Coralie Fargeat Makes Movies Like No One Else

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As a child growing up in Paris, Coralie Fargeat never felt fully adapted to the real world. Extremely shy, she wasn’t very interested in playing with dolls or the other “regular stuff” that little girls were supposed to like. She looked for different ways to express her imagination—like using a tape recorder to capture her own stories. “Everything I could create to escape reality,” she says, “I did it.” Fargeat and her older brother spent a lot of time with their grandfather, a free spirit and cinephile who introduced them to everything from Chaplin to Rambo. Fargeat became movie obsessed.

Her life changed as a teenager when her father bought a small video camera for the family. “Very, very soon I appropriated it,” says Fargeat. She quickly moved from shooting home movies to making short films. When a magazine held a contest for amateur filmmakers to submit their own short versions of Star Wars, Fargeat poured everything she had into making her ten-minute adaptation. She put friends in costumes and blended in stop-motion animation. “I spent the best time of my life,” she says. “Like, not sleeping because I was editing all night.”

She didn’t win the contest, but she was immediately hooked on the experience of moviemaking—of being a director. “That was really the shift for me,” she says. “I was a totally different person. I felt super powerful, like no one can stop me.”

Mark SeligerCoat by Brandon Maxwell; top by Tory Burch; skirt by Stella McCartney; boots by Chloé; Tiffany Hardwear Ring by Tiffany & Co.

Fargeat, forty-eight, has followed that feeling of liberation and her own artistic vision as a filmmaker ever since—even when it often seemed like no one else got it. A few decades later, she’s finally breaking through. Her second feature film, The Substance, won best screenplay at Cannes in May and stirred up plenty of Oscar buzz for Demi Moore’s all-in performance. The visually arresting body-horror thriller—which Fargeat wrote, directed, coproduced, and coedited and which costars Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid—is a biting commentary on sexism and ageism, especially in the entertainment industry. It’s a potent mix of dark humor and gross-out shock, with elements of Kubrick and Cronenberg.

The enthusiastic reviews for The Substance are powerful validation for Fargeat. “I’m more than thrilled to have such a positive reaction, because I put myself in danger with that film,” she tells me over lunch at Corner Bar, the restaurant in the chic Nine Orchard hotel on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “It was like five years of work. It was sticking to my conviction,” she says, “making my choices and following my intuition that the movie had to be really bold.”

Fargeat is nibbling on a Nicoise salad while we chat. “I’m so French,” she says, laughing lightly. Dressed casually in a GAP sweatshirt, she is a voluble and animated conversationalist. Stray strands of her untamed, curly brown hair periodically fall in front of her face as she talks, and she brushes them back absentmindedly.

In The Substance, Moore plays an aging actress named Elisabeth Sparkle who suddenly finds herself cast aside. Feeling wounded and insecure, she decides to try an underground treatment that promises to deliver a younger, more perfect, more beautiful version of her. But, of course, it comes with a catch—and extreme consequences.

Sometimes I say, Oh, why don’t I do fun stuff? I don’t have to, you know, hit the difficult points. But I felt strong enough to be able to confront this and to have something to say about it. Fargeat wrote the film to challenge the way that society continues to judge women by their physical appearance and the damage that does. “Sometimes I say, Oh, why don’t I do fun stuff? I don’t have to, you know, hit the difficult points,” she says. “But I felt strong enough to be able to confront this and to have something to say about it.”

Coming out of high school, Fargeat was determined to attend La Fémis, the prestigious film-and-television school in Paris. But students are required to complete an undergraduate program before applying. So Fargeat spent a few years studying political science. One day, a movie crew came to shoot at her school and Fargeat introduced herself to the first assistant director to ask if she could do an internship. Not long after, he called her and asked if she wanted to work with him on an American movie called Passion of Mind shooting in France. She quickly accepted. The star of the movie? Demi Moore.

That first job led to consistent work on movie crews. And in 2003, Fargeat wrote and directed her first short film, The Telegram, about two women in a French village during World War II waiting for a fateful letter. The movie was well received and earned Fargeat some notice as a young filmmaker to watch.

But the early success turned into years of frustration. Fargeat wanted to make movies in the genres she loves the most—science fiction, fantasy, “more weird stuff.” But her tastes ran against the prevailing taste for realism in the French film industry. “I was writing stories that nobody wanted to produce in France,” she says. She faced rejection after rejection. “For real, everybody was looking at me like an alien.”

Another breakthrough finally came in 2014 when Fargeat won a contest and some money to make a short sci-fi movie called Reality+, a Black Mirror-like, body-image satire that in some ways presages The Substance. On the strength of that success, she was able to secure financing for her first feature, Revenge. The movie is an intense, bloody thriller about a woman who is sexually assaulted and left for dead in the desert before seeking her vengeance. Released in 2017, Revenge tapped into the #MeToo spirit of the moment and earned Fargeat praise for the powerful feminist statement it made.

But she wasn’t focused on that message going into the project. The feminist story line just emerged organically when she sat down to write. “I really met feminism after Revenge,” she says. “Because I put it in the film, but it was not intellectualized. I didn’t say, ‘I’m going to do a feminist film.’ I just did it, you know?”

That wasn’t the case with The Substance, which hits theaters in September. Fargeat knew when she sat down to write the script that she wanted to tell a story that would tap into her own lived experience as a woman. “I decided to go for exactly the way I was seeing things,” she says. And that meant telling the story, she says, “in a violent way, because the way I was living all this was so violent.”

The movie has plenty of blood and gore—and there are several moments that will have you squirming in your seat—but it’s also absurdly and very intentionally funny. Fargeat hopes audiences will have conversations about the themes she explores in the movie, but she also wants to reach them on a more basic level. “I really hope they have fun,” she says, “because the movie is really meant to be entertaining.”

After so many years of battling to tell stories her way, the real triumph for Fargeat is that she’s finally able to share the full filmmaking vision she’s been crafting since she was a young girl watching movies with her grandfather. “This movie has really kind of made me stronger,” says Fargeat. “Because I know being a director is what I’m made for. It’s who I am.”

And who she always was.

Photographed by Mark Seliger
Styled by Chloe Hartstein
Hair by Kevin Ryan using GO247 & UNITE
Grooming by Jessica Ortiz for La Mer
Makeup by Rebecca Restrepo using Lisa Eldridge Beauty
Production by Madi Overstreet and Ruth Levy
Set Design by Michael Sturgeon
Nails by Eri Handa using Dior
Tailoring by Yana Galbshtein
Design Director Rockwell Harwood
Contributing Visual Director James Morris
Executive Producer, Video Dorenna Newton
Executive Director, Entertainment Randi Peck

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