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‘The Substance’ Director Coralie Fargeat on How Her Feminist Body Horror Film With Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley Mirrors #MeToo: ‘We Need a Bigger Revolution’

'The Substance' director Coralie Fargeat has gone from admiring David Cronenberg to being in competition with him at this year’s Cannes.

Fargeat’s “ The Substance,” described as a feminist take on the body horror genre and starring Margaret Qualley and Demi Moore, bows at Cannes on Sunday night, the day before Cronenberg’s latest frightful offering, “The Shrouds,” will do the same. However, she offers that it’s about a product that comes on the black market, called The Substance, which “allows you to generate another you that is better than every way — more beautiful, younger, perfect, everything we fantasize.” But one can only spend a week at a time in this version of themselves — or consequences arise. Qualley and Moore play “two faces of the same coin,” Fargeat says, noting that she needed to find “two powerful actresses” to handle the film’s physical and symbolic demands.

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