Coralie Fargeat

Coralie Fargeat (born 1976) is a French film director and screenwriter. She 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 lists David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, David Lynch, and Michael Haneke as filmmakers who have influenced her, as well as crediting several South Korean filmmakers as stylistic inspiration.

Early life
Fargeat was born and raised in Paris. She decided to be a filmmaker when she was 16 or 17 years old. Fargeat studied at the Paris Institute of Political Studies before beginning work on film sets. She later attended La Fémis, a prestigious cinema school in Paris. While she was there, she was selected to be in Atelier Scénario, a year-long screenwriting workshop, where she was told her screenplay would never be made because of how violent and graphic it was.

While attending La Fémis, Fargeat and a group of her director friends created a collective called La Squadra, where they all tried to edit their features together, facing similar difficulties as they each wanted to create genre films. They met twice a week and invited filmmakers and industry professionals to share their success stories with them, which helped them to gain a more realistic understanding of the film world, how it works, and the logistics of how to get their stories told.

Career
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 [ fr ] 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.

Filmmaking style and ideology
Fargeat is fascinated with a suspension of disbelief, and is a fan of using imagery and symbols to express something simple in a powerful way. She is fascinated with films that are able to create their own world and manage to exist outside the realm of reality, citing revenge films like Kill Bill and Rambo as examples of this.

In making graphic or gore-filled movies, Fargeat finds that balancing violent scenes with humor makes the violence more tolerable.

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.

When in pre-production for Revenge, she stated that actress Matilda Lutz was chosen for the part partially because of her extensive trust in Fargeat, something that was important to her for the creation of the film.

Filmography
Feature film

Short film

Television