Coralie Fargeat 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 $18 million film and planned to distribute it, had decided that the movie couldn’t be released in theaters with Fargeat’s 140-minute version.
Fargeat’s debut “Revenge” was 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.
The Substance was ultimately released by indie distributor Mubi, grossing $79.1 million worldwide.
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Universal executives whom she declined to name — two men and one woman — demanded extensive changes: “I think the film must have titillated something in these gentlemen.”
“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.”
Universal respected Fargeat’s vision, evidenced by its financial support of “The Substance.” The studio even turned over the marketing materials to its eventual new owner, Mubi (the distributor did not use any creative from Universal, one source added).
But Fargeat’s insistence on total creative control led to a “go with God” situation, even if it meant Universal taking a small loss.
“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.
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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 comment on the matter.
Shortly after that screening with Universal in L.A., Fargeat took matters into her own hands by submitting 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.”
Cannes Fest as Temple of Cinema
“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 competition at Cannes since attending the festival’s 2001 premiere of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.
Selecting “The Substance” for the competition rather than Midnight Screening, where most genre films play, was a bold move by Frémaux, the festival’s director.
Fremaux admits that he “surprised 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, “it was 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 first film to debut in U.S. theaters before hitting its platform (A24 had considered 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.)
Fargeat praises Moore’s go-for-broke performance, informed by having been prematurely 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 emancipate 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 personal to Fargeat, and she was willing to make 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 difficult 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.”
Fargeat puts herself in the film in the most disturbing moments — during the scene when Moore’s character first uses the serum that 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.
“This violence is not delicate,” she says. “It’s not small or kind. It doesn’t smile. It’s something overpowering. And I knew that to be true to the story I wanted to tell, the film had to show it, make people 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 partners, 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.