‘The Substance’ Director Coralie Fargeat On Crafting Her Body Horror Masterpiece
For this writer, writer and director Coralie Fargeat changed my life with the 2017 subversive rape-revenge film Revenge. Confrontational, stylish, and gory, Fargeat’s feature film debut shifted cultural consciousness ever so slightly. And now, with her sophomore feature The Substance, Fargeat has even shifted the zeitgeist with a disgusting, rage-filled scream about bodily autonomy and expectations of women, especially in the spotlight. Like Revenge, it’s bright, pulsing, and angry, and with even more blood to boot. Smashing the themes over our heads like empty vodka bottles, Fargeat shoves this story into our eyes like so many pieces of beautiful, splintered glass. And the result is breathtaking.
In The Substance:
Elisabeth Sparkle is a former A-lister past her prime and suddenly fired from her fitness TV show by repellent studio head Harvey (Dennis Quaid). She’s then drawn to the opportunity presented by a mysterious new drug: THE SUBSTANCE. All it takes is one injection and she is reborn—temporarily—as the gorgeous, twenty-something Sue (Margaret Qualley).
The only rule? Time needs to be split: exactly one week in one body, then one week in the other. No exceptions. A perfect balance. What could go wrong?
We spoke with Fargeat about Elisabeth Sparkle’s iconic yellow coat, the Real Housewives, and the power of Demi Moore.
Dread Central: When did you start writing The Substance? Was it something that was in the back of your head before Revenge? Or did your experience coming into the spotlight influence the idea?
Coralie Fargeat: I would say it’s both because it’s a theme that has lived with me for a very, very long time that I’ve explored in different ways. Partly Revenge is also related to that in some sort of way. But definitely, Revenge allowed me to take this to another level. You know, having explored my filmmaking in that film, I felt that I was ready now to address this [topic] in a cinematic form in a way that I could also be prepared emotionally as those issues are quite personal, and be able to handle them properly to express my voice about it.
DC: Something I love in your films is the way you use clothing. In The Substance, we have Elisabeth’s bright yellow coat. How did you decide on that piece and that color? I’m obsessed with that pop of color.
CF: In fact, this is stuff that comes to me very, very early in the process, from the writing. It’s already elements that are here for me to build my story because I don’t write a lot of dialogue in my films. So basically, I’m working with symbolism. And for me, visuals and colors are a very powerful way to symbolize ideas.
Some of them come to me in a conscious way, and some of them come in a kind of unconscious way. The idea comes and you don’t exactly know what it represents, but you feel that intuitively there is something important here to preserve. I think here it was the idea of each actress having her own color, which is a way to define them, a way to play with symbolism. You know, Elisabeth, being in the space with this yellow thing, that coat is part of her world. So, when we leave her world, it becomes more pink and flashy.
I remember when we were discussing with Demi, she said, “But it’s it’s the summer! I don’t need to wear a coat.” And I said, “I understand. But for for the movie. It’s really gonna create something that is gonna strongly be related to you and the character.”
Sometimes that’s where you need to accept that you have to escape logic or realism to enter the more symbolical world of the film. That’s what happened with that yellow coat which really created her character, and became a part of of her character in a very powerful way.
DC: I also love how you use colors and symbols to make a world that feels familiar, but also like really bizarre at the same time. It’s very much like a commercial, and I love that. How did you approach world-building in The Substance?
CF: Yes, absolutely. Again, it was super important for me that all the locations and the set designs were more symbolizing ideas of a world, to say that this story could happen anywhere at any time. And it’s true in a new, universal way as the myth. I think, that builds, you know, our relationship to beauty, to society.
So it was really to take those elements and put them in a form that feels timeless, that it’s not exactly reality, but it’s more something that represents the ideas of the film. It’s the mental world of the themes that are represented on screen. The show is basically society looking at us. The camera represents all of the gazes that we can have on us, and that gaze is kind of the same everywhere.
For the world of The Substance, it was also for me very important that the visual identity would be very strong in giving the sense that it was again something that is not totally realistic. It more represents something that represents a dream that is sold. It’s gonna change your life. It’s gonna give you happiness and love and everything but with such a kind of simple injection. With all those letters that are at the same time simple but huge in your face almost as if there is no way to escape—you have to do the Substance. You know you have to take it and I think it very much represents for me what I feel. We feel that we can’t escape that pressure and we need to conform or fit into a certain mold.
To me I really wanted The Substance to represent this, but in a tempting way, because I think that’s why all this is so crazy. Even if we know that it’s not gonna work, or even if we know that it’s going hurt us, we are still doing it, you know. We will produce the same pattern again and again. So yeah, the Substance design and voice and process is almost like the pact with the devil.
DC: I love trash reality television. I love Bravo, and the Real Housewives. Have you ever watched any of those shows? These women would feel right at home in The Substance.
CF: So I haven’t watched specifically the Housewives shows, but I watch so much trash TV. [Laughs] I’ve been watching so much since I was a kid. I’m fascinated by those programs. I watch soap operas, I watch all the crazy TV shows that make people do stupid things. I do think that TV is a window into the world and it’s saying a lot about our desires, fantasies, and nightmares. TV portrays them in a very simple, raw way. And I think when you watch a lot of shitty shows, it informs you a lot about human desire, human dreams, what we fancy.
TV has this kind of mythological simple stuff. Beauty love fight, you know, kind of competition, like the the kind of the basic things of humanity. And I think that’s what makes TV so powerful and so attractive. And so as myself being exposed to all this in a massive way, it’s something that shaped me a lot in my relationship to this film.
I love the fact I get to work around that as well and to kind of reshape it in my own world and with my own creativity.
DC: That’s awesome. And so I was curious when you were writing this. Did you picture Demi Moore as Elisabeth? What was it like working with her as your Elisabeth?
CF: Yes, she’s amazing. So when I write, I always have someone in mind, because I I need to have an image when I write. I’m a very visual person. So I need to write with someone in mind, but like in everything I do, the person I wrote in mind ended up not being the person that would be in the film. I think when you write you’re in the dream space, you’re in the unreal space. You don’t have limits, you don’t have the schedule issue. So you can think about whatever you know guides you at the moment that you write.
But then starts the casting process when you have to deal with other people’s desires, other people’s schedules, and the reality of who’s ready to jump into that story or not. Who’s where at a personal level holding her to kind of respond to the story or not? Wanted to take a risk or not. So then it’s a whole different process that starts, and that kind of where you have to still keep your ambition. And why, you know the ambition you you wrote the script for, but kind of dealing with real human beings, you know, that gonna are gonna be working. Wanted to work with you.
To be honest, when the idea of Demi Moore arrived in the process, I really thought it was a fantastic idea. But I said, “Come on, she will never want to do that like. Let’s not lose time. I want to go ahead with the film.”
So when I heard that, she responded positively to the screenplay, I was very surprised because I really didn’t expect that. So I said, “OK, there is something potentially very interesting here. Let’s meet and discuss more about the project and and see if this match is the right one for the film.
And I really discovered someone that I had no idea existed. I discovered another side of Demi that I didn’t know through her films. I discovered someone who was very risk taking. Then I read her book, and I discovered all this in her book that she went through a lot of shitty stuff in her life. She navigated in a male-dominated industry, and she fought hard to make herself a place. She took a lot of risks many times in her life, thinking out of the box, and being very innovative at a time when she was kind of a precursor in a way.
I also discovered someone who had dealt with very difficult things with herself in the past few years of her life. So she had already done huge work on herself to address the issues in The Substance. She wouldn’t be just a victim of this, but she would take again control of her life. She was in a place where she was strong with herself. And I think that’s what allowed her to feel ready to test the risk, to show herself vulnerable on screen. Basically, I really discovered someone very instinctive, who has a lot of intuition.
And then discussing the film, explaining to her very specifically what I wanted to do with the project, I felt like we were aligned in jumping into that story together. We had the mutual trust that was going to be required for the whole shoot.
DC: Amazing.
CF: I think we met at a time when the story made sense in the same way for both of us.
The Substance is out now in theaters.
Categorized:Interviews
