Before Coralie Fargeat Had Characters or Story, She Wrote This One Scene That Gave Birth to ‘The Substance’
Coralie Fargeat is not a screenwriter who starts with dialogue — in fact, there are very few spoken words in even the final version of “The Substance” — but she also wasn’t particularly focused on plot or character in the initial gestation period of her Oscar-nominated film. While on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Fargeat talked about how writing “the birth” sequence — when Sue (Margaret Qualley) grows out of the back of Elizabeth (Demi Moore), after taking the eponymous substance — was the key breakthrough moment from which so much started to fall into place.
“It’s interesting because in fact, the birth sequence is the first sequence that I wrote even before I had my characters or my story,” said Fargeat on the podcast. “I had my general idea of ‘generating another you,’ this fantasy that there is this better version of yourself, and I wrote this full scene the way it is in the film before I even knew who my main character was going to be.”
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While on the podcast, Fargeat talked about how, while writing, she thinks about imagery, specifically for its symbolic power of embodying the ideas at the heart of the project. And it was in intuitively writing the Sue birth scene that the writer/director discovered the symbolic element that became the literal and figurative backbone from which so much of the film emerged.
“The spinal cord is a very important element in the whole film. The spinal cord is something that makes us stand straight, it’s our definition, it’s our balance, it’s our backbone… and then the fact that the other you [Sue] comes from the back, what maintains the balance, and then you have to respect the balance [something Sue and Elizabeth fail to do, leading to their downfall], it’s something that came intuitively,” said Fargeat. “And I think also because it’s the relationship with yourself, you break something of you to let this other idea of you emerge. And then the other [you, Sue] has to stitch your spine again and take care of it. But everything comes from the spine. [Sue] pulls the liquid [from Elizabeth’s spine] to stabilize herself. I think the spine, in a very unconscious way, became this very important element.”
Once unlocking the spinal element, Fargeat started writing it into the costumes (the zipper “catsuit”), sound design, and the detailed bodily transformations, as the relationship between the body horror and underlying themes of the film congealed. But there was also something visceral about the spinal birth that also unlocked for Fargeat how she would film “The Substance.”
“It’s all those elements that give very strong sensations that don’t need to be fully explained, but that stay with you in movies,” said Fargeat. “I think it embodies all the main elements of the movie — with being a scene without any dialogue, with a very visceral relationship with your body, with what you film, how you film it, and what you leave out of frame, what you hear.”
It was in writing this scene, in which character, story, and ideas are directly related to the flesh, that Fargeat said she knew the film would rely almost entirely on practical effects and prosthetics makeup. And not surprisingly, from early in prep through late in the edit, it’s the scene that took the most time and discussion.
“And me as a filmmaker, I have to be able to touch it, to put my hand on it, to be able to frame it for real, because I know that I film in a very obsessive way with all those macro shots that are really the way I build my cinematographic language, and I need to be able to film for real, I can’t film a green [screen] and imagine it,” said Fargeat. “So I always tend to not write the thing that I know I won’t have the money to do, and limit myself to frame less things, but seeing [instead] that I know that I will be able to do for real.”
“The Substance” is nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actress (Demi Moore), and Makeup and Hairstyling.
To hear Fargeat’s full Toolkit interview, subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch the full interview below, or subscribe to IndieWire’s YouTube page.
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