Please note the following Q&A contains plot spoilers for The Substance. Watch the film first, you won’t regret it!
Demi Moore’s transformation in The Substance has taken the movie world, and pop culture at large, by storm. Acclaim and awards buzz have rightfully followed. With a small 15-person crew, and a mere 17.5 million dollar budget, special makeup effects supervisor Pierre Olivier Persin took writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s ambitious, wildly original vision and together they created the ultimate magic trick.
Here, in an interview with Olivier Persin, I attempt to understand the secrets behind The Substance‘s many cinematic illusions.
Shadan Larki: So, I say this with so much love and respect. But The Substance is one of the most disgusting and disturbing movies I have ever seen. [Laughs]. How did you do it? I know. there were many different inspirations, with David Cronenberg being one of them.
When you get a script like this, how do you even start to visualize what these scenes could look like? How did you all pull this off? I need to know!
Pierre Olivier Persin: [Laughs]. Well, when I read a script like that, I’m happy. Disgusting is a compliment in my job. And Coralie wasn’t afraid of anything. She was pushing us with the prosthetics and the special effects team with the blood to go crazy, ‘Don’t be afraid of anything, more, more veins, more bumps, more goo, more blood…’
That said, I never thought at any moment, ‘Oh, let’s do something gross.’ Let’s try to gross out people and make them feel uneasy or anything. We were trying to pull off the best illusion possible. And to create characters that were cool and fun. And realistic and well done with lots of details. We put all our love into this. So, it was more a matter of love, a matter of art, than trying to disgust people. Even though I am with you, the results are pretty gross.
Shadan Larki: I read an interview that you did with IndieWire where you mentioned something similar. You talk about the idea of the ‘decay’ of the woman’s body. I’m paraphrasing here, but you said, ‘I don’t see it as decay. I see it as a thing of beauty.’ I thought your word choice there was really interesting. Can you tell me more about finding beauty in the storytelling and the visuals we saw on screen?
Pierre Olivier Persin: Yeah, very true. I never thought, and with all my crew at the workshop, we were never laughing at reference pictures; we never thought of it [in a derogatory way]. We were like, ‘Wow, cool!’ Cool forms and how we could shape them and paint them.
It was always fun. The idea was to create a really looking form, every wrinkle, the translucency of the skin, the movements… let’s have hollow breasts and a hollow bum, so when she walks, it jiggles and all that. And it was all these successive ideas, the forms, and then the technical side of it and then the artistic side, the painting and everything and translucency and all that, and trying to get the best movement possible to avoid wrinkles in the bodysuit.
And even when we were working on Monstro and designing Monstro, again, the idea was to have that creature with all the boobs, bumps, and everything, but with ballerina feet like a dancer, tiptoeing and dancing very lightly with that crazy body. That was the idea. So, there was always an element of grace. We came from a place of love for our characters.
Shadan Larki: I do have to mention, and I want people to know that you were working with a $17.5 million budget and creating something that films with $200 million budgets cannot do. And I’m not saying that as any empty compliment. Truly, the sheer amount of prosthetics and the level of detail is incredible. How were you able to pull that off, given that your resources were finite? $17 million is not a lot of money for any project, let alone such an ambitious one. Again, I have to ask: How did you do it?
Pierre Olivier Persin: And I had a small crew. At the maximum, a 15-person crew.
We were not 50 people working at the workshop on that. We put lots of love and passion into it and lots of weekends and late nights. And I really worked pretty much 11 months without much of a break; I had a Christmas break for a week. And I had COVID for a week. So, even my wife told me, ‘I’m happy that you’re sick and you have COVID because you wouldn’t have stopped otherwise.’
Shadan Larki: Oh my gosh!
Pierre Olivier Persin: So, at least with COVID, I was stuck at home, and I couldn’t go to work. So, I guess I had two weeks off for those 11 months working on The Substance.
When you don’t have lots of money, you have passion. And all of my crew was the same. They were all really talented. I had a very talented crew. And they all worked really, really, really hard.
Shadan Larki: There are so many scenes that I feel like have now become iconic. For me, the one that stands out is when Sue (Margaret Qualley) is sewing Elizabeth (Demi Moore) back together after she’s born. What I loved about that scene, in particular, and what sort of got to me, was the fact that the skin felt gelatinous in some way. I was just fascinated by the way that it looked, almost like I could see the way that her skin would feel. Like, if I were to reach through the screen, I could touch it and feel it.
Pierre Olivier Persin: Yeah, thank you for saying that because when you build prosthetics, they are really, really soft. They are a silicone gel. So, they are really, really stretchy and soft, but because I knew it’s going to be shot in tight close-up, I didn’t want, when the stitch goes through, to see some kind of plastic, too stretchy looking skin, like with the needle going through and you see very stretchy skin, and it would reveal the trick. So, it was a very soft appliance, a silicon appliance. But on the lip of the wound, we put a special silicon inside the lip, if I may say, the edges of the wound where the needle goes through for all of the stitches.
So, it was a mix of a very soft appliance and special silicone for the edges. So, we had that flesh-like quality and nice movements, but we also had something a little bit different where the needle goes through. And it’s difficult to explain, but, yeah, in close-up, you can really tell the difference. Those small details, I think, were important.
Shadan Larki: You mentioned the word ‘Illusion,’ which is what I was thinking of the whole time that I was watching The Substance. In terms of scope, what do you think is the biggest or most difficult illusion that you had to create in terms of the prosthetics?
Pierre Olivier Persin: There are very technical characters in the movie: Monstro, Golem… However, there is one illusion, which is a small illusion, and it is when Demi’s character is sitting in her chair in her living room, watching TV. And one of her legs is old and shrunken and horrible, and the kneecap is stuck. And she tries to get unstuck. I don’t know if you remember the scene; she tries to unstick the leg, and it’s all stuck, but then suddenly, she’s able to. In that scene, Demi was kneeling inside the chair. It was a special sofa chair. And both legs, the normal one and the old creepy one, were fake silicone legs with mechanisms and everything. And It’s a little something, and I like that. It’s like a very old-school magician trick from the 19th century. You know, hiding someone in a box, and you saw the box in half. It’s an old trick, but I like it, and it is a proper illusion, I think.
Shadan Larki: Well, speaking of having somebody in a box, Monstro, at the end, Margaret said she was in the actual costume.
Pierre Olivier Persin: Correct. We had Margaret for the close-up, and we had the stunt double for all the wide shots and the blood and all that. And it was a suit. Everything in the movie is mostly prosthetics. So, there are really silicone appliances, even Golem, that are glued onto the body.
For Monstro, only the face was glued on. The prosthetics of the face were glued for movements, but the rest was really a suit that you could put on. So, the upper half, the bottom, gloves, feet, and a hood. And the face was glued on. So, getting inside Monstro’s body was fast; applying the face took quite a bit longer.
But even if you have the most comfortable suit in the world, if you are inside the suit, it’s very tough for the performer. We had a cooling vest. Margaret was also wearing a cooling vest to cool herself. We were able to plug in the cooling vest in between takes to cool her off. But it’s very tough. There was a heat wave in Paris at that time, and people were passing out literally on set, some because of the heat. So, we had to take a break and stop the shooting while people were recovering. It was quite tough.
Shadan Larki: What’s interesting is that the character of Monstro is designed to look like both women, right? But it also, as you mentioned, has elements that are entirely her own. So how do you even, again, think of… I’m sorry, but all my questions are based on my fascination with how your brain works, basically. [Laughs].
Pierre Olivier Persin: [Laughs]. I wish I knew how my brain works!
Shadan Larki: Yes, getting into Pierre’s mind, that’s what we are doing here!
Pierre Olivier Persin: Okay, so what was in the script from the very beginning was Demi’s face in the back with that scream kind of face, something like that. I don’t know. It was like, for instance, with all the boobs and everything, we also have a spine in the middle, between the boobs. Spines are really important in the movie.
I was like, ‘Okay, we have lots of boobs, but also we can add a spine just in the middle as if another spine has grown.’ Coralie was like, “Maybe, I want some teeth biting one of the boobs.” So I did that, and we moved on like that. Coralie, from the very beginning, was thinking of the Elephant Man or the ‘Elephant Woman’ in a way. We did many designs for the heads, but the one Coralie picked is very close to Elephant Man. We had other designs that were much more different. She really wanted them not to be horrible monsters and wanted the audience to feel sympathy and be moved by what was happening to the character rather than just have an ugly monster eating everyone.
So, yeah, Coralie wanted to keep that because The Elephant Man is universally known, and everybody is moved by the movie. We have never tried to rip off any movie, but you do not create it in a vacuum, either.
Shadan Larki: Are there any other details you’d like to mention? You mentioned painting veins and other small details. The more you watch The Substance, the more you notice the artistry at work. What were some of those details?
Pierre Olivier Persin: I really wanted to use different layers, not just prosthetics. Sometimes, you apply a prosthetic and paint over it to bring out the fleshiness, but we also painted the skin first with strong details before gluing the prosthetics on top. This allowed us to have things coming out from under the skin. For veins and other details, we added different colors and differences, layering them under the silicone prosthetics.
It was important for me to create depth and complexity, not just in the details but in the overall shape, too. From a distance, the character needs to be believable but close up; it should remain interesting. We had to be careful because Coralie was using tight close-ups and harsh lighting, which made the prosthetics more challenging. But it was very interesting.
Shadan Larki: My last question: It’s amazing to see how The Substance has already become iconic. Elisabeth’s spine has become a symbol. I saw so many Elizabeths in yellow coats on Halloween! How does it feel to see these images you’ve created become so beloved?
Pierre Olivier Persin: It’s crazy. Coralie keeps texting me photos of Halloween costumes and stuff, and I’m amazed. Some days during shooting, I thought, “This is the end of my career,” but now to see the response… it’s incredible.
