‘The Substance’: The Cinematic Metamorphosis of Elisabeth Sparkle

“Deep Dive” is an in-depth podcast and video essay series featuring interviews with the stars and creative team behind an exceptional piece of filmmaking. For this edition, IndieWire partnered with MUBI to take a closer look at “The Substance” with writer/director Coralie Fargeat, special makeup effects designer Pierre Olivier-Persin, production designer Stanislas Reydellet, cinematographer Benjamin Kracun, and actor Demi Moore to examine the transformation of Elizabeth Sparkle (Moore) through through story, performance, makeup, set design, and cinematic presentation. 

When we first meet Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), it is at the exact moment her storied Hollywood career appears to be coming to an end. A sad reality made more painful by returning to her home, which serves as a monument to her stardom and with a majestic view looking down on the town she once ruled.

“This view is what has been and what is going away,” said Fargeat of Elisabeth’s glass home. “This is not about the real Hollywood, but the symbolical part of Hollywood which we all have in our unconscious collective mind. This is the dream that represents Hollywood.”

According to cinematographer Benjamin Kracun, Fargeat was incredibly specific in her formal choices of how they shot Elisabeth’s home early in the film to create this illusionary sense of the city. From the wide-angle lens to the tremendous amount of artificial sunlight they had pouring onto the soundstage set, the goal was always to create a heightened sense of Los Angeles.

Production designer Stanislas Reydellet built an almost amorphous living space where our eyes, like Elisabeth’s, are inescapably drawn to the golden Hollywood hills. Reydellet created the sense of a continuity of space, using architectural techniques where the living room’s ceiling and floor opened up to the outdoors and framed the view like the largest, most vivid painting imaginable. No LED screens, CGI, or VFX were utilized for the backdrop. The view of the city, designed as if looking out from Benedict Canyon, was printed ona 115-foot by 42-foot piece of fabric and turned into a Rosco backdrop, where, when blasted with lights from the front, appeared as if it was bright daylight, and when lit from the back transformed into the sparkling lights of Los Angeles at night.

Demi Moore, commenting on how little dialogue and human interaction her character has in the movie, discussed how interacting with Reydellet’s set helped her get in touch with her character.

“That window was so extraordinary, and it told you so much without saying anything,” said Moore. “And on an emotional level for me, it really lent itself to how isolated she was. She was in a glass cage.”

Reydellet designed Elisabeth’s living room so it would transform with color, lighting, and lens choice to reflect the emotional impact of the arrival of Sue (Margaret Qualley) and the emergence of El Monstro on Moore’s character over the course of the movie, but it was down the long-curved hallway in the bathroom where Elizabeth’s metamorphosis would take place. In the video below, Fargeat and Kracun talk about how Reydellet’s white, almost blank slate set was built to be transformed by the camera.

The bathroom is, of course, where Elisabeth takes the fictional substance, and her body transforms. In the video above, special makeup effects designer Pierre Olivier-Persin talks about how difficult it was to make the skin look organic. Fargeat never wanted the transformation to be horror-movie monstrous, nor was it as simple as sped-up aging. The challenge of making prosthetic skin, using silicon and plastic, look and react like organic skin was nearly impossible under the extreme duress of Sue violently pushing and stretching the flesh until it splits open. Kracun was impressed by how well Olivier-Persin’s work held up when you consider how Fargeat wanted it shot.

“The usual practice with prosthetics is you try to hide it within darker scenes, or you’re not seeing so much of it, and we’re seeing everything,” said Kracun of shooting in the well-lit, empty, white bathroom set. “We go 200 millimeters macro into that finger,” said the cinematographer of the extreme telephoto, microscope-like lens used to capture the film’s first prosthetic transformation, “so we’re seeing [the skin] in minute detail, close up [under bright lights].”

It’s prosthetics work that is both expensive and labor intensive, so much so the production could only afford to build the big transformative pieces to be worn by Moore for the actual day of the shoot, when Moore would spend upwards of seven to nine hours in the makeup chair. In the video above, Moore and Fargeat talk about the challenges and process of preparing for a lead performance dependent on such physicality and physical transformation, when Moore couldn’t experience being in the prosthetics until shortly before cameras started to roll. Part of it, explained Moore, was rooted in Fargeat’s larger themes and ideas imbued into her character’s arc.

Said Moore, “The real anchor and throughline for me was the violence that we have against ourselves. And I think that is universal.”

For Olivier-Persin’s part, the technical aspects of his job, while rooted in making sci-fi/horror elements more human-like, it’s in the collaboration with Moore that breathes life and art into his work.

“The real magic of our job is when we apply the makeup to the actor and onto Demi, and then we can witness her using that to create the character,” said Olivier-Persin. “They give life to all that plastic and rubber.”

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