Don’t call it a comeback, Demi Moore has been with us for years. However, with The Substance, the onetime box office star rebounds with a cathartic role that gives new meaning to the saying “Fame is fleeting.” The Coralie Fargeat-directed horror movie, which received a 13-minute standing ovation at its Cannes Film Festival premiere in May, makes its North American premiere tonight at the Toronto Film Festival.
Moore plays TV fitness guru Elisabeth Sparkle, who is shown the door by her chauvinistic network boss (Dennis Quaid) because he wants a younger star. However, a new medical procedure billed as “The Substance” finds its way into Sparkle’s hands, giving her the opportunity to switch off on a weekly basis with her younger self, played by Margaret Qualley. And wouldn’t ya know? That younger self winds up taking over as the host of Sparkle’s show. Similar to Gremlins, there’s all sorts of rules to making the great experiment work, which of course, Sparkle fails to follow.
Arthouse streamer Mubi saw the pic as a great opportunity to launch it in the genre space, acquiring the pic before Cannes for a price, we hear, north of $10 million from Working Title, which had the film in place at Universal. The Substance now goes wide in theaters on September 20.
Moore talks here about how the project came her way, and the weepy movie that catapulted her into the big leagues, 1990’s Ghost, which grossed back in the day over a half billion worldwide — enormous for the time. With Striptease in 1996, Moore became the highest paid actress of the time with a $12.5 million payday.
DEADLINE: How long have you been waiting for a script like this? Is this a rare find? The whole movie feels like a metaphor for you and your career to a certain extent.
DEMI MOORE: It’s rare in the sense that if there were more of these, we would see more of them and I think it was clearly a very complex and nuanced and rich role for both myself and Margaret [Qualley], but I think what’s rare is just also that it’s unique.
DEADLINE: Has there been an instance in your career where a director like this, who isn’t from Hollywood, comes in and they’re like, “I got this crazy idea,” and maybe at the time you were like “I don’t know.“
MOORE: Nothing exactly like this has ever kind of crossed my path and I will say when my manager Scott Metzger sent this to me, all he said is “I don’t want to say anything about it. I’m not sure but I think you should just read it,” and after I read it, I called him and I said I get now why you kind of presented it this way, because it’s such a wild ride and you know her particular way through this phantasmagoric extreme point of view, it was just so unusual that it had that level of risk and uncertainty where you could go this could either be amazing or it can be a f*cking disaster.
It kind of made it worth jumping in. As a role, it clearly pushed me out of my own comfort zone and I felt that it tackled the subject matter of dealing with not just aging and that kind of male perspective of the idealized woman as women have many times bought into but also that battle that exists within ourselves, that intense harsh judgement that we exist with, that pursuit of perfection that doesn’t exist.
DEADLINE: You’ve never been afraid to push boundaries, whether it was a movie like Striptease or Indecent Proposal. Were you ever concerned in your career that maybe you went a little too far?
MOORE: I don’t think in the moment I’ve ever felt it was too far. I think in almost all the different moments or choices it’s always been something that has either been a question that I’ve explored or been wanting to explore for myself, or it’s been an awareness of an external limitation that exists in certain perceptions that didn’t make sense to me. So, kind of pushing that in a way in a hope of expanding and creating a greater depth of understanding compassion. Like the same with Striptease.
There was so much more to me to that then it being about just a stripper. It’s about trying to survive and take care of their child and this being a means to an end. And even with G.I. Jane that pushed forward a provocative question of — why shouldn’t women be in combat at that time? Which is really what the question is, or in special forces, and why aren’t they if somebody’s good enough? So, I feel like these choices just generally come out of questions I’ve tried to get answers to as well.
DEADLINE: Tell me about your prep on this movie. Was it an independent production in the sense of having a limited number of weeks to crash and run?
MOORE: It was about being less in shape in a certain sense as opposed to like — the prep that went into it first and foremost was really emotional and internal. Like really connecting on the deeper level to the desperation and the pain and rejection that Elisabeth is facing at the beginning of this and that kind of depth of fear and self-loathing. So, really it was kind of coming at it from that. This was in a sense for this kind of movie not a huge budget movie, but we shot for four and a half months.
I was away from home, and you know, I was in Paris away from everybody in my family and there was a lot of preproduction of preparing with getting molds and doing all of that because all the prosthetics and a lot of the effects for Coralie were really important that they be practical not as much as of the CGI or the gore. And so, there was a lot that just kind of went into that part of it and time just connecting for Margaret and I since we obviously were playing the same person. So, this was definitely physically and emotionally challenging.
DEADLINE: Had you met Margaret before?
MOORE: Well, Margaret knows my daughters. I obviously know her mother. We had not met before, but from the first moment we did meet — which we all got together in Los Angeles before we ever went over to start shooting — there was such an ease and comfort. It was like I had known her forever.
‘Ghost’
DEADLINE: Let’s go back down memory lane. In regards to Ghost — does it still surprise you to this day that movie just took off, or did you always have the feeling it was going to work?
MOORE: It’s interesting you bring that forward because I was thinking about that script and I remember reading the script and going it’s a love story, a thriller and a comedy, and I had a very similar feeling with a director that had never crossed into these kind of arenas. He had done Airplane. I had kind of a similar thing, which is this could either work or it can be a disaster, but what I did know is if it worked that it could strike a chord. It could have a resonance that could be formative and in a way I feel like there is an aspect of this that could also raise consciousness.
DEADLINE: With Ghost, Hollywood just doesn’t make ’em like they used to — meaning a movie that leaves audiences crying. It’s why people went to the movies, and we haven’t had something like that in a very long time. When you have something like that, it’s electric. What was the first sense you got when Ghost was really resonating with people?
MOORE: I still today have people who express appreciation at it helping them deal with the loss of a loved one, that it gave them a sense of connection and hope and in ways that were kind of again beyond like what in some ways you hoped could happen. But you know the real profundity of it isn’t something that I think you could ever anticipate or expect. I’m still in shock to the response to this movie.
I will point out something I find kind of intriguing. I don’t read reviews generally. That goes back to Ghost. I saw Ghost and thought “Wow, this really is wonderful” and the reviews were awful. So, from that far back I just thought, you know, maybe better to let that be whatever it’s going to be because it is going to be whatever it’s going to be. But it’s interesting I just saw a couple of little headlines (about Substance), particularly in English-speaking press, and it was interesting almost to the point of the movie that the way they were putting the headline was only focused on it being about nudity and I thought, “Oh, how sad that it’s kind of being presented in a way that’s shaming and diminishing.” It’s the least part of the movie.