‘Before Ozempic we had amphetamines. But it’s always the same violence’: Coralie Fargeat on women, ageing and Hollywood

Coralie Fargeat is based in Paris, but is in London for the Oscar nominations – the film she wrote and directed, The Substance, has been nominated for best picture, best director, best original screenplay, best actress (for Demi Moore) and best makeup (the prosthetics are really something). It’s the same story with the Baftas (minus best film), and Moore, of course, has already won the Golden Globe for her role. She accepted it with the memorable line, “Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a ‘popcorn actress’ …”

Fargeat is all smiles in the office of her production company in central London. There’s a big plate of salami – she loves salami (I love salami!). I suppose I expected her to be more austere, but that’s the patriarchy for you: you can’t even make feminist body-horror without people expecting you to frown. That’s what society does. “It puts labels on things, and puts people into boxes,” Fargeat says. “If you are this, you can’t be that. Pretty girls should always smile. If you’re pretty, you can’t be gross. If you’re blond, you are stupid. We make fun of these things but they create representations that destroy us.”

Fargeat is the only female director nominated at this year’s Oscars, and if not the only feminist then certainly the most feminist, but what surprises me more is that anything so bloodthirsty would get on to the list. That’s just not what the Oscars do, is it? “Exorcist?” the publicist demurs, but hell, that film is as old as I am (it was released in 1973).

Now 48, Fargeat made her first full-length feature, Revenge, in 2017. It was so graphic that paramedics had to be called to the premiere, where a guy had a seizure. “He’s fine!” the director said in an interview at the time. The film is a rape-revenge fantasy, told through the body (Matilda Lutz’s) and in the way its stance changes – but also with some very detailed injuries. “I like to create a visceral visual experience. I like to take things to excess, mix violence and fun elements. I fully went for it – embraced my singularity as a strength not a flaw. I started to take the first step, with Revenge, and I felt this is the place where I belong. Where I can express myself with so much confidence, where I feel powerful, where I feel free, where I have no doubts.”

Fargeat grew up in Paris, watching Indiana Jones, escaping her creeping sense that, between her glasses and her personality, she didn’t fit in. “I didn’t feel at ease in real life. I was super shy. I felt totally not adapted to reality. When I watched films, that’s where I felt alive, that’s where I felt I had great emotions, that’s where I felt at home.” She discovered horror as a teenager, and it intersected with her sense of gender alienation. “When I grew up, girls weren’t supposed to love horror. People used to say, ‘Coralie loves guy movies.’ I felt very proud of that. I felt like I had access to a world that was not supposed to be mine.”

She went to La Fémis cinema school in Paris and made her first film in 2003, a short called Le télégramme, which won two festival awards and was nothing like her later mayhem. It’s based on a short story by the Scottish writer Iain Crichton Smith, whose purpose was to “expose the pointlessness of petty rivalries in small, rural, island communities” (according to BBC Bitesize – it’s on the Scottish highers syllabus).

That is not the logline you’d give Fargeat’s film, in which two women await news of their sons and see the operator on his way with a telegram, which they know is only sent in the event of a death. It’s a short, brutal dive into how maternal love can turn your heart to stone – each is hoping, one almost with exhilaration, that it is the other one’s son who has died. “I always wanted to do genre, non-realistic films, but I knew that if I wanted to have a chance for my first short to be financed and made, I had to find some kind of normal story,” Fargeat says. “At the same time, there was a lot of space for me to still do genre, in the way that I could create the mise-en-scene, create a world, a universe, where visuals and sounds and frame and silence build tension, build atmosphere.”

Her next release was Reality+ in 2014, another short film, which nudged towards the territory of The Substance. In the film, people can alter their appearance with a digital device, but it only lasts a few hours. Again, it was constrained by finance: “I knew I couldn’t have a lot of prosthetics. I wish I could have been more in the body with Reality+.”

A quick walkthrough, with only the scantest of spoilers, for those who haven’t seen The Substance: Demi Moore is a screen-aerobics megastar who is unceremoniously binned by her TV network (and run over by a car) on her 50th birthday. A disembodied corporate voice offers her a Faustian deal: she can have her young self back – only better – but has to live alternate weeks in each body. The unused body exists, maimed and lifeless, in a tiled bathroom.

Moore’s character Elisabeth takes the deal: enter Margaret Qualley as Sue, in a self-birthing scene that is the most gruesome thing you’ll ever see – unless, that is, you watch the whole film. Organs burst out of the zips of catsuits; a hunchback springs up like it has a mind of its own. Did Fargeat worry that she was denying herself a mainstream audience, let alone any plaudits, with the gore? “The movie is violent, it is excessive, it is unsubtle. But I never censor myself. I never think, ‘That’ll reduce my audience.’ I go, always, with sincerity.”

The Substance, she says, is a film about what women “usually want to hide, or are told that you should hide. That’s why it was important for me to make it very visceral, very present, because it was a real statement: no, everything you ask us to hide, to cut, to make thinner, to erase, it will explode. Our pearly smiles are made of so many horrendous things that we have to keep within ourselves. I was trying to deconstruct, explode the idea of beauty. To show the reality of who we really are and what we’re made of.”

Some critics have found the Moore/Qualley dyad essentially still male-gaze, just with a hyperreal, nightmarish filter. Qualley’s youth is literally bursting with perfection; Moore’s ageing is repulsive in a fascinated way, as if the spectacle of a woman losing her beauty is Jabberwocky-level horrific. Plus, they fight; if you think you’re looking at the relationship between young and old women, then it’s defined by resentment and disgust, which is quite a guy perspective.

But since Elisabeth/Sue are one divided woman, the allegory instead is that beauty standards create a duality – how you look versus how you have to look, to please the world – that is inherently violent. The self resents the mask for suffocating it; the mask is disgusted by the self. “This distinction between who you really are and who you’re trying to be, that’s what creates the real violence. That’s what creates the disconnection with yourself. Everything you do to try to look some other way creates two selves; and there will always be this fear that your real self is going to find a way to be seen.”

I was surprised by Demi Moore in this role. “It was not obvious to me, either,” Fargeat says. “I knew that it was going to be tough to have an actress accept that part. It puts her in a very dangerous place. I knew I would have to face many ‘no’s, and that’s what happened. The name Demi Moore came up, but we thought: she would never want to do that. I imagined her in hyper control of her image. I said, ‘Let’s approach but let’s not lose time waiting for an answer.’ But it was a time of her life, she was about to be 60, she wanted to get her narrative back for herself. She wanted to exist for herself, take it back from the things people were projecting on to her. The script met the actress who was ready at that specific moment.”

Qualley was curveball casting for a different reason. “The idea was: if I were to wake up in a body that was the perfect one, what would it be? I was raised in a time when it was the babydoll, Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Jessica Rabbit, being thin but curvy; having a lot of sexual attributes, too: the bum, the boobs, the waist. I wanted to transmit to the audience, waking up in that ideal, in a body that’s going to give you so much importance in the world. With Margaret, we totally created that shape. In real life, when I met her, she’s very skinny, she doesn’t have boobs, she’s almost like a tomboy. She wanted to create that girl. She trained every day to sculpt this body. We created prosthetic boobs. She really worked to create this perfect, curvy body where everything sweats sex appeal.”

I remember the 80s and 90s being all about androgyny, not curves, but Fargeat reminds me what a supermodel actually looked like then – Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista – and describes how alien, how monstrous she felt growing up around that ideal, as a tomboy, with glasses. I guess we all measure ourselves against the most impossible standard, which is sort of the point.

“Every age has its own perfect,” Fargeat says. “Now, there’s Ozempic; before, we had amphetamines. Every culture has its own standard of what is valued. But it’s always the same violence. And it’s a trap. It’s not going to solve the way you can have a fulfilling relationship with the world. To me, it’s not something you can fight on the personal level. The whole world has to change to make you at ease. I truly believe that it’s a fight you can’t win on your own.”

• The Substance is streaming now on Mubi