Coralie Fargeat
Coralie Fargeat (Template:IPA; born 24 November 1976) is a French filmmaker. She gained recognition with her debut feature film, Revenge (2017), for which she received awards from several independent film festivals. Her follow-up feature, The Substance (2024), a satirical body horror film, earned her the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay as well as three Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.[1][2]
Early life
Fargeat was born and raised in Paris.[3] She decided to be a filmmaker when she was 16 or 17 years old.[4] Fargeat studied at Sciences Po before beginning work on film sets. In 2010, Fargeat attended La Fémis, a prestigious cinema school in Paris.[3][4][5] She was selected to be in its Atelier Scénario, a year-long screenwriting workshop. In an interview with Seventh Row, she said: "...I first arrived with a project that was completely genre. It was about a woman who thinks that she’s being chased and attacked by insects, and she goes crazy. When I came to the workshop with that idea, everyone looked at me like I was an alien! It’s not at all the kind of projects that are usually read and developed there."[6]
While attending La Fémis, Fargeat and a group of her director friends created a collective called La Squadra, where they all tried to edit their features together, facing similar difficulties as they each wanted to create genre films. They met twice a week and invited filmmakers and industry professionals to share their success stories with them, which helped them to gain a more realistic understanding of the film world, how it works, and the logistics of how to get their stories told.[4]
Career
Fargeat's first short film Le télégramme was released in 2003, a film about two women awaiting a postman's delivery during World War II. The film won 13 awards at several film festivals.[3]
In 2007, Fargeat co-created Les Fées cloches [fr] with Anne-Elisabeth Blateau, a comedy mini-series which she also directed.[7]
Fargeat released her short follow-up Reality+ in 2014. The sci-fi tale received a nomination for the Jury Award at the Tribeca Film Festival.[8]
Fargeat is best known for her debut feature film Revenge (2017), a revenge thriller about a young woman who is raped and left for dead. Inspired by other revenge movies such as Kill Bill, Rambo, and Mad Max, Fargeat was interested in exploring a character who would seem "weak" to others and the audience, but during the film would undergo a transformation into a "kind of superhero" that would set out to get her revenge.[9] The film had its world premiere at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival in the festival's Midnight Madness section,[10] and was selected to be screened at 23 additional film festivals.[11] Moreover, the release and success of Revenge was the long needed stimulus for once again discussing the lack of diversity in horror filmmaking, and filmmaking as a whole.[12] Fargeat herself encouraged conversations regarding this topic, opening up about her long desire to challenge the male perspective in the film industry.[12]
In 2022, Fargeat directed an episode of the Netflix series The Sandman, "Chapter 9: Collectors."[12] In this episode, Fargeat’s style is very evident through her distinct color palette, emphasis on atmospheric elements, and focus on the grotesque.[13] For example, in Revenge and The Substance (2024), Fargeat implements an eye-catching neon color palette which carries over into The Sandman. With Revenge and The Substance containing deep reds, cold blues, and contrasting blacks and whites to convey emotions and feelings. The Sandman falls directly into this color palette as well. Also, Fargeat did not rely on dialogue in The Sandman in the same way she did not in Revenge and The Substance, whereas she instead directed emphasis on the atmospheric and visual storytelling aspects. This creates a tension that would otherwise not be as strongly felt within the viewers. Her focus on the grotesque elements are an important aspect of the stories she tells. While The Sandman was nowhere near as graphic as her feature films such as Revenge or The Substance, her thematic interest in the darker and more grotesque aspects of human nature are clearly reflected in the portrayal of the “collectors” and their unsettling motivations.[9]
Fargeat's second feature film was The Substance (2024), a body horror film starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid.[14][15] The film premiered in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival to a strong, critical, but positive, reception, with a 13-minute ovation.[16] Fargeat went on to win the festival's Best Screenplay award for the film.[17]
In June 2025, Fargeat was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.[18]
Fargeat is a member and one of the founding signatories of Collectif 50/50, a group established with the purpose of working towards gender equality across the film industry.[19]
Fargeat is a member and one of the founding signatories of Collectif 50/50, a French organization by French film directors Céline Sciamma and Rebecca Zlotowski.[20][21] The Collectif 50/50 was first known as the Le Deuxième Regard back when it was first established in 2013 before becoming known as the Collectif 5050x2020 in 2018 following the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse case that same year.[22] Being created by film and audiovisual professionals, the Collectif 50/50 took its first action at the Cannes Film Festival by calling together 82 women directors from the film industry on the red carpet. The Collectif 50/50 is committed to working towards implementing greater gender equality and diversity throughout the male dominated field[21]. Collectif 50/50 creates studies, puts plans of action into development, constructs tools and offers a wide variety of incentives to higher ups and actors/actresses in the industry with the goal of advancing positive change within the industry.[20][21]
Filmmaking style and influences
Fargeat is fascinated with the suspension of disbelief, and is a fan of using imagery and symbols to express something simple in a powerful way.[9] She is fascinated with films that are able to create their own world and manage to exist outside the realm of reality, citing revenge films like Kill Bill and Rambo as examples of this.[9]
In making graphic or gore-filled movies, Fargeat finds that balancing violent scenes with humor makes the violence more tolerable.[23]
Fargeat believes that films that fill themselves with homages and references can push the viewer away from being able to identify with the film.[4] She describes this separation as "second-degree moments" and chooses to stay away from excessive references. Fargeat finds it crucial to approach film and filmmaking with a genuine and sincere vision, stating she tries to "embrace [her] subject in its choices, its biases, its excesses, in its faults too" to achieve this.[4]
When in pre-production for Revenge, she stated that actress Matilda Lutz was chosen for the part partially because of her extensive trust in Fargeat, something that was important to her for the creation of the film.[4]
Fargeat lists David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, David Lynch, Paul Verhoeven, and Michael Haneke as filmmakers who have influenced her, as well as crediting several South Korean filmmakers as stylistic inspiration.[24][25]
Filmography
Feature film
| Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer | Editor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | Revenge | Template:Yes | Template:Yes | Template:No | Template:Yes |
| 2024 | The Substance | Template:Yes | Template:Yes | Template:Yes | Template:Yes |
Short film
| Year | Title | Director | Writer |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2003 | Le télégramme | Template:Yes | Template:Yes |
| 2014 | Reality+ | Template:Yes | Template:Yes |
Television
| Year | Title | Notes | Template:Refh |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2008–2014 | Les Fées Cloches | Co-creator and starred as Pata | [26][27] |
| 2022 | The Sandman | Episode: "Collectors" |
Awards and nominations
References
Further reading
- "Coralie Fargeat Essay". Cut-Throat Women.
- Crucchiola, Jordan; Fargeat, Coralie (2020-04-17). "A French Director Fears Parisians Aren't Taking the Coronavirus Seriously". Vulture.
- "Director Coralie Fargeat Talks Obsession, Inspirations, and 'Revenge'". Film School Rejects. 2018-09-18.
- Fleming, Amy (2018-05-10). "'Revenge' director Coralie Fargeat on her gory riposte to the male gaze". Financial Times.
- Posada, Tim. "Male Hysteria and the New Final Girl in 2018's Revenge." Performing Hysteria (2020): 189–203.
- "Rencontre avec Coralie Fargeat, la réalisatrice du très énervé Revenge". EcranLarge.com (in French). 2018-02-11.
External links
This article incorporates text from the Wikipedia article "Coralie Fargeat", available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.Retrieved 2026-03-01.
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- 1976 births
- 21st-century French screenwriters
- 21st-century French women writers
- Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay winners
- English-language film directors
- Film directors from Paris
- French horror film directors
- French women film directors
- French women screenwriters
- Living people
- Sciences Po alumni
- Writers from Paris