How Do You Make ‘The Substance’? Start With “a Volcano of Blood”

Fargeat: The thing that is quite philosophically funny is that once we finished shooting the apartment, we destroyed the set and we built this theater in the same space. So basically, it’s built on the ashes of the apartment.

The shooting took so long that we couldn’t finish everything in prep; prep was continuing while we started shooting. We had first thought about shooting in a real theater to use a real set. The theaters we visited had read the script like, “It’s going to be splattered in blood. Oh yes, that's funny!” They wanted to welcome us with their arms open. And when everyone understood how much blood I wanted to splatter here, for real, the executive producer said, “Okay, I don’t want to finish in jail. We can't shoot in a real theater, because there is no way we can protect it in a way that it's not going to be destroyed.” So very soon after that, we understood that the only way to get to do this technical challenge was to build our own sets.

Kracun: It was a proper blood opera, wasn’t it? Everything had to be waterproof. It was going to go everywhere. All the lights were waterproof. We did design a lighting show for the beginning with little spotlights, and had [the monster] follow the spot and things like that. This is how the whole film worked, in a way, because we were constantly pushing to see what we could find and discover.

Fargeat: It was a massive technical challenge of how to spread the blood, how to protect the elements, how to keep everyone safe. But it was also, I must say, so much fun to be able to lose ourselves in this tsunami. I remember Ben getting into white protection gear with all the crew to protect themselves, pushing the dolly on the massive track among a tsunami of blood. The behind the scenes for this is heroic. We were navigating a volcano of blood, and we all had our hands in the thing. I was splattering it for real myself with the hose and a helmet that I had, and filming that at the same time. Ben was with another camera in the crowd, and navigating following the stunt people. We didn’t know until the end if it was going to work. Once we were on set in this massive pool, our faces totally covered in red, we hugged each other and we said, “We did it.”

This interview has been edited and condensed. Awards Insider’s Shot List spotlights the year’s most impressive cinematography.

Listen to Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast now.