Demi Moore’s Director Coralie Fargeat Is Not Afraid to Gross You Out With ‘The Substance’

After turning heads, and stomachs, in Cannes, the film is about to be unleashed on the public. Are audiences ready for a bloody body horror flick about aging women and the perils of self-hatred? 

Coralie Fargeat tried to give everyone fair warning.

When the French filmmaker was readying her latest film, The Substance, she wrote the script in its entirety, filled with as much detail as possible, before taking it to producing partners. When it came to casting, she had long conversations with her leads about why the extremity in that script, from nudity to gore, was necessary for the story. And when bringing in financial backers, she was upfront about what the shoot would require, including hours upon hours of prosthetic work that would require weeks of extra shooting.

Still, when you are making a movie like The Substance, which is getting a midnight screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, says Fargeat, “As precise as you can be on the page, no one really sees totally what you want to do and what you have in your head.”

It follows Elisabeth Sparkle, a one-time award-winning actress turned celebrity fitness host who is forced into retirement at the age of 50. In distress, Elisabeth takes a mysterious drug that allows her to propagate (through no small feat of physical discomfort) a younger self, and the two have to figure out how to coexist.

With needles swan-diving into flesh and a climactic third act with enough blood to make John Carpenter blush, The Substance is exposure therapy for the squeamish and a feast for body horror obsessives. Set in a hyper-pigmented Hollywood, The Substance boldly — and violently — tackles the internalized self-hatred of aging women grappling with idealized beauty standards.

To get The Substance to theaters on Sept. 20 — shortly after the film opens the Midnight section at Toronto — Fargeat embarked on a journey that eventually included the lows of losing a top-tier distributor and such highs as becoming the toast of Cannes.

Says Demi Moore, the film’s star who is receiving early awards buzz for her performance: “Going into this movie, I could read it on a page and go, ‘OK, this could either really work and be part of a real cultural shift, something that really has an impact. Or, in truth, it could be a fucking disaster.’ And, you know what? That makes it interesting.”

Fargeat broke out with her first feature, 2017’s Revenge, a slow-burn thriller about a woman who, after being raped and left for dead while on vacation with her married boyfriend, goes on an extremely satisfying killing spree, methodically hunting down her perpetrators and dispatching them in increasingly graphic fashion. The film premiered at Sundance to exceptional reviews and was distributed by Neon, quickly becoming a favorite among horror audiences.

After Revenge, the filmmaker began receiving scripts for her to direct, but nothing clicked. “For me, the most important thing is creative freedom,” she says. Ready to tackle a bigger budget with an international cast, Fargeat wrote The Substance on spec.

While Revenge was about female rage against external violence, The Substance looks inward to focus on the self-violence that can plague women who have been socialized to chase physical perfection — in this case, as in most, thin, wrinkle- and blemish-free — throughout their lives but especially as they age.

“The theme of the movie is something I’ve been working around for a long time,” says Fargeat, who didn’t feel ready to tackle a film that talked about something she herself has felt. But, eventually, “I felt strong enough to kind of cope with the disturbance that digging into this is going to create.”

Fargeat knew casting her lead would be tricky. The role required a star who carried a mystique similar to Elisabeth’s, an actress thrust into sex symbol status early in her career. But, the filmmaker adds, “I knew those kinds of actresses would obviously be frightened jumping into something that confronts them with a phobia that I think as women we all have, but is especially heightened for actresses.” In Hollywood, where actresses routinely experience dwindling offers as they get older, aging doesn’t mean just losing out on social capital but also financial capital.

Moore wasn’t Fargeat’s first pick. “I hadn’t even put her on my list because I said, ‘She will never do it.’ ” But Moore was interested and, during a meeting in Paris, gave Fargeat a copy of her memoir, Inside Out.

Says Fargeat of reading the memoir, “I really discovered someone that was at a stage of her life where she had already confronted all the fears and all the phob -

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ias, all that violence. I really discovered someone who was so ahead of her time.” Adds Moore: “I understood the pain of what Elisabeth was experiencing, even though a lot of what was in my memoir came at a much younger time, for me.”

The movie has little dialogue, with most of the talking done by a garish television executive played by Dennis Quaid (Ray Liotta was cast in the role before his death). Moore’s role, as written, required a primarily physical performance that included full-frontal nudity and extensive prosthetic work.

Moore says there were many conversations she and her director had about the film’s nudity: “Any time that you can really spend to have everyone on the same page, where there’s a deep understanding of what the intention is, is really helpful.” Adds Fargeat, “I wanted to be 100 percent honest about the way I wanted to shoot it.” The result is nudity presented not sensually but matter-of-factly, as though the camera is revealing how women might look at themselves.

As for the prosthetics, Fargeat says of her commitment to practical effects, “It’s really a movie about our bodies and about the reality of how we feel in our bodies. I needed to speak to the reality of the way our flesh can reflect our mental deformation, and I knew this had to exist for real.”

Prosthetics ranged from aging a single index finger, meticulously adding wrinkles and spots, to full-body metamorphosis as Elisabeth transforms into something increasingly unrecognizable. For Moore, this meant as many as seven hours in a makeup chair, leaving only an hour or two for filming. Even though everything was spelled out in the script, Moore admits, “It definitely reads a lot easier on the page than it does in the physical. I’m really grateful that I have an ability to get very Zen and still.”

After filming with the cast was complete, there was a full month tacked on at the end for what Fargeat calls a “lab shoot”, where she and a reduced crew captured details and insert shots like a back being split open at the spine and various fluids being injected, extracted, projected and generally making a mess.

From the jump, The Substance was set up at Universal Pictures, with the studio’s longtime production partner, Working Title, handling the film. Multiple sources have told THR that the studio was worried about the prospect of releasing the film. Watching the movie, it’s hard to visualize it sharing a slate with the Minions, Fast & Furious, or even then Blumhouse offerings.

After Universal stepped away from the project, producers were given the opportunity to shop it around. But where to take a femme-focused movie filled with flesh and guts to get some attention? To France, of course.

“The most scary moment is, yes, when we didn’t have a distributor anymore,” says Fargeat, who long had harbored ambitions of bringing the film to Cannes. “I knew it was the festival that could be the perfect presentation for the movie.” Indeed, Cannes has a long history of embracing body horror, from David Cronenberg’s Crash in 1996 to Julia Ducournau’s Titane in 2021.

“It was my first time having a film at Cannes, and it was my first time seeing the completed film with all the effects,” says Moore. “Margaret Qualley, Moore’s co-star and I kept looking over at each other going, ‘Oh my God!’ ”

The film received a 10-minute standing ovation. In a competition lineup that included not only Cannes heavy hitters like Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Schrader and Yorgos Lanthimos — not to mention the king of body horror himself, Cronenberg — The Substance quickly became the most talked-about title at thefestival.

It was ahead of Cannes that the film landed new distribution with Mubi. The haute streaming service is better known in Europe but has been trying to break in to North America, where specialty distribution is dominated by A24 and Neon. The movie is a massive play for the company whose biggest recent festival acquisitions were Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave and Ira Sachs’ Passages.The Substance will be its largest domestic release to date.

Despite the stops and starts, Fargeat remains confident The Substance will find its way to audiences. “I knew that I would get there,” she says. “I knew in the bottom of my stomach we would make it.” Luckily, she has a strong stomach.

This story first appeared in the Sept. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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