Female Filmmakers in Focus: Coralie Fargeat on “The Substance”

The new body horror film “The Substance” from French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat is not for the squeamish. A satire about the tolls of toxic beauty culture, the film is set in a fairytale-like Hollywood. Demi Moore, in a career-best performance, stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, a former A-lister who lives in a fancy apartment in the Hollywood Hills overlooking the city. On her 50th birthday she is unceremoniously fired by a callous studio head named Harvey (Dennis Quaid, marvelously disgusting) from her long-time hosting gig of a daytime fitness show. Driving home she sees her billboard being taken down. The image of her body literally being thrown away as garbage causes her to spiral and get into a minor car accident. At the hospital she’s told about a mysterious new drug called The Substance, which promises a new, better you. Drowning in her own self-hatred and desperate for her job back, Elisabeth injects herself with the miracle drug and is reborn–quite literally–as a perky, young woman named Sue (Margaret Qualley), who is quickly hired as the show’s new host. The two must share their body for one week at a time, but as Sue gets a taste for fame–and the same damaging self-hatred creeps in, the balance is soon lost, plunging both into a grotesque waking nightmare, culminating in what may well be the best depiction ever committed to celluloid of the stark contrast between the prestige of having your star on the Walk of Fame and what Hollywood Blvd is actually like.

“The Substance” premiered in competition at the 77th annual Cannes Film Festival, where Fargeat won the award for Best Screenplay. I saw the film at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival back in June and it was so viscerally upsetting that by the final act most of the audience was in a full body cringe; one woman a few seats down in my row was literally shaking and crying. While the graphic nature of the film has proven divisive, I haven’t had a better time at the movies all year. For me the film has the perfect balance of mordant humor, deranged imagery, and brutal societal satire. You can feel Fargeat working through her own issues with self-hatred via the art of cinema. She makes you feel the violence that is all around us and how it can affect your own sense of self. The film made me think a lot about my own relationship with my body as I age. It made me want to be kinder to my younger self, my future self, and most importantly, my current self. It also left me a lot of questions for Coralie Fargeat, the woman who created this repulsive fever dream. 

Fargeat grew up in Paris, where she spent her childhood trying to escape reality, often recording stories she made up on a tape recorder. She got the filmmaking bug as a teenager when a magazine ran a contest for amateur filmmakers to make their own short versions of “Star Wars.” Although her film, shot with a camcorder, didn’t win, she fell in love with the medium of film. After studying for three years at Sciences Po Paris, she interned on an American short film that was being shot on campus. She then studied at the French film school Le Fémis. Her first short film, a period piece called “The Telegram,” won 13 awards at multiple film festivals. She began working in genre filmmaking with her follow up short “Reality+,” a sci-fi film about a new technology that allows users to see themselves, and each other, in their dream bodies for 12 hour intervals. Her debut feature film “Revenge,” a bloody tale of rape and murder, premiered at the 42nd Toronto International Film Festival, as part of the Midnight Madness section. Fargeat is one of the founding signatories of Collectif 50/50, which aims towards gender equality at film festivals and across the film industry. 

For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Fargeat over Zoom about the music that inspired the film’s fleshy feelings, Hollywood as a symbol for our collective dreams, filmmaking as therapy, how monstrous myths shape how we understand our own bodies, and the importance of new female voices in film.    

You’ve said that the idea for “The Substance” began with certain images and sounds in your head. I’d love to know what particular sounds you had in mind.

In my films, sound and image are a truly important way to express my ideas and the final world that I’m going to craft. So at the same time that I’m working on the theme and on the story, I research images and sounds that are going to be the emotional core of the film, that are going to give it its unique personality. They are going to be the way to express the specificity of the feeling that I want to say. I listen to a lot of music. It’s usually music that can put me in some sort of trance regarding the universe of the film. In this case, it was a lot of experimental music. Music that expresses the flesh. I listened to Micah Levi’s score from “Under the Skin,” which has this organic, experimental vibe that is linked to the inner world, that is linked to sensation, that is linked to what’s inside your body. 

There was a lot of music also from other composers that had this kind of heartbeat or pulsation. It was a lot of pulsative music, which I think, unconsciously, are related to the heartbeat of the new human being, or the way you can feel with your body. I also listened to hyper-sexualized music, which built the universe of the show Pump It Up. This is really the way I build the scenes and and the most important aspect of how I’m going to drive them. So music very strongly influenced me from the start and helped me put my ideas on the screen in a way that I know will reach the audience that is also the best way to express myself.

The film has a visceral presentation of Hollywood Boulevard as being the height of glamor, but also full of garbage. I used to live just off Hollywood Boulevard. It’s really disgusting there most of the time, and I thought that opening sequence really distilled the highs and the lows of it really well. Can you talk about how that sequence came to be?

I had been to Los Angeles, and it’s even where I started to write the movie, in fact. So I think I have this fascination for what Hollywood Boulevard represents. I work with symbolism. I don’t use a lot of dialogue. The way I craft my stories is by using symbolism. I started to write the best symbolism I could think of about how beauty has been made into some kind of goal or a prison with its promise of beauty and happiness and when you lose that, you crumble. For me, that was Hollywood. It’s still this dreamy representation that is also linked to appearance and linked to how people see you. There is this hyper-scrutinization and also a surface happiness and joy. So it was a symbol I was really interested in exploring because I think it embodies everything that every woman I think has to deal with. About how, depending on what you look like or don’t look like, you are going to be valued or not valued, or feel accepted or not accepted. 

On Hollywood Boulevard there is this symbolic star and it is such a powerful symbol of all of that. When the star fits those expectations, it’s loved, it’s worshiped, it’s bright, and everyone looks at it. When it starts to crack, to be dirty, to age, basically, or to not fit the beauty standard, then people don’t care anymore, and they treat it like a piece of trash. I love the idea of playing with this very simple idea, but it’s so powerful at the same time that just this image can represent the violence of how you can be seen and valued or not valued, depending on what you represent or what the world decides that you represent or not. 

So that’s also why I wanted the world of the film to have this non-realistic touch and vibe. So it would be clear that Hollywood here is a symbol. It’s like the Hollywood of our unconscious collective mind. The one that we grew up with. Everyone has an idea of how it is, even those who’ve never been, because we’ve seen it in movies. It’s a huge cultural and social symbol that I think has embodied a lot of the themes that I’m dealing with in the film.

Did you find the process of writing the script and then completing the film therapeutic?

Oh yes, I would say, a hundred percent yes on many levels. Making this film was such a strong way to express myself and everything I felt inside and the violence of everything I was feeling around me. To be able to make something with those feelings, to be able to express it in my own creative language with filmmaking was so strong and was so liberating. It was also a way to step into the world and not feel limited with the thoughts that have been putting me down, like “you’re going to age” or “you’re going to be erased.” Making something with those feelings was very empowering and liberating. 

But I’m not gonna lie. I think that all those things that you carry with yourself since you’re a kid, about how people perceive you, how you feel like you don’t fit, that you are never good enough, all the beauty standards, I think that they somehow stay forever on your shoulder. You can tame them. You can make them less loud. You can put them asleep for some time, but they are still, I think, your strongest inner enemy that you have to deal with and that’s what I wanted to show. I wanted to show the reality of how society still works and the reality of what we have to live with. To show how violent it is, but also to show how difficult it is to make that change on our own. If society and everything else around doesn’t change, you have to be a superhero to not feel impacted by all of this. 

I would say, the last thing that I want with this movie is that it becomes a new injunction for women that they have to feel good with themselves. To me, I really believe that it’s an ongoing journey. To me, it’s more like I wish we would allow women to feel at ease, also if you don’t feel good like it’s not your fault; everything around is responsible for making you feel like that. So hopefully, if we see some change in society, it will help us all get out of this jail that we have built for ourselves.

As you were crafting the darker second half of the film did you study the mythology of monstrous women?

I researched a lot of monstrous figures, not necessarily women, but more like what was considered freaks. “The Elephant Man” was a very strong representation of a monstrous figure, especially because the film was based on someone who really existed. I studied other representations of the monster in many different films like Quasimodo. I also fed myself with research into plastic artists, who do sculptures and craft their own monsters by mixing human flesh, animal parts and all of this together. So, I fed my inspiration with many different representations of what is considered a freak. I also studied the Disney of our childhood. There’s witch figures, but also the dancing elephants in their ballet shoes. I was interested in all these representations of what is monstrous, of what is considered ridiculous or as the opposite of the beautiful princess, which represents the ideal. I think we all grew up with that. I grew up with the myth of the beautiful, blonde, thin princess that was going to be saved by the prince, and everything else is rubbish. I think those myths and those cultural images really shape the way we feel about ourselves, and the way that we feel we fit or not fit. They are definitely strong cultural weapons that shape us one way or another.

You’ve spoken a lot about the need for parity at film festivals for women directors, so I was wondering if there were any other women whose films you either greatly admire or that you think readers should seek out?

Oh yes, there are many, and I’m so happy to discover more and more of them. Unfortunately, at this year’s Cannes Film Festival I had my film, so I didn’t have time to go to other films. But there were so many new female directors that I was so interested in seeing their films. Lately, one of the female directors that I adore when I discovered her world was Jennifer Kent, who did “The Babadook.” Her film “The Nightingale” had such a strong impact on me in the way that it powerfully dealt with topics of inequality and social violence and did so in a very harsh way. It was something that knocked me out. 

I love the fact that all of these different filmmakers express themselves in their own way. There is Céline Sciamma, who deals with these topics in her own way.

I love that there are more and more female filmmakers who now succeed in making their films and are allowed to express new imaginations, new creative worlds, and new ways of crafting a world of their own through cinema. When I grew up it seemed like all the movies were made by male directors. But that is what built who I am, and I think it’s great that now there are new models and new imaginations and there are going to be more and more.

I’m not gonna lie, parity is still not there at all. Things are starting to change, but there is still so much progress to be made. But something like Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” was such a great film, and I think that’s what’s going to change the world; new eyes, new visions, new minds, are going to be put out there and will be watched by the younger generation, who are going to feed themselves and build themselves on them.