Spider-Man Director Jon Watts Looks Back on Web of Lies Behind Clown

Sometimes, actors and filmmakers have to stretch the truth to get their big break. For example, if young actors are asked whether they can ice skate or ride a horse, the answer is always yes. In the case of MCU Spider-Man director Jon Watts, it was concocting a fake trailer, circa 2010, for a child-eating clown movie called Clown, as if it belonged to horror connoisseur Eli Roth.

Luckily, when Roth caught wind of the gambit that Watts and his co-writer, Christopher D. Ford, conceived, he was feeling generous, not litigious. After all, he was only a few years removed from making Thanksgiving, one of the five faux-trailers to be featured in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse. Roth then asked Watts and Ford if they had a feature-length script for Clown, and while they most definitely did not, the two best friends agreed that one more falsehood couldn’t hurt.

“We lied. We said, ‘We definitely have the script all worked out and ready to go.’ So while we scrambled to get that together, Eli took the trailer to AFM and pre-sold all the foreign rights,” Watts tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of Clown’s newly remastered 4K Blu-ray release via Turbine.

Watts and Ford quickly turned their viral fictitious trailer into a proper script, one that’s centered on a mildly successful realtor and family man named Kent McCoy (Andy Powers). Due to a new listing, Kent is running slightly late for his son Jack’s (Christian Distefano) 7th birthday party. And upon receiving a call that his rent-a-clown was double booked, he chooses to rummage through the leftover possessions of the deceased homeowner whose property he’s trying to sell. 

That’s when he discovers an old-timey clown costume he can wear to the party. Kent may have saved his son’s birthday, but he quickly realizes that the clown suit won’t come off no matter what he does. He then makes the chilling discovery by way of Peter Stormare’s costumer character that the clown garb stems from the skin and hair of a Nordic demon called the Clöyne. If Kent wants to successfully stop his ever-increasing transformation into the Clöyne and rid the possession, he has to consume five children to satisfy the demon’s appetite.

Shortly before filming was scheduled to begin, Roth also facilitated a distribution deal with the Weinstein brothers’ genre banner, Dimension Films. Fortunately, Watts didn’t have to contend with any of the company’s patented interference during post-production, but he did receive an oddly specific note from one of the brothers during pre-production.

“The son character, Jack, his name was going to be Jake, but then Bob Weinstein asked us to change it because his son’s name was Jake,” Watts recalls. “He didn’t like the idea of a little Jake being in jeopardy. So we always wanted the kid to be named Jake after [future Thunderbolts* director] Jake Schreier, but we had to change it at the last minute.”

Watts may not have had his edit hijacked, but he was by no means out of the woods in terms of Clown’s release. In 2014, Dimension opted to bury the film domestically, and it wasn’t until Clown grossed $4.3 million internationally (against a $1.5 million budget) that they decided to give it a nominal U.S. release in the summer of 2016. Clown would go on to gross a meager $55K domestically after spending just two weeks in 100 theaters or less.

Watts can only speculate as to why the film didn’t get the robust theatrical push it was promised. One possible explanation is that Harvey Weinstein went on TV in early 2014 to say that he’d prioritize less violent movies going forward, so perhaps Clown became a casualty of that pivot. Watts also remembers an advanced screening that likely sealed the film’s fate. 

“I think Bob [Weinstein] saw it for the very first time when we did a preview screening, and he was just absolutely horrified,” Watts shares. “He didn’t talk to any of us, and he just walked out of the theater at the end. That’s how that ended.”

In retrospect, Watts still can’t help but wonder what Clown would’ve done had it been given a genuine theatrical push. Maybe it could’ve reaped the benefits that Andy Muschietti’s It movies and the Terrifier sequels would enjoy in the years that followed. Watts and Ford even game-planned an entire Clown universe in the event of its success.

“I always wonder what would’ve happened. We always planned it as a seven-part epic. So as soon as the world is ready, we’ve got them all lined up,” Watts says. “We want to go back into the past and into space. I want to do one that’s like The Northman. Anyone can put that suit on, and that opens the door to a lot of possibilities.”

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Watts also explains how the Clown playbook helped him land Spider-Man: Homecoming, the first chapter in his Tom Holland-led Spider-Man trilogy.

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In 2010, you and your NYU film school gang made a fake trailer for a Cronenberg riff called Clown, only you labeled it as an Eli Roth movie. Did you choose Eli because he appreciates the concept of the faux-trailer as much as anyone? 

That was part of it. It was also the idea that if you put Eli’s name on it, you know it’s going to go to a really dark and disturbing place. That allowed people’s imaginations to fill in the blanks between what we actually put in the trailer. It’s funny that you describe it as Cronenbergian because that was the other idea. We were either going to say Eli Roth or David Cronenberg, and I think we made the right choice. 

Eli liked it enough to not call his lawyer. He was the one who then got the ball rolling on Dimension’s involvement?

Eventually. The first step was him saying, “Do you guys have a feature?” And we lied. We said, “Yeah, absolutely. We definitely have the script all worked out and ready to go.” So while we scrambled to get that together, Eli took the trailer to AFM [American Film Market] and pre-sold all the foreign rights. Dimension then got involved after we had written the script and were getting into production [during the winter of 2012].

Did you have the same eventful postproduction experience that so many others have had?

No, we didn’t have any of that at all. Now knowing what was actually going on behind the scenes over at Dimension and the Weinstein Company in those years, it’s interesting to think back on it all. I think Bob [Weinstein] saw it for the very first time when we did a preview screening, and he was just absolutely horrified. He didn’t talk to any of us, and he just walked out of the theater at the end. That’s how that ended.

As far as the edit, do you credit the especially low budget for Clown not being at the top of their minds? 

For not being top of mind, I honestly credit the fact that they were probably busy trying to cover up a bunch of terrible things. At the time, I had no idea what was going on; no one did. It was right around the same time that Harvey Weinstein had come out against violence in films. Remember that? He said that he no longer wanted to be associated with films that were excessively violent, and here we were just putting the finishing touches on our movie about a child-eating clown. So the timing couldn’t have been worse for any of it.

Has this week’s remastered 4K release had to jump through a lot of hoops given how tangled the new ownership web is?

I don’t really know all the specifics of the complex legal connections. So much of it was pre-sold, and because this is a German 4K release, it’s through FilmNation. They owned it. Dimension only had U.S. rights. The film came out internationally [in 2014 and 2015], but it was never theatrically released in the U.S. In Italy, it was the number-two American film the weekend that it came out in 2014. It was right after Interstellar [during the Nov. 13 to Nov. 16 weekend]. I was like, “That’s something.”

Didn’t it get a limited two-week run in the U.S.?

Eventually [in June 2016]. It was only after it played well internationally, and I think they felt like they had to do something with it. It never had a [proper] theatrical release, though. It was really only released through whatever straight-to-video or streaming thing existed back then. 

I talked to Jake Schreier about your film school gang earlier this year. Your co-writer, Christopher Ford, was certainly a key part of Clown, but how involved was the wider Waverly crew in the actual production? 

We were always a very collaborative group when it came to writing scripts. Everyone would read each script and give notes. I know that writer-director Ben Dickinson wrote and sang the song, “Frowny the Clown,” which plays over the end credits. But everyone is involved somehow. Duncan [Skiles] definitely did something; it may have been a voice. Ford is hiding in the background of a few shots if anyone out there wants to try and find him.

Jake is in there somewhere too. The son character, Jack, his name was going to be Jake, but then Bob Weinstein asked us to change it because his son’s name was Jake. He didn’t like the idea of a little Jake being in jeopardy. So we always wanted the kid to be named Jake after Jake Schreier, but we had to change it at the last minute.

Kent McCoy’s gradual transformation into the final clown form was really well designed and executed. Was it quite a process to chart and track while shooting out of sequence?

Yeah, we had the most amazing spreadsheet. We had mapped it all out. It was a continuity masterclass. We had broken it down to six or seven various phases, and we just tested it out in pre-production to make sure it felt like it was tracking. The idea was to have the evolution happen over the course of the film without you necessarily being aware of it. Every time you come back to him, he looks a little bit worse and a little bit worse until he emerges as this completely unrecognizable monster. We actually had more stages for after the ending of the film. That’s not the final form at the end. You only see the final form in the illustrations that Peter Stormare has, but we wanted to not quite get there so that he was still an unformed, unfinished demon. (Laughs.) I haven’t gotten to talk about Clown in such a long time. This is such a treat for me. 

That long fixed shot of Kent in the bathtub is such a striking composition. He’s at the bottom of the frame with all this green blood on the tile behind him.

Thank you. It’s really nice when someone comes up to me and tells me that they liked Clown or something from Clown. It was such a bad experience when it got shelved in the U.S. and all that. But making it was so fun. The trailer was amazing. All of that felt like a dream come true, and then it just all fell apart. So now being able to look back on it and laugh — and to see this incredible remastered version — I guess that’s what it feels like to become a cult classic. I don’t know if it’s a cult classic yet, but we’ll see. 

Genre films have always been a stepping stone for filmmakers, but when you were making Clown, did you have ambitions of being a blockbuster filmmaker?

No, it was genuinely a surprise. I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, this trailer will lead to a horror film, which will lead to the next thing.” There was a moment where I was like, “Do I actually want my first movie to be about a child-eating clown? Is that going to be my Citizen Kane?” But filmmakers that I really admire had made genre movies like Dementia 13 [Francis Ford Coppola] and Piranha II [James Cameron]. There’s so many examples. So to get the opportunity to make anything, I was like, “I’ve got to do it.”

Knowing how effective Clown’s fake trailer was, you decided to run that same play again en route to Spider-Man: Homecoming?

Yeah, I’ve always liked trailers. They’re their own little art form. So I felt it was helpful to communicate the tone of what I wanted to do in the Spider-Man world, and that was the best way to do it. You can talk about it till you’re blue in the face, but it’s much easier to just cut together a little trailer to really show people what that juxtaposition was going to look like. You take high school scenes, and you put them next to superhero scenes. So that really helped visualize the tone that I was going for, and it seemed to work. 

One of the best scenes in the MCU, if not the best scene, is the Jaguar ride to the homecoming dance. Michael Keaton’s Adrien Toomes figures out Peter Parker’s (Tom Holland) alter ego on the way there, and he threatens him, which makes a lot more sense having revisited all your work. You really have a knack for adults scaring kids. Where does this through-line come from? 

(Laughs.) I have really nice parents, and I had a really great upbringing, so I’m not quite sure. We always called that the Hitchcock sequence. We built the whole movie around that, and it was part of my early pitch. I was like, “Could we make a drive to the dance be more tense than any other scene in the film?” So that was really fun to plan and pull off. Whenever I get to dip into thriller or suspense genre elements, I always really enjoy myself.

You probably have some clue as to what’s transpiring in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but are you looking forward to being an audience member again?

Yeah, I can’t wait. It’s going to be so strange for me. I’m still in touch with everyone. Hopefully, Tom is okay. He got hurt a couple weeks ago, but I think he’s going to be fine. So that’s going to be such a surreal experience for me. I’m nervous, I’m excited and I can’t wait to see what they’re doing.

I wish I could’ve watched Spider-Man: No Way Home without knowing anything. It was still exciting in the moment, but I wanted to be blindsided, something a series of viral leaks precluded. While you suffered more than most, is there any way to stop leaks on these types of movies? 

I mean, I feel like a lot of people didn’t know that that was going to happen.

Lucky them.

Yeah. People that are really invested try to get every tiny piece of information they can, which is part of the fun for some people. Some people don’t want the surprise. But if I ever sit on something like that ever again, you’d have to get to such an extreme level of secrecy to try and protect it, and I don’t even know if it would be possible.

So, if I had a secret that big again, I feel like I could keep it a secret. But then again, one of the things that leaked was a [DoorDash] delivery to Andrew Garfield’s house in Atlanta. How can you anticipate that? You’d have to force your cast and crew to be on total lockdown. So I don’t know that you could ever be so airtight. 

What was cool was when we did our first focus tests. No one knew what was going on at all. It was early on in the process before people started to make connections. We got such a pure, genuine, shocked reaction from the crowd. It was amazing. 

I just don’t understand the mindset of someone who decides to use their privileged position of working on a Spider-Man movie to capture images or video with their cell phone, all so they can hand those materials off to someone else to disseminate. 

There’s always someone looking to spoil it and get some clout. 

When you and Ford originated Skeleton Crew, did one of you say, “What if Cop Car had a starship instead?”

Space Cop Car! That was the pitch. That’s all we had to say.

I read a decade-old interview with you, and like the two kids in Cop Car, you mentioned that you and your childhood friends in Colorado would just go walking in hopes of finding either an alien spaceship or pirate treasure. So Skeleton Crew was clearly in your mind for a while.

Wim and Neel walking and falling down that ditch and then eventually finding the spaceship, the feeling of it is directly from my childhood. It’s like that ditch is from behind my house. It’s everything that I ever wanted to happen to me. I actually got to make that dream come true. 

You had a big win this year with Final Destination: Bloodlines. You conceived the story and hired the directors. What lesson are you going to apply to your next producorial jobs? 

That was fun. I had been given such a big sandbox to play in at Marvel. Kevin [Feige] is a great producer. He is very involved, and he cares a lot. So one thing I took from him and tried to apply to Bloodlines is to just let the directors direct once the shoot starts. Let them do what they’re going to do and try not to micromanage that part of it. Then just see what they deliver in post. You can always get back into it. You can tweak it, you can do pickups, and you can try to make it as good as it can possibly be. 

So, because Marvel was so hands off with me when we were shooting, I tried to apply the same thing to Bloodlines. I think it allowed Zach [Lipovsky] and Adam [Stein] a kind of freedom to really push the story to a really interesting place, and it paid off. People really responded, which felt good.

Lastly, I’ve just illustrated how well things worked out for you, but seeing what the new It stories and Terrifier movies have done for clown horror, does part of you wish you could have doubled down on the Clöyne at some point? 

We have the story ready to go. I always wonder what would’ve happened. Even if people didn’t like the movie, I do feel like a lot of people would’ve gone to see it if we had released Clown in America with a big marketing push. I’ll never really know, but we always planned it as a seven-part epic. So as soon as the world is ready, we’ve got them all lined up. 

Why that specific number? 

That was just the right number to tell the story that we wanted to tell. (Laughs.) Isn’t that how many Leprechaun movies there are? It’s seven or eight. But there’s a big scope. We want to go back into the past and into space. There’s a lot of potential within the clown universe. 

I figured the number would be five since five kids have to be eaten to shed the demon.

That gets into the origin story. I want to do one that’s like The Northman. We’ve always had an idea of how to make a whole bunch of these movies. It was built into the premise. Anyone can put that suit on, and that opens the door to a lot of possibilities. Clowns, Clown³, Clown: Resurrection. It’s there. It’s all there.

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A remastered 4K Blu-ray of Clown with three cover variants is now available from German distributor, Turbine.