‘The Substance’ director used 36,000 gallons of fake blood for one scene

Across a seven-year gap between her last film, 2017’s rape-vengeance thriller Revenge, and her new body-horror The Substance, director Coralie Fargeat tells Entertainment Weekly she trusted her gut to, well, splatter some blood and guts into the cultural consciousness — 36,000 gallons of the stuff for one scene alone.

“You need to have a moment to get back to yourself and digest the film, so new ideas and desires can take shape,” Fargeat explains to EW of the multi-year process of making the film, which stars Demi Moore as an aging actress, Elisabeth Sparkle, whose days as a fitness video instructor come to a violent end when she’s canned for a younger star. Her ouster prompts Elisabeth to inject herself with an experimental drug that draws Sue (Margaret Qualley), a cellularly identical (albeit much younger) version of herself, out from Elisabeth’s bloody spine.

“I got many offers to direct scripts I didn’t write. I questioned myself. What do I feel is good for me? I still wanted to create my own path. I wanted to keep crafting my worlds and stories, and doing what I started to do with Revenge — creating my films the way nobody else could make them,” she continues. That path, it ends up, is one forged through a sea of blood, as the film navigates uncomfortable subject matter, from self-hatred and harmful beauty standards to ageism not just in Hollywood but in culture at large.

“All of this hits me in a very violent way more than ever,” Fargeat says, admitting that she, like Elisabeth, went through a period of “direct, brutal, violent” confrontation with her own mortality — which, she feels, was amplified by the fact that she’s a woman in her 40s working in the film industry.

That pain manifests itself in The Substance‘s shocking scenes featuring intense gore. Fargeat says many insisted that she use CGI for the film’s more elaborate sequences, but she refused. The director says she wanted to use physical props and practical effects to confront her audience with tangible reality — similar to how her own intrusive thoughts about aging had a violent impact on her.

“That wasn’t an option for me, because I knew the scene needed to be massive,” she says of a particular portion of the movie, which took almost three weeks to shoot and required the construction of an entire theater inside a soundstage.

“Logistically, we dealt with all the challenges and pressure of the blood, the quantity of the blood, the fabrication of the blood, the color of the blood. It was I think 36,000 gallons of blood,” she says of the sequence.

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While it might’ve proven to be difficult in the planning stage, Fargeat says she “couldn’t do it differently because the movie is about flesh, blood, and bones,” and that she never entertained the thought of presenting anything outside of practical violence to her audience.

“It’s about filming what you feel, and what society does to you. I needed to show it for real,” she says. “It’s the symbolic: Look at the violence, don’t shy away.”

At least for now, the industry isn’t shying away from the film’s difficult subject matter. Following its world-premiere screening at Cannes in May, the project received a reported 13-minute standing ovation, and, for the first time in her career, landed Moore on many pundits’ lists of potential Oscar contenders in the awards race ahead.

The Substance — also starring Dennis Quaid — is in theaters Friday.