Thousands of liters of blood were used for The Substance

Coralie Fargeat looks back on the epic filming of her genre film with Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley.

Sensation of the last Cannes Festival, The Substance electrified the audience. A totally crazy body-horror film, where Demi Moore shares the poster with Margaret Qualley And Dennis Quaidit will be released in France on November 6. While it is already on screens in the United States, its director, the French Coralie Fargeat, returned to her epic shoot in EWnotably admitting to having had to use an industrial quantity of fake blood. No less than 130,000 liters… for a single scene.

“You have to take the time to refocus on yourself and digest the film, so that new ideas and new desires can take shape.”she explains about the process of creating this film which lasted several years.

It stars Demi Moore as Elizabeth Sparkle, an aging actress whose television career ends violently when she is replaced by a younger woman. Her ouster prompts Elizabeth to inject herself with an experimental drug that causes Sue (Margaret Qualley), an identical (though much younger) version of herself, to emerge from Elizabeth's bloodied spine.

“I received many offers to direct scripts that I had not written, also says the director. I asked myself questions. What feels right for me? I always wanted to create my own path. I wanted to continue to shape my worlds and my stories, and do what I started to do with Revenge (his first film, Editor's note) : to create my films in a way that no one else could. That path, ultimately, was forged through a sea of ​​blood, as the film tackles uncomfortable topics, from self-loathing and harmful beauty standards to ageism not only in Hollywood but in the culture at large.”

The Substance is characterized by the almost frenetic use of blood. While its director says she had to insist on not using computer-generated images (cheaper and less complex to make), the idea was to confront the audience with a tangible reality:

“It wasn't an option for me, because I knew the scene had to be huge,” she said of one sequence in particular, which took nearly three weeks to shoot and required building an entire theater inside a recording studio. Logistically, we faced all the challenges and the pressure of the blood, the amount of blood, the manufacturing of it, the color of it… I think there was 36,000 gallons of blood, in all.”

A winning bias for Coralie Fargeat which won the screenplay prize at Cannes and whose French release on November 6 is expected to be very much in style.

Here is the trailer:

Feminism, horror and violence, the return of female body-horror at Cannes with The Substance