Coralie Fargeat Career Summary
January 25, 2025
My Oscar Book:
Coralie Fargeat Career Summary:
Occupational Inheritance: No
Social Class:
Nationality: French
Education: Sciences Po; Le Femis
Training: Collective, “La Squadra”
First Film: Le télégramme, shirt; Revenge (2017); age 37
First Oscar Nomination: The Substance, 2024; age 49
Other Nominations:
Genre (specialties): Body Horror genre
Collaborators:
Last Film:
Contract:
Career Output: 2 shorts, 2 features
Career Span: 2003-present
Marriage:
Politics:
Retirement: NA
Death: NA
Coralie Fargeat (born November 24, 1976) is a French filmmaker, who gained recognition with her 2017 debut feature Revenge, for which she received awards from several film festivals.
Her follow-up feature, The Substance (2024), a satirical body horror film, won her the Cannes Film Fest Best Screenplay Award and earned her accolades worldwide, including 3 Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, and two BAFTA nominations.
She decided to be a filmmaker at age 16.
Fargeat studied at Sciences Po before beginning work on film sets.
In 2010, Fargeat attended La Fémis, a prestigious cinema school in Paris. She was selected for its Atelier Scénario, a year-long screenwriting workshop, where she was told her screenplay would never be made because of how violent and graphic it was.
While attending La Fémis, Fargeat and some friends created a collective called La Squadra, where they tried to edit their features together, facing similar difficulties as they each wanted to create genre films. They met twice a week. They invited filmmakers and industry professionals to share their success stories, which helped them gain more realistic understanding of the film world, how it works, and the logistics of how to get their stories told.
Fargeat’s first short film “Le télégramme” was released in 2003, a film about two women awaiting a postman’s delivery during World War II. The short won 13 awards at several film festivals.
In 2007, Fargeat co-created Les Fées cloches with Anne-Elisabeth Blateau, a comedy mini-series which she also directed.
Fargeat released her short follow-up Reality+ in 2014. The sci-fi tale received a nomination for the Jury Award at the Tribeca Film Fest.
Fargeat’s debut film was Revenge (2017), a thriller about a young woman who is raped and left for dead. Inspired by revenge movies like Kill Bill, Rambo, and Mad Max, Fargeat wished to explore a character who would seem “weak” to others or the audience, but would undergo transformation into “kind of superhero” that would set out to get her revenge.
The film had its world premiere at the 2017 Toronto Film Fest in the Midnight Madness section, and was selected to be screened at 23 additional film festivals.
In 2022, Fargeat directed an episode of the Netflix series The Sandman.
Fargeat’s second feature was The Substance (2024), a body horror film starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid. The film premiered in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival to a strong critical reception, and won the festival’s Best Screenplay award.
Fargeat is a member and one of the founding signatories of Collectif 50/50, a group established with the purpose of working towards gender equality across the film industry
Fargeat is intrigued with the suspension of disbelief, and is a fan of using imagery and symbols to express simple ideas in powerful way. She is fascinated with films’ ability to create their own world, while existing outside the realm of reality, citing revenge films like Kill Bill and Rambo as examples.
In making graphic or gore-filled movies, Fargeat balances violent scenes with humor makes the violence more tolerable.
Films filled with homages and references push the viewers away from being able to identify with the film. She describes this separation as “second-degree moments” and chooses to stay away from excessive references. Fargeat’s films express a genuine sincere vision. She tries to “embrace her subject in its choices, its biases, its excesses, in its faults too” to achieve this.
When in pre-production for Revenge, she stated that actress Matilda Lutz was chosen partially because of her extensive trust in Fargeat, a crucial factor for her,
Fargeat lists David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, David Lynch, Paul Verhoeven, and Michael Haneke as filmmakers who have influenced her, as well as South Korean filmmakers as stylistic inspiration.
Filmography
Features
2017 Revenge
2024 The Substance
Short films
2003 Le télégramme
2014 Reality
