How Director Coralie Fargeat Stayed True to Her Vision

On the day the Oscar nominations were announced, Coralie Fargeat, the director of “The Substance,” sat
with her laptop in her tiny one-bedroom flat in Paris’ bohemian 20th arrondissement, watching as this year’s contenders were revealed. It was afternoon in France when her name was called among the best director nominees (she was the only woman among them), and an overjoyed Fargeat leaped in the air
before collapsing back onto her red vintage couch. A few minutes later, she watched as “The Substance”
became the first body-horror film ever to be nominated for best picture. It landed five nominations in
all, an astonishing feat for any independent movie, let alone one told in a genre not typically embraced by
Oscar voters.

“When I make a film, I make it to be at Cannes, to be at the Oscars,” Fargeat, 48, says triumphantly. “I have this faith that this is what I want to do. I believe in the impossible.”

But a year ago, Fargeat wasn’t thinking about drafting an Oscar speech. In fact, she was worrying
that audiences might never see “The Substance,” her gory sendup of Hollywood sexism and ageism that
stars Demi Moore as a washed-up actress turned fitness guru. Universal, which had financed the $15
million film and planned to distribute it, had decided that the movie couldn’t be released in theaters
with the 140-minute version that Fargeat had shown them. That’s when things got really complicated.

Fargeat was a rising star, her film “Revenge” having been well received by critics and genre fans in 2017. She’d been granted final cut for “The Substance” by Working Title, which produced it, and she’d assumed her movie — which she made in France over six months — was nearly finished. She didn’t want
to change a scene.

I meet Fargeat in her apartment on the day of the Oscar nominations announcement. In the
months of press that she’s done for “The Substance,” which was ultimately released by independent distributor Mubi, grossing $79.1 million worldwide, the most she’s said about the struggle to release the film was to a journalist at Le Point. In that story, Fargeat was quoted as saying that three Universal executives whom she declined to name — two men and one woman — demanded extensive reshoots. “I think the film must have titillated something in this gentlemen,” she said in her diss of one of the men in that screening room.”

Today, Fargeat doesn’t point fingers at Universal. Nor does she have hard feelings about the studio that couldn’t embrace her passion project. “I can’t go into that too much,” she says. “I think it was as simple as it wasn’t a good match for what they wanted to do. They felt, I think very simply, that the gap was too big for them, how they sell films.”

Insiders say Universal respected Fargeat’s vision, as evidenced by its significant financial support of “The Substance.” The studio even turned over the marketing materials it had created for the film to its eventual new owner, Mubi. But Fargeat’s insistence on total creative control led to a “go with God” situation, even if it meant Universal taking a small loss.

Fargeat could easily have taken credit for being right, having just become the ninth woman ever nominated for best director at the Oscars (putting her in a class with Jane Campion, Kathryn Bigelow and Chloé Zhao), but that’s not Fargeat’s style. “It was tough,” she says. “Deep down, there was disappointment. There was bitterness. It was painful. It was difficult.”

Last spring, a Universal executive floated the idea that “The Substance” could be sent to the studio’s smaller prestige distributor, Focus Features. That company, often helpful in keeping Universal in the Oscars conversation, had too full a slate to accommodate Fargeat’s film.

“I also know there have been experiences that have been, and can be, much worse,” Fargeat says. “In spite of everything, I was surrounded by kindhearted people who didn’t always believe in the film, but there was no malice.”

Even now, there are different versions of what exactly happened with “The Substance” in the hands of Universal — a studio known for its deft touch with strongheaded auteurs. (These same executives, after all, helped Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” win seven Oscars last March.) Some insiders say Universal screened the film and knew it wasn’t right for them. Multiple other parties say Fargeat would not budge an inch when it came to studio notes — or even a conversation about notes — and that led to an impasse. Universal and Working Title declined to com- ment on the matter.

For her part, Fargeat says that “The Substance” turned out to be “so iconoclastic” that she felt she had delivered the monster from the final act of the film to Universal. “You do this job because you want to be loved,” she says, “but after a while, the film you really wanted to make doesn’t correspond at all to the expectations of someone who has studio logic.”

Shortly after that screening with Universal in L.A., Fargeat took mat- ters into her own hands by submit- ting her cut of “The Substance” to the Cannes Film Festival. She knew that if “The Substance” got into Cannes, allowing her to go directly to the highbrow masses, she had a shot at selling it to another distributor. Yet at 11 p.m. on April 10, with the press conference to announce the official selection just 12 hours away, the director ran out of hope. “I said to myself, ‘It’s dead.’ I was texting a close friend, ‘Listen, I still haven’t heard anything. Now I think it’s over,’” she remembers. “And just as I’m typing this text, Thierry Frémaux calls me to tell me the movie has been entered in the official competition.”

“When I got into Cannes,” she says, “I screamed so loudly that I must have woken up the entire floor. I knew everything was going to change because I was going to give birth to the film in the temple of cinema, a place where I couldn’t have dreamed of anything better.”

Fargeat had been fantasizing about presenting her film in com- petition at Cannes since attending the festival’s 2001 premiere of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” whose DVD cover sits right next to her on a shelf in her living room alongside John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”

Selecting “The Substance” for the competition rather than a Midnight Screening, where most genre films play, was a bold move by Frémaux, the festival’s esteemed director, who admits that he “sur- prised the selection committee” with that decision. “Right from the start, I thought the film would go very high, because I loved it. I loved its nerve,” he says, describing it as a “great oddity” and “extraordinarily original and disturbing.”

Soon after “The Substance” was accepted into the Cannes competition, Mubi, which is led by Efe Cakarel, bought it for multiple territories. Cakarel believed in Fargeat’s film so deeply that he made it Mubi’s inaugural theatri- cal release in the U.S. (A24 had con- sidered the project, sources say, but passed. Neon and its dogged founder, Tom Quinn, went down to the wire with Mubi, three other sources say, but did not triumph.)

Despite Fargeat’s tumultuous relationship with Universal, the film’s star, Moore, stood by the project and championed the director’s uncompromising vision. “I never felt the movie would go away,” the actress says only hours after receiving her Oscar nomination for “The Substance.” Like Fargeat, Moore was ready to bet it all on the film. “This movie defies so many norms,” she says. “And as I’ve said before, it could have been an absolute disaster.”

Fargeat praises Moore’s go-for- broke performance, clearly informed by having been pre- maturely put out to pasture by Hollywood after being one of the biggest stars of the 1990s. “Demi responded to this script because she was at a point in her life where she was on a journey to emanci- pate herself from a prison that ‘the image’ can become,” Fargeat says. “It’s something you have to free yourself from if you want to not have all your value in just the gaze of others. She was at a place where she could take those kinds of risks.”

The story of “The Substance” was so personal to Fargeat, too, that she was willing to make huge sacrifices for it. She was broke while she wrote the script on spec, keeping creative control from start to finish. She turned down lucrative offers (and even cut short preliminary talks with Marvel, which had approached her to direct 2021’s “Black Widow,” a source says) so she could stay focused on the project.

“I held on so tightly during the making of the film and the diffi- cult postproduction phase, when everyone wanted me to make it less violent, less excessive, less gory, less frontal. I knew that I had written this film to be more than — or at least at the same level as — what I’m denouncing in the film,” Fargeat says, adding that our society is “still insanely violent for women and puts us in boxes” to a point where we “create our own violence against ourselves.”

In fact, Fargeat puts herself in the film in one of the most disturbing moments — during the scene when Moore’s character first uses the serum that she believes will make her younger and more employable. “When you see the needle going into Elisabeth’s arm to inject the substance, it’s my arm,” she says.

That moment is one of many in “The Substance” when audience members might be tempted to look away. Which, for Fargeat, is precisely the point.

“This violence is not delicate,” she says. “It’s not small. It’s not kind. It doesn’t smile. It’s something over- powering. And I knew that to be true to the story I wanted to tell, the film had to show it, make peo- ple feel it and, above all, not censor itself at all on the level of intensity.”

Despite the issues with Universal, Fargeat says she has no regrets about sticking to her guns. She’s grateful to Working Title co-chairman Eric Fellner for championing the film.

“It was a very difficult project to finance. It took us over a year. We ran into COVID, and investors were very reluctant,” she says. “We were seeing a lot of different part- ners, but it was a risky project. It’s not horror like ‘Scream,’ which is designed to frighten. It’s really a genre film, but it’s multilayered, has a very strong message, has a director’s point of view.” And with that, she breaks into a confident smile.

Matt Donnelly contributed to this story.

Copyright: Sebastien Cauchon