Coralie Fargeat Loves Her Inner Monster

As anyone who has been to the Walk of Fame can tell you, the reality is different from the one in our collective imagination — a relic of a tourist trap on the edge of civilization. I met Coralie Fargeat, the writer-director of The Substance, there the morning of Super Bowl Sunday — a rest day during an Oscar season that is otherwise packed with parties and awards shows. She’s completely uninterested in any of the stars on the sidewalk until we get to Jeff Goldblum. “I love him,” she says, stopping to take a picture. She’s been a fan of his since David Cronenberg’s The Fly, one of her abiding influences, and they met after he reached out to say he loved her movie. A car nearly swipes us as we cross the street.

After debuting at Cannes, The Substance has become the body-horror movie that could, netting five Oscar nominations including three for Fargeat (Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay). The Los Angeles in Fargeat’s The Substance is built from the cinematic iconography of itself: palm trees set against a hard blue sky, a splashy billboard, flashing bulbs, a star from the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Los Angeles is less a specific place — the movie was shot entirely in France — than it is the idea of “Hollywood.” The result is a familiar yet disembodied reality, akin to a fairy tale, in which characters act out a parable of our ugliest fears and desires. Elisabeth Sparkle, played by Demi Moore, is the aging star fighting her obsolescence, goaded on by Dennis Quaid, an executive inspired by Harvey Weinstein. She takes “the substance,” a radical rejuvenation procedure, which promises the creation of a younger, better version of herself. Out of her spine emerges Sue (Margaret Qualley) in all of her beauty and cruelty. With the birth of Sue comes a set of rules: The pair must switch places every seven days. Drawing too much from one side of the ledger results in irrevocable debt.

The success of The Substance has been an unlikely one — weathering COVID and squeamish executives. After her first feature Revenge in 2017, Fargeat turned down offers to work on other projects. She began writing The Substance on spec, eventually working with Working Title and Universal, and shooting the film entirely in France as a way to take advantage of national tax credits. A screening for Universal executives went south: They hated it, especially the third-act gambit, a monster named Monstro Elisasue. They were at an impasse. Fargeat didn’t know if the movie would see the light of day, but she refused to compromise on her vision. “If you fail with a movie that you didn’t want to make,” she says. “You will never know if you would have succeeded if you had done the movie that you wanted to make.”

What’s the experience of being thrown into the belly of Hollywood in the middle of an Oscar campaign, for a film that is symbolically about Hollywood?
The first time I came to L.A., I thought I wouldn’t like it because everyone was telling me, “L.A. is not like New York. There is no center of the city.” And I came and I just loved it. There is this weather. Everything is shiny. I was hit by the energy, by the fact that cinema is everywhere. I write with symbols. It still represents the dream of what I want to do, of making films.
It’s been a lot of joyful madness for this campaign. Of course, you always wish you’re going to win. I knew from the start that this movie could have some sort of success, and I’m not shy about pushing for it. Because I feel like women don’t get to be ambitious. They don’t get to want to be at the top. I want that, because that’s generally who I am. But you have to push people around you to come with you. When you say campaigns, it’s like political campaigns, it’s about power, money, domination. The people you’re going to bet on and invest money in? It’s a very male-dominated space in an unconscious way. I pushed my distributor to believe in the director campaign because you need people to believe to make it happen.

You pushed for it?
Yeah, because naturally the trend is not this one. It’s a whole unconscious system that needs to be shifted. But it’s tiring. I need a few weeks of rest. These awards campaigns can be very unsettling. Because basically, you’re not working. You’re investing your energy in getting something you don’t even know you’re going to get.

I’m curious about the person who made this film. There is such a visceral relationship with the body that comes through. Where did your interest in the body begin? 
From a very young age. I had a dual relationship with the images presented to me about what a beautiful girl is, like Barbie: delicate, thin, blonde. I was fascinated by that. I had curly hair. I had glasses. I wished I could be the pretty girl, but I was more of a tomboy. I was raised with a mother who was terrified that, when I was walking home alone at night, I could be assaulted. It really drove me crazy because all I wanted was to be free. And to feel that I had those limitations where I needed to be cautious, that my brother didn’t have, created a massive feeling of injustice. It’s the same in cinema. I was seeing all those male directors being able to do action movies, sci-fi, have big budgets, and fail, but no one cared. They still could do other movies.

And how did you get into film?
I knew I wanted to be a director when I was 17 or 18. I was doing amateur short films with the family camera — I did a remake of Star Wars with my friends. I had all the little toys and I animated them image by image. It was the best time of my life. I was rather shy but when I was directing I was another person. I wanted to go to the French cinema school La Fémis, which is the biggest one. To be able to apply, you first have to complete two years of general studies at a university. I did political science at Sciences Po. It was a tough time because this school was super intensive, and I had zero time off to do anything I liked. So at the end of that school I said, “I don’t want to do any school anymore, even in cinema. I want to be in the field, in the middle of stuff.” In my last year of that school, I got a job as a production assistant on an American film called Passion of Mind that was shooting in France. It was directed by a Belgian director, Alain Berliner, and it starred Demi Moore.

No way.
Yeah. That’s where I discovered the whole life of a film. I was a little mouse able to see everything. It’s a micro society with fights, people who love each other, who don’t love each other, things that don’t go as planned. That was the best school I could do.

Do you remember Demi?
It was my first experience. Of course, I remember everything so precisely.

What was she like then versus now?
Very different and very similar at the time. She was at the top of her career at that moment. She was that legend. It was so impressive to see her in France. Bruce Willis was coming to visit her on set.

How did Demi eventually come to do The Substance all of these years later?
I knew that my best hope to make the movie in the way I wanted was to work with an icon, with someone who would represent the star.

To use their star image.
Yes, to have this symbolic power they represent in the story. I didn’t want to be shy about trying my luck and thinking big. We started to send the script with the first ideas I had in mind.

How old were the actors you were sending it to?
Around 50. It was a scary part. So for maybe five or six months, it was just nos, one after another. For the financier, it was the same. It would have been much easier if I had come with a revenge story that people could identify as straight action or horror. The Substance was not that. They were interested in working with me, but you could feel they couldn’t totally wrap their head around it. So we kept going. I work on only one project at the time. I invest so much risk in it. I had written for a year and a half on spec. I had said no to every other offer. I couldn’t fail. Not being able to switch to something else is super scary, but it also gives me extra energy. It needs to be done.
At first, I honestly thought that Moore would never go for something like this. I thought she was so in control of her image. But I said, “We have nothing to lose. Let’s send.” I met her and discovered a new facet of her that I didn’t know at all. More importantly, she was in a phase of her life when she was wanting to bring her narrative back for herself and not what people would fancy she would be.

Did you talk about that?
She gave me her book to read. She’s very smart. She really wanted to make the film, and I think she understood that her book was the way to convince me she was capable of taking those kinds of risks. The book shows a whole other facet of her personality, of what she’s been through, what she’s capable of. And indeed, it made me see her through a different lens. I discovered someone who’d been very risk-taking and avant-garde. She had the level of rock-and-roll instinct that the project would require.

But I needed to discuss the movie with her at length many times to share everything about what I wanted to do — the filmmaking, the nudity, the prosthetics — to be sure that she understood and was willing to go for it. She comes from Hollywood, and you don’t know if she’s going to be willing to come shoot in France without a huge entourage that we couldn’t afford. All the money needed to go onscreen. It’s super important to be transparent about what the movie’s going to be. It’s not something you can discover on set.

At what point were you both clear and ready to go?
I needed maybe five or six meetings.

So you needed to be more sure. She was more ready.
I think so, yeah. She saw the part. She saw that it made her able to express herself as an actor in a way that she probably hadn’t been able to do for a long time. But there are things that are not going to happen the same way as other films she’s worked on. It took her out of her comfort zone.

Like what?
I don’t shoot in a traditional way. I don’t do a master shot, then a close up. I focus first on the emotional parts of the shot, which might very well be a hyper close-up on an eye. And for some actors, it can take them out of their comfort zone because they’re used to a more classical way of setting up a scene. But when she understood that it was what was needed, she really went for it.

What is her process like?
Everything is through the emotional and where the character is, even if it’s a close-up on a hand. She needs to be grounded. Which I totally understand. For this film, we had so many prosthetics. The prosthetic techniques are so technical that you have to shoot some things first, then you need to let the skin rest, so you have to shoot something else in the meantime.

I know your relationship with filmmaking changed as you were approaching 40 and you made your first feature, Revenge. Can you tell me about that?
The fact that it came around my 40s was a meaningful thing because it’s the moment when your value can totally shift because you are going to be viewed in a very different way. It’s the symbolic loss of being the desirable, potentially having-kids person that gives you a worth and an existence.
I had decided that I needed to do my first feature before I turned 40. It gave me the kind of superhuman energy not to take no for an answer. I entered “war mode” — I was only focused on having my movie get made. I accepted that what I love is to get up and think about films. That was the first huge step of me accepting who I was, what I loved, and not pretending to love things that I don’t to maintain a normal social life, going on holidays with people, or going to dinners. Now I don’t care that I’m not like everybody else. I’m not married; I don’t have kids. It’s as simple as that. I started to accept that the only thing that I love and that made me feel great and alive was to make films. It was a huge liberation.

You’re giving birth in a different way.
Yeah, and Revenge was what allowed me to do The Substance, which was a much more ambitious project that was dealing with personal layers of my relationship to the body, to my fears, to my convictions about how I see the world. In Reality+ the main character is a guy. I was not ready to tell that story through a woman’s perspective. It felt too intimate. Too close. It’s funny because when I was doing Revenge, I couldn’t describe it as a feminist movie.

You couldn’t?
No. I wasn’t rationalizing that at the time. It was something I needed to say that I was feeling, but I didn’t have the words. When the movie was released and everybody started to call it feminist, at first I was taken aback because it was not something I had conceptualized. I was just dealing with it the way every woman deals with it, like when somebody puts a hand on your butt on public transportation. It’s the everyday life you’ve been used to and you don’t think about it as a structural problem.

What were the opportunities like after Revenge?
The movie really sparked something in the industry. I received many offers to direct things and meetings with studios. When it’s the first time that everyone wants to meet you, it’s very flattering. It’s tempting. It was a tough time because I was starting to write on spec; I didn’t know yet what I wanted to do. So I was saying no to things. I turned down every offer I had to direct, scripts or people who wanted to finance my writing, because I felt I needed to stay free. I was seeing the trains that were passing by, and sometimes you say, “Wow. Am I making the right choice?” I had a few director friends in France whose first movies were successful in Europe, and when they started to work on American projects, they ended up not being very happy because they couldn’t do the movie they wanted. So I was very wary about that. I’d love to think that I’m special, but there is no way that if I were doing the same thing that they did that the result is going to be different. So I decided to trust my need to find a way to be in full control of my project but, at the same time, to find a way to work with the American system. Part of me wanted and needed to be here, to find a way to set up my own system, sort of.

Like getting American funding but shooting in France?
Yes, or working with American casting, or having this ambition for my project. If I wanted to still be able to work with the U.S., the best way to do what I wanted was to produce the movie, which gave me some control, and also partner with other producers who could protect me within the studio industry. I decided to produce the movie with Working Title, which had been very willing to work with me since Revenge. The first thing I discussed with my partner producers Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan was the absolute need to have creative freedom. The real battle is in the edit room. It’s the final one. You can have all the freedom you want during the shooting, prep, and writing. The battle that matters is in the editing room, because that’s where your movie can be totally different than what it is.

Can you tell me a little bit about fighting for your edit of the film? You have a good relationship with Working Title, and the movie was set up with Universal for distribution, but there was a rocky screening that led to an impasse over the edit of the movie. What did they want to change?
I think they wanted everything changed. The movie was exactly what I wanted to do, which was to show that yes, this is violent, this is excessive, this is gross. They didn’t want to see that. So it was a big shock. One thing that was really not liked was the monster. The monster is the most sincere and risky part, where I show my inner self. I show the way I felt since I was a little kid, because I don’t totally fit what is expected. You show yourself naked and people find you ugly. But I was like, okay, so even monsters have to meet some beauty standards. It’s really an endless battle.

They thought the monster — Monstro Elisasue — was too ugly?
Yeah, that made me understand that it would be a trap to start entering those conversations. They rejected the monster. It wasn’t seen. It wasn’t understood. In postproduction, you’re fragile. You’re tired. And when you’re not loved, it’s tough. But I could understand that they would want to change too much, even for them. It would have to be too different to be realistically done.

Universal eventually stepped away leaving the movie without a distributor. What was the situation that led you to submit the film to Cannes?
We were in limbo. We didn’t know what was going to happen. The best that could happen to the film happened: It was sold to the independent distributor Mubi, and its team loved the movie for what it is. They loved my monster. They loved my excess. They loved the fact that I’m not going to hit the head in the mirror one time but eight times.

Where does your love for excess come from?
From this feeling that everything I’m not allowed to do in my real life, I can finally express. I still struggle a lot with my two selves, with the self that is me as a girl who should be gentle and tempered.

Is that what you were told a lot to do?
In direct or indirect ways. And it can range from a woman shouldn’t talk loud to you should go on a diet. All those things you think you have to conform to even if it’s not at all who you are. Revenge was a moment where I allowed myself to express my real self, the one who loves to be excessive, to be rude, to be funny, and to create something that is fun. And it has an influence on my life too. I feel more empowered because I feel less the need to pretend that I’m someone I’m not. Also, I love to surprise. I love to create things people are not going to expect. More importantly, there’s the possibility of expressing everything that I see around me that I can’t shout in my real life, because otherwise you will be angry at everything. But I can present it onscreen and say, “Yes, this is this Harvey character.” I’ve seen many of them, here he is in your face. This is what it’s like.

Was Dennis Quaid’s character based on Harvey Weinstein?
Yeah. And he represents all the toxic behaviors. That’s my way of being a feminist — not portraying the world the way I would love it to be but the way that it really is. People don’t want to look at it. Sometimes people say, “But Harvey is a caricature.” That tells a lot. That shrimp scene is the one that makes guys the most uncomfortable. Of all the scenes, I hadn’t thought the shrimp scene was the one that would be “too much.” Calm down with the shrimps. I learned that on my first feature film: When there is a scene that makes everyone uncomfortable, it’s because there is something very important in that scene that needs to be preserved.

What scene was that in Revenge?
It was the foot scene, when he’s searching for the glass. And it ended up being one of the audience’s favorite scenes. Everyone said, “This scene is too long, it’s too excessive.” It was the same for the shrimp thing. The power of the shrimp. It says a lot when you portray things for what they are. There is still some denial that it’s the reality.

The shrimp scene is also important because it establishes the visual language of the film pretty early on.
Or the fly. This shot on the fly could be removed. The film exists without it, but this shot is such a strong grammatical way of defining the visual language of the film. I still get the suggestion to remove the fly. But a movie is not just about what is needed. There are a lot of things that you don’t need that make a good film. That’s where I was thinking about David Lynch in his movies. I love what is useless. It builds a movie as much as what is needed for the narration.

There’s an interesting tension in your practice in that you’re quite controlled and technical, but it’s in service of shooting chaos or mess.
Exactly. To be chaotic, it has to be super controlled. It’s how the craziness can reach the audience. Every detail matters. If it’s too much, it doesn’t work. If it’s too little, it doesn’t work. It’s a balance. The rules lead you to accept the world. Yes, her back is going to crack open and give birth to another one. And if this doesn’t build precisely, it’s craziness that people can’t enter. It’s an escalation and you have to go through all the steps.

Is there an example of a smaller detail that you sort of had to make sure was correct so that it would do that?
The cooking scene is a good example. It’s the moment where she lets go. It’s her way of getting revenge on her other self because she doesn’t care anymore. Each bit is very precise in the level of craziness that the Lis character has to go through. At the beginning, if this is too toned down, you don’t believe the moment where she puts her hand into the chicken and destroys the eggs and goes really, really crazy.

When did the monster become a part of unlocking the third act of the film?
The monster was the liberation from the tyranny of image. It’s the moment where she finds some relief when she has almost no human shape. It’s the first time she looks at herself in the mirror and she doesn’t judge herself in a harsh way. She’s not scared. It’s the moment where she has, for the first time, some tenderness for herself. And it’s also the moment where she says, “I’m going to put on my dress, I’m going to put on my earrings, and I’m going to go outside in the world, and I’m going to take my space onstage and I’m going to have my moment.” What’s most important is when she says, “It’s me. It’s still me.” She saw herself for who she really is and not what she looks like or what other people would like her to look like. And she was able to finally love herself for that and feel that she deserved to go outside in the world in the center of the stage and have her moment of glory.

The audience at that moment represents society. And society is not ready to let go of its old way of judging what’s acceptable, what’s beautiful, what’s not beautiful. It gives her back so much violence. This leads to the final explosion, which is almost like this revenge, as if she’s saying, “Go fuck yourself, look at the violence that you create. Look at the violence that you generate.” I needed almost some apocalyptic image to show the level of violence I feel toward all this. And I think that women have kept it within themselves. I wanted it all out and to show how huge it is, how crazy it is, how violent it is, how everywhere it is.

I wanted the monster to be an incarnation where all the body parts are chopped into pieces. Like you can be seen for your boobs, for your butt, for your legs, for your white teeth, or your smile. I wanted this to be recomposed in a Picasso way with everything at the wrong place. It has to be monstrous, but at the same time I also wanted the monster to be lovable, to be a monster that you want to hug and protect. That was the most difficult part. I remember talking to the prosthetic designer and I really had to make him understand that I needed both. It was a tricky balance to create empathy for the monster. Because the monster to me represents who we are for real, our whole humanity with its weakness, its truth, and its imperfection.

I saw that you were the one holding the hose of fake blood shooting it into the audience. Was that all one take?
The first spray was one take, but then once everyone was wet, we just went more and more until we were out of blood, basically.

How many liters?
Oh my God, it was more than 20,000 liters of fake blood. It was a unique experience. All the extras were so fascinated by the experience. When you’re wet with fake blood, you start to get cold and so we said, “If some of you want to go out and go and get warm, please go,” and they said, “Oh, no, no, no. We want to stay and do more.” It was a very special moment. You don’t get to live that every day.

The film is very much about self-loathing. Even in moments of extreme violence between Sue and Elisabeth, they’re technically the same person, two sides at odds with one another. I’m curious to hear how you thought about the creation of Sue.
Sue is the incarnation of what the outside world makes us fantasize for ourselves. She is the fantasy of the male gaze, of the way men think we are valuable, think we are desirable, and the way they put that in our brain from a young age. Sue is not freedom. Sue is a prison. Sue is the tyrannical image that doesn’t exist and is going to make us feel bad because we are not that. When I was younger, I thought something like, Oh, yeah, when I lose two kilos, I will be able to go outside and everybody is going to look at me. This is the tyranny that prevents you from taking your place in the world because you think that until you are that perfect fantasy that society has built for you, you’re not worth taking your space.

I’m interested in hearing you talk more about the male gaze, because for a while, Sue is rewarded. There is something seductive, too, about watching her. You’re not shy about showing her body and her beauty.
Absolutely. Because it is great to be looked at. It is great to feel that you’re the center of the world. It’s a major thing that has allowed women to exist so far. Women have had a place in society because they were beautiful. That’s the main thing they’ve been rewarded for. But it’s because you only depend on other people’s eyes. And to me, it’s a super-interesting question about the wish and the hope I have for women to be totally free to use their bodies the way they want. To be as sexy as they want, as not sexy as they want, age naturally if they want, age not naturally if they want. But what’s the part of what you do because it’s really something you want for yourself or the thing that you do because, unconsciously, you feel that it’s the only way that you can exist? Everyone wants to exist, and sometimes, you are going to just do what it takes to exist.

Would you take the substance?
I think I would. [Laughs.] It’s a pact with the devil and the devil is so strong. The film is the expression of all my fears, all my questioning of my relationship with my body, with my centrality, with aging. For me, what takes the lead now is who I am as a filmmaker. I’m less and less concerned about the rest, but it’s still there. I can’t lie. When you’ve been raised with such a tyranny about appearance, it stays with you forever. That part of me is much more gentle now. It’s more under control. But I also have no idea how I’m going to feel about myself in ten years. It’s an endless journey to find this peace with yourself.