“I knew I wanted all the effects practical and made for real. The movie is about flesh and bones, about women’s bodies.”
Coralie Fargeat, writer, editor, producer and director of The Substance, is discussing the “visceral journey” and extraordinary make-up effects in her body-horror genre movie, which won an Oscar for best make-up and hairstyling. It was also nominated in several other categories, and Demi Moore, as ageing Jane Fonda-esque TV fitness star Elisabeth Sparkle, won a Golden Globe award for best actress.
A featurette, The Making of the Substance, is one of the extras in this MUBI ancillary release. No CGI for Fargeat and her make-up artist, Pierre-Olivier Persin – the energy, she stresses, would not have been the same. “You have to be able to manipulate the camera into the stew.”
And what a stew it is: prosthetic make-up, dummies, body suits, body doubles, offal tumbling out of backs and gallons and gallons of fake blood, large quantities of it sprayed on to a horrified audience at an awards ceremony at the end of the movie, with Fargeat wielding a helmet cam and manipulating the hoses. Looks like hard work.
She’s nothing if not hands on. Bursting someone’s back open, she adds, hasn’t been done before, and it was hard to calculate exactly how many fake backs would be needed. It’s certainly hard to forget the sight of Margaret Qualley as Sue emerging from the spine of Sparkle as the cell-replication process unleashed by the mysterious Substance gets underway, with its complex delivery system and its need to maintain balance between the two warring bodies. Which inevitably fails, due to Sue’s selfish ways – she takes over Sparkle’s TV show and also parties hard – and leads to a monstrous speeding up of Sparkle’s ageing process. Hideous malfunctions result. But "I'm still me," insists Elisabeth/Sue.
This was not part of a huge Hollywood machine. Would Moore get on board with an indie-type venture and a limited budget? “She was rock and roll and knew how to take risks.” It is, after all, only Fargeat’s second feature after the rape and revenge action thriller Revenge (2017). The Substance takes aim at sexism and ageism and the way women’s bodies are constantly criticised.
She says that as she left her 40s behind “something was silently telling my brain” that her life would be over, just as Harvey (Dennis Quaid) tells Elisabeth over his shrimp-engorged lunch that “at 50 everything stops.” What stops? she asks. He doesn’t reply. But she’s fired. He needs someone new and young.
“No one is going to care about me, no one is going to look at me… you don’t exist any more,” muses Fargeat. “It was time for me to really do something with that. A big scream at the system.”
She recreated her own Hollywood in France. Shooting there gave her a sense of freedom and it was simple to use symbols, such as one palm tree against a blue sky. “I could use the rest of the money to create other things – like more blood.”
DP Benjamin Kracun shared her vision (she was inspired by his work on Promising Young Woman), and the film packs a mighty visual punch, with hyper-real, vivid colours and camera-angle innovations. There’s not a lot of dialogue. “All my filming language goes through symbolism, with silent shots. It can speak to anyone.”
“Women should be free to do whatever they want with their bodies. We should just stop commenting,” says Fargeat, laughing wryly. Some hope, but The Substance, in its gory, colourful, explosive way, certainly makes her point.
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