Over the last year, no director has had the ascent of Coralie Fargeat. The French filmmaker has gone from indie genre darling to one of the most talked-about directors in Hollywood. Her 2017 debut, Revenge, a sleek, blood-soaked spin on the rape-revenge thriller, made waves on the festival circuit and marked her as a filmmaker to watch. But few could have predicted her next move: a Cannes competition slot for her long-awaited follow-up, The Substance – a film that would soon have the Croisette buzzing.
Starring Demi Moore in a career-redefining performance, The Substance is a body-horror satire that reimagines Sunset Blvd. for the TikTok era. Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging fitness icon whose once-popular TV show is deemed passé. Studio executives, led by Dennis Quaid’s pointedly named Harvey, demand a younger, “fuckable” host. Desperate to reclaim her relevance, Elisabeth discovers a mysterious medical company offering a radical solution: an experimental serum that promises, “a younger, better” version of oneself. After retreating to her bathroom and administering the liquid, she collapses to the floor before Margaret Qualley – her new, improved doppelgänger – emerges from a vagina-shaped hole in her spine. The fresh-faced version of Elisabeth takes over the rebranded Pump It Up, while the original is left behind, literally crumpled on the bathroom floor. The catch? The two versions must switch every seven days or suffer terrifying consequences.
The film’s world premiere at Cannes was polarizing – walkouts, raves, and instantly invoked comparisons to David Cronenberg, Darren Aronofsky, and Paul Verhoeven. But even among the controversy, one consensus emerged, this was a role Moore was born to play. The question was whether the Academy – historically resistant to extreme genre fare and still largely male – would embrace Fargeat’s visceral vision of what a woman needs to do to stay economically viable in Hollywood.
Eight months later, The Substance has defied expectations. Fargeat became only the ninth woman ever nominated for the Best Director Academy Award, securing a Best Original Screenplay nod along the way. And Moore, fresh off her Golden Globe win, is now the frontrunner for Best Actress.
How did a gruesome, boundary-pushing body-horror film become an awards season juggernaut? To find out, I revisited my conversation with Fargeat, conducted the morning after The Substance’s Cannes premiere – now shared here for the first time.
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Reading the reviews this morning, the term that people have been using to describe The Substance is “body horror”. What does that term mean for you?
Coralie Fargeat: I would say that it's everything that is related to how we see our body and the fear that we can have towards it. How it can transform, how it can be invaded, how it can be mutated. It can metamorphose. We can want to improve it or give it some strength or some hyper power. The specificity of humanity is we have always wanted to escape the body we have and create something else or make it last. To kind of, get control over it. But in the end, our body is the only thing we don't have control over, even if we try hard.
The Substance resonates with many, not just women in the entertainment industry, as it confronts the relentless ideals society imposes. The film taps into deep, visceral emotions – especially anger. Was that what was driving you emotionally when you wrote it?
CF: I have been impacted in my life since a very young age about how I'm seen. How I'm seen if I don't fit in the boxes. How I was raised, feeling that if I don't look like this or look like that, I’m going to be no use or I'm going to have no worth. I explored these feelings in my short films and a little bit in Revenge in a different way, but it truly incarnated in this film because I had passed my 40s and I felt, ‘okay, this is it, my life is over and I'm not going to have a place anymore. I'm not going to have any worth anymore, and I'm done’. It was really coming from a place of reflecting on how negative I could be about that, and yet I was only – hopefully – halfway through my life.
So I said, ‘okay, so what can I do to change this?’ To me, it was a perfect time to address these themes in a genre film, which is a vehicle that I love, and into a story that I knew. After Revenge I needed to have something that I knew I would care about for many years. Because I know the way I work, I write, I direct, I edit – it's many years working on the same project, so I have to be really passionate about it. I also knew it was the right time to express this because my feminism also had evolved.
Even though it has always been with me, I was able to articulate it now, my consciousness of it was different. I really wanted to make everything explode. At that time, I said, how come we are still here? How come all this shit is still going on? I was kind of amazed, angry, but also full of energy: ‘I need this to change, and I need to create something about it that is going to be very truly sincere and hopefully powerful’.
The way you take these feelings in The Substance is to use humour and horror. Why this particular approach?
CF: To me, genre film is really paired almost always with humour. Genre films that I love allow all the violence and the social or political matters to go through to the audience in a way that you can also have fun with, because it's related to excess. I'm not so interested in realism and violence in my films anyway, but to transcend it and create something that becomes almost pop art. That way there is fun and love in it. I also think it's a great way to relieve all the tension that comes with what I'm talking about.
How did you go about working with Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley to create Elisabeth Sparkle?
CF: I knew that the two actresses that were going to incarnate the character would be the central piece of the film because they are in every shot, and they have almost no dialogue. Their physical presence and the way they create something without having to say a word was going to be so important. Both Demi and Margaret, in a different way, are two super instinctive actresses and that was important because I think the movie is everything but cerebral. It's telling the story with your body, with trusting each other, like having this intelligence of what a physical presence can transmit without any words. But for this, you have to be very grounded in how you inhabit your body.
I read Demi’s autobiography (Inside Out) just before working with her and I was really amazed because it made me discover a total other face of her that I didn't know. How smart and instinctive she managed to be, to take her place and to stay in her position in a very male world. How feminist her decisions were and how she took risks that were very provocative at the time. Also, the relationship that she had with her own body, transforming it a lot, being obviously obsessed with it as well. This is what really convinced me that she could be bold enough to come on board in this film, because it was a very risky part. She has this instinct and she's smart because she knows when she can trust. She decided to shoot in a country that is not hers, with a director she had never worked with in a project where she exposes herself a lot.
What was great is that she and Margaret worked so well together. It was kind of an unexpected pairing, but there was an instant chemistry. Margaret is a very, very instinctive and smart actress who also knows how to tell a story with her body. She trained a lot for the part to get the perfect curves and everything and it was really her tool to give life to this kind of surreal creature that is as bodily grounded as Demi, but in a different way. For her too, it was a lot of trust and a lot of just going for it. Like, you can't come on board on the project if you don't go 100 per cent.
To tell the story you want to tell, using the body as a storytelling device, there needs to be a lot of nudity. The history of cinema has been built on the male gaze, so I’m interested in how you went about working with this almost default way of presenting the female body.
CF: In the film, the nudity is everything but sexualized. That's the way I naturally wrote it. It's a woman looking at herself, living with her body in this white bathroom which is kind of like a temple to the body. This is where they are who they are. There is no other gaze in that bathroom. It's only them with themselves. That is the place where the body is what it is. It's naked, it's heavy, it's on the floor, it falls. It’s the only place in the film where it's seen for what it is.
In the rest of the film, the body is always under the eye of someone else. Especially for Pump it Up, which is the kind of expression of how you can use your body in a hyper sexualized way. In that world you're going to be scrutinized. Everyone is going to look you into pieces. They ask, is this perfect? Where is the imperfection? When it's in the outside world, the body becomes another object. It's under the eyes of everyone, at least when you are a woman, I think. It's a very different story when it's inside this bathroom and the body is naked.
Here at Cannes, there are only four female directors in the lineup of 22 films. This comes after years of lobbying and pushing for more women in competition. It is a problem with the Oscars too, and both places pledge that they want more women that they want to remove the glass ceiling. What do you think needs to change?
CF: To me, there are so many glass ceilings. To be honest, I really think if you don't do more affirmative action to rebalance things, there will always be inequality in the numbers. So, I'm very proactive to give more places to more voices. I feel if we wait for nature to rebalance on its own, it's going to take maybe 3,000 years and maybe it's never going to come. Yeah, there is a little progress, but it's still super shy compared to what it should be. And I think in politics it is also important. We did it here in France for the national assembly. We said you have to have 50/50, more people came in and then it becomes natural, and we get used to seeing other voices. When you search for new voices, you find them.
Finally, can I ask what your hopes are for The Substance? Are you hoping that there will be awards? That you will change people's minds, that you will have a big international success?
CF: As a director, of course I always hope that the movie is going to be seen and is going to be well received. I think, especially for this one, considering everything I put in it and the things I want to address, it would be amazing if it managed to find its way to the world. I felt like yesterday, the premiere was the first spark that will make its way everywhere. I made it in such a symbolic way that I think it can speak to any country. That's what I like in my films – to work with symbolism so it can speak everywhere. Hopefully it makes its way.