As a child growing up in Paris, Coralie Fargeat never felt fully adapted to the real world. She was extremely shy and had little interest in playing with dolls or other “normal things” that little girls are supposed to like. She looked for other ways to express her imagination – for example, using a tape recorder to record her own stories. “Anything I could think of to escape reality,” she says, “I did.” Fargeat and her older brother spent a lot of time with their grandfather, a free spirit and film buff who showed them everything from Chaplin to Rambo. Fargeat developed an obsession with films.
Her life changed as a teenager when her father bought a small video camera for the family. “Very, very soon I became proficient with it,” says Fargeat. She quickly moved from making home videos to making short films. When a magazine held a competition for amateur filmmakers to make their own short versions of star WarsFargeat put everything she had into her 10-minute adaptation, putting friends in costumes and adding stop-motion animation. “I had the time of my life,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep because I was editing all night.”
Although she didn’t win the competition, she was immediately fascinated by the experience of making films – of being a director. “It was really a game changer for me,” she says. “I was a completely different person. I felt super powerful, like nobody could stop me.”
Coat by Brandon Maxwell; Top by Tory Burch; Skirt by Stella McCartney; Boots by Chloé; Tiffany Hardwear ring by Tiffany & Co.
Fargeat, 48, has since followed that feeling of liberation and her own artistic vision as a filmmaker – even though it often seemed as if no one else understood her. A few decades later, she finally has her breakthrough. Her second feature film, The substancewon Best Screenplay at Cannes in May, generating plenty of Oscar talk for Demi Moore’s all-in-one performance. The visually arresting body horror thriller – which Fargeat wrote, directed, co-produced and co-edited, and stars Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid – is a scathing commentary on sexism and ageism, particularly in the entertainment industry. It’s a powerful mix of black humor and gross-out shock, with elements of Kubrick and Cronenberg.
The enthusiastic reviews for The substance are a strong endorsement for Fargeat. “I am more than thrilled about the positive response, because I put myself in danger with this film,” she tells me over lunch at the Corner Bar, the restaurant in the chic Nine Orchard Hotel on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “It was like five years of work. I stayed true to my convictions,” she says, “I made my decisions and followed my intuition that the film had to be really brave.”
As we talk, Fargeat nibbles on a salad Niçoise. “I’m so French,” she says, laughing slightly. She’s casually dressed in a GAP sweatshirt and is a talkative and lively conversationalist. As she speaks, strands of her untamed, curly brown hair occasionally fall into her face, which she absentmindedly brushes back.
In The substanceIn this film, Moore plays an ageing actress named Elisabeth Sparkle who suddenly feels abandoned. Feeling hurt and insecure, she decides to try an unknown treatment that promises to give her a younger, more perfect and beautiful version of herself. But of course, there’s a catch – and extreme consequences.
Fargeat wrote the film to challenge the way society still judges women based on their appearance and the damage that does. “Sometimes I say, ‘Oh, why don’t I do something funny? I don’t have to address the difficult issues,'” she says. “But I felt strong enough to confront it and say something about it.”
After high school, Fargeat was determined to attend La Fémis, the prestigious film and television school in Paris. But before they can apply, students must complete an undergraduate course. So Fargeat studied political science for a few years. One day, a film crew came to her school to film, and Fargeat introduced herself to the first assistant director and asked if she could do an internship. Shortly after, he called her and asked if she could work with him on an American film called Passion of the spirit Filming in France. She accepted quickly. The star of the film? Demi Moore.
This first job led to constant work in film crews. And in 2003, Fargeat wrote and directed her first short film, The Telegramabout two women in a French village during World War II who wait for a fateful letter. The film was well received and brought Fargeat some attention as a young filmmaker.
But early success turned into years of frustration. Fargeat wanted to make films in the genres she loves most – science fiction, fantasy, “more offbeat stuff.” But her tastes clashed with the prevailing taste for realism in the French film industry. “I was writing stories that nobody wanted to produce in France,” she says. She was hit by one rejection after another. “Seriously, everyone looked at me like I was an alien.”
Another breakthrough finally came in 2014, when Fargeat won a competition and some money to make a short science fiction film called Reality+, A Black Mirror-like body image satire that in some ways anticipates The substanceDue to this success, she was able to secure financing for her first feature film. Revenge. The film is an intense, bloody thriller about a woman who is sexually abused and left to die in the desert before taking revenge. Released in 2017, Revenge seized on the #MeToo spirit of the moment and earned praise from Fargeat for the powerful feminist statement it made.
But that message was not important to her in her project. The feminist plot emerged quite naturally when she sat down to write. “I really got to know feminism after Revenge,” she says. “Because I put it in the film, but it wasn’t intellectualized. I didn’t say, ‘I’m going to make a feminist film.’ I just did it, you know?”
This was not the case with The substancewhich will be released in September. When Fargeat sat down to write the script, she knew she wanted to tell a story that reflected her own experiences as a woman. “I decided to act exactly as I saw things,” she says. And that meant telling the story “in a brutal way, because the way I experienced all of this was so brutal.”
The film is full of blood and brutality – and there are several moments that will make you squirm in your seat with fear – but it is also absurd and deliberately funny. Fargeat hopes audiences will start talking about the issues she tackles in the film, but she also wants to reach them on a more fundamental level. “I really hope they have fun,” she says, “because the film is meant to be really entertaining.”
After so many years of struggling to tell stories her way, the real triumph for Fargeat is that she can finally share the full vision of film production that she has developed since watching movies with her grandfather as a little girl. “This film has really made me stronger,” says Fargeat. “Because I know that I was made to be a director. This is who I am.”
And who she always was.
Photographed by Mark Seliger
Styled by Chloe Hartstein
Hair by Kevin Ryan with GO247 & UNITE
Care by Jessica Ortiz for La Mer
Makeup by Rebecca Restrepo with Lisa Eldridge Beauty
Production by Madi Overstreet and Ruth Levy
Set design by Michael Sturgeon
Nails by Eri Handa with Dior
Tailoring by Yana Galbshtein
Design Director Rockwell Harwood
Contributing Visual Director James Morris
Executive Producer, Video Dorenna Newton
Executive Director, Entertainment, Randi Peck
