Coralie Fargeat: There was instant chemistry when Demi and Margaret came together

I really love his cinema. He is someone I grew up with. He creates this great imaginary world, related to the human body.

I would say that it's everything related to how we see our body and the fear that we can have towards it—how it can transform, how it can be invaded, how it can be mutated, how it can metamorphose, how we may want to improve it, or give it some strengths or hyper powers. It is everything that is related to the mortal human condition that we want to escape at some point in our lives. We have often wanted to escape the body we have and create something else out of it, or make it last longer, or get control over it. But in the end, it's the only thing that we don't have control over.

I have been impacted in my life since a very young age by how I'm seen, how I don't fit into the traditional boxes. I explored it in different ways in my short films. However, it truly came together in a big way in The Substance. I was in my 40s, and I felt that my life was over. The film really came from reflecting on how negative I could get about that stage in my life and what I can do to change it. To me it was a perfect time to address these issues through the vehicle of a genre film. I have been working on this film for many years. My consciousness of my feminism had evolved. I was angry, but also full of energy that I needed things to change, and I needed to create something truly sincere and powerful.

A genre film is paired almost always with humor. It allows all the violence and the socio-political issues to go through to the audience in a bearable way. I'm not so much interested in realism and violence in my films but in transcending it and creating something that becomes almost like pop art. I think it's a great way to relieve all the tension. So, I love to pair humour and horror.

In the end, the protagonist is happy when she doesn't have a body anymore. It’s a kind of liberation. She has her moment of glory. She frees herself from all the gazes, she doesn't care anymore what she looks like and can truly be herself.

The fight between the two is more a fight that we have within ourselves, the violence that we internalize and the kind of rules that we force ourselves to follow. It makes us totally bipolar and schizophrenic. You have many versions of yourself inside you, and each one sometimes wants to take the wheel. The two women and their fights are expressions of that.

I knew that the two actors would be central to the film. They are present in every shot. There is almost no dialogue in the film, so their physical presence and the way they incarnate their characters without saying a word was going to be important. Demi and Margaret, in their own way, are two super instinctive actresses and I think the movie itself is everything but cerebral. It's about telling the story with the body, it’s about what a physical presence can transmit without any words. For this the actors needed to be very grounded in the way they inhabit their bodies.

I read Demi’s autobiography before working with her, and it made me discover the other side of her that I didn't know about. Everything she went through in her life, how she navigated the world, how smart she maintained her position in a very male dominated world, how she was a feminist ahead of the times. Also, the relationship that she had with her own body, transforming it a lot, being obviously obsessed with it as well. It convinced me to have her on board.

It was great that the ladies worked so well. It was an unexpected pairing but when they came together, there was an instant chemistry. Margaret is also a very instinctive and smart actress. She also knows how to tell a story with her body. She gave life to this surreal creature.

Nudity is everything but sexualised in most of the film. That’s the way I naturally wrote it. It's about a woman looking at herself, living with her body in this white bathroom, a kind of the temple where she is on her own. There is no other gaze in that bathroom. It's only the women with themselves. The body is what it is. It's naked, it's heavy, it's on the floor, it falls, and it's seen for what it is, a body that is not judged by anyone but the woman herself. And in the rest of the film, it’s the opposite. The body is always under the eye of someone else, hypersexualised, scrutinized, broken down to pieces. The way women are usually looked at in the world.

If we don’t take affirmative action to rebalance, inequality will stay. So, I'm very proactive, to give voice to women and give space for more and more female voices. If we wait for nature to rebalance, it's going to take 3000 years and more, and maybe the change will never come about.