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Who Is Coralie Fargeat? Everything To Know About Screenwriter As She Wins Best Screenplay At Cannes Film Festival 2024
French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat received an 11-minute-long standing ovation after the premiere of her horror drama The Substance at the Cannes Film Festival. She has also won the Best Screenplay in the festival.
Coralie Fargeat, known for her 2017 film Revenge, has been enhancing her body horror skills and did not come to Cannes to play lightly.
There isn’t anything in the French writer-director’s second film, The Substance, that hasn’t been addressed before. The fear of aging, specifically how Hollywood’s obsession with beauty leads to the ruthless system discarding female talent the second they’re past it, has been seen in countless films. However, Fargeat executes it with a merciless precision that out-Cronenbergs Cronenberg.
Who is Coralie Fargeat?
Coralie Fargeat is a French film director and screenwriter and is best known for her 2017 debut feature film Revenge, for which she received awards from independent film festivals across the world. Her second feature The Substance (2024), a feminist body horror film starring Demi Moore, screened in the main competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where Fargeat won the Best Screenplay award.
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 film 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 Festival.
Fargeat's debut feature film was Revenge (2017), a feminist revenge thriller about a young woman assaulted and left for dead. Inspired by revenge movies like Kill Bill, Rambo, and Mad Max, Fargeat was interested in exploring a character who would seem "weak" to others or the audience, but during the film would undergo a transformation into a "kind of superhero" that would set out to get her revenge.
The film had its world premiere at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival in the festival's 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 film was The Substance (2024), a feminist 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. Fargeat went on to win the festival's Best Screenplay award for the film.
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 a fan of suspension of disbelief and uses imagery and symbols to express simple ideas powerfully. She admires films that create their own worlds, like revenge films like Kill Bill and Rambo. Fargeat believes that balancing violent scenes with humor makes violence more tolerable in graphic or gore-filled movies.
Fargeat believes that films that fill themselves with homages and references can push the viewer 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 finds it crucial to approach film and filmmaking with a genuine and sincere vision, stating she tries to "embrace [her] subject in its choices, its biases, its excesses, in its faults too" to achieve this.
A brief about The Substance
The Substance is a 2024 body horror film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, and starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid. The film premiered on May 19, 2024, at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, and was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in its main competition section, where Coralie Fargeat won the Best Screenplay award.
The Substance is a showbiz satire that applies a Charlie Kaufman-ish science-fiction concept to the themes of Sunset Boulevard. Its heroine, played by Demi Moore, is an actress named Elizabeth Sparkle, which gives us some idea of how little Fargeat cares about being subtle.
A brilliant opening montage shows Elizabeth's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame go from being shiny and new to cracked and dirty as the years pass, just as Elizabeth goes from being an Oscar-winning A-lister to the host of a daytime aerobics television show. And even this role is taken from her when her boorish producer, played by Dennis Quaid, announces that it's time for fresh meat.
The Substance is a surprisingly long film for its genre, with a runtime approaching two and a half hours.
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