters is him, and that The Ipcress File was his first production design credit.

On geography, he said it was a mashup of DC's established Gotham and Liverpool, where Matt lived across the water. He warned that people in Wallasey and Birkenhead would be offended at being called the rough side, so he said it was wrong to frame it that way.

The DJ claim is true. Price plays at nights called Soul Source with friends, spinning funk, soul, rare groove and Latin music, plus some house and drum and bass. He kept a record deck in his office on the job and made his team listen. Adam, his supervising art director, came to the nights and started calling him DJ Halfprice. Sophie, the graphic designer, loved it, and the next thing he knew there was a 10 foot poster, which the team gave him rolled up at the end.

The one thing that made Clayface look like a much bigger movie

Price had previously told In Love with the Process there was one thing he did to make Clayface look like a 100 to 200 million dollar movie, and that he'd only reveal it once the film was out. Now it's out, his answer was what he'd already described: no backlot, building as much as they could, and not moving the production around.

I said in my review that the film looks very personal. Some people treat the visible budget as a negative, but this wasn't a world ending Batman movie. It was an intimate story, and I felt every inch of that. We're not flying anywhere else, we're right there, and in no way did it feel cheap.

How the ferry put Clayface on the streets of Gotham

Price said Mike Flanagan's original script was more contained, with less on the streets of Gotham and much of it inside Renew. Watkins worked hard with the writers to get Matt out onto the streets. At a session at Watkins' house, with Price and, he thinks, Rob Hardy, they discussed sending Matt by taxi from his posh apartment to the Narrows.

Price pointed out there's no road bridge there, but there is a beaten up old ferry, so he suggested putting Matt on it. Watkins liked it, and Price added that Matt can't even afford the cab ride. VFX added a bridge, but much of the foreground is real. His approach was to keep over half the frame, possibly more, as real photography, with effects as the icing on the cake. He cited The French Connection with Gene Hackman as the reference he had in mind.

For Price, Gotham is a real place in his head, part Liverpool and part Gotham. Concept artist Antonio modeled the whole city in Blender so the team knew where things like Renew Lab sit. Price thinks understanding a place's geography matters for the filmmakers and actors, especially for a city seen so many times on screen, where it's up to them whether to follow Christopher Nolan, Tim Burton or the current Batman films.

Clayface is an original Batman villain who has never been on the big screen

Price stressed this is his first comic book movie, and that Clayface is an original Batman villain who has been around since the 1940s. He loved a 1970s version who wore a mask and pressurized suit to hold himself together. Clayface has appeared on TV, Price said, "but he's never appeared on a big screen before," so this was their own take rather than another version of Batman or Superman.

Finding Clayface's face, from clay sketches to Bart Hess

It has been reported that Price was among the first to put creature visuals on the table, and Watkins has said it took 17 to 19 versions to find the monster. Price's first step was to work in clay, which he admitted was crude, to find his way in, alongside sketchbook drawings. For the pitch, they overlaid faces that Price thinks were by artist Bart Hess, whom he described as known for a dripping latex Lady Gaga cover and faces stuck with tape, onto photos of actors the studio was considering, without saying who.

The hard part, Price said, was balancing what comic fans expect with keeping Matt's regal presence as an actor. Concept artist Jonas nailed it in Blender using scans of Matt's face, keeping a tortured human soul inside. Price described Matt as someone who escaped the wrong side of the tracks, earns an Oscar nomination, meets a girl, and has his life taken from him having done nothing morally wrong. "It's a complete just tragedy to him," he said, and you've got to feel for the guy. Price said the famous image of Matt looking in the window is all Legacy's prosthetic, adding that he didn't even know if they did any effects on that.