The Substance is the story of a fading actress who gets to look young again with an experimental drug. It was one of the most successful films of the past year. It had a successful festival run with great reviews, and box office success. It is now nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Makeup. Pierre Olivier Persin did a remarkable job in bringing director Coralie Fargeat’s vision to life. Persin recently spoke with Immersive via Zoom.

[Note: This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]

Tell me how you got involved with with The Substance.

I had already worked with executive producer Nicolas Royer. The producers were interviewing different companies for The Substance. He told me this was a big show. I read the script and did a sculpture as part of my bid. They liked the piece and I got the job.

How long have you been doing makeup effects?

I started playing with makeup effects when I was 15 and I’m 50, so it has been 35 years.

Who were your heroes?

I love Rob Bottin, he did Robocop, The Thing, and The Witches of Eastwick, so many. I love Carl Fullerton too. He was Dick Smith’s assistant then he did Remo Williams, The Silence Of The Lambs and others. There are so many.

Tom Savini was most important for me… even though it’s blood and guts and everything… when you are 15 years old in the suburbs of Paris, you cannot compete with Rob Bottin or Rick Baker because they were like Pink Floyd – big bands playing stadiums, but Tom was like The Pixies or whatever, smaller and freer in a way.

I like it when he pops up in the movies too. In Maniac, he’s the dude making out with his girlfriend in the car and Joe Spinell just jumps up and shoots his head off and it explodes…

That’s fantastic. I thought, I can do that. Not exactly like him, but it’s more achievable than Rick or Rob.

Tell me about working with Coralie. She seems to have boundless energy and enthusiasm.

She was really passionate about her project as was I. I’m always pushing myself and I’m pushing my crew to do the best job possible, but with Coralie, on top of that, pushing us on top of what we were already pushing, it was really intense and passionate.

What sort of unique challenges were there in making this film? Are there any particular scenes that were more challenging than others? The end sequence is insane, so if you want to dive into that…

First, the size of the project, because everything was important – usually there are only a few important key scenes. Every scene was important in this film. It was like doing a commercial every day, everything counts.

The second stage of aging of old age makeup with a healthy face was tricky, and the stage scene because I knew the audience would be able to compare both sides at the same time you want to do cool prosthetic makeup, but you don’t want to make it too obvious. You want to blend with the face because you are building up with the prosthetics, but at the same time, you see the other side of the face which is not wearing any prosthetics. That’s hard. So there is a balance.

That’s hard. Like the Martian faces in Total Recall – you look very closely at the half-made-up faces. Where does it begin? Where does it end?

Exactly. I didn’t want it to look like makeup from makeup school when you do half of the face. I liked all the prosthetics and everything. I love doing the full body and all that, but I liked the birth at the beginning of the movie when the back splits open. I really liked doing that.

The different kinds of techniques we used that I really liked, even though we don’t really see it, we see it in the movie, but we shot tons of footage for that. It’s when her head explodes and then it grows back. We did a couple of really old school heads, old school, growing back and then changing your heads and that was really a dream come true to do that. Just to use a couple of fake heads with different mechanisms and that was really fun.

That must have been a fun day to be on set.

Yeah, that was really great because we shot with the actresses for month, so with all the prosthetics and everything, but when we were doing the effects heavy scenes like that, we shot that for a few weeks, maybe a month at the end of the shoot with the reduced crew.

And you must have had time to experiment outside of that…

Then we were really able to play with our toys. When we did the birth with the back opening one day we tried something and I said to Coralie, if you give me a couple of days, I can do it better. And she was like, okay, go ahead. We’re going to shoot something else. Come back in a couple of days. There was no pressure about that, which was great.

What was it like working with Demi Moore? She’s an icon. I’ve been watching this woman for most of my adult life.

Same here. She’s a trooper. She’s great. She can be also really fun. I remember her grabbing a piece of prosthetic that was hanging from her body and she started using it as a puppet, making it talk and everything, and it helped to release the pressure of the day, long days, and everything. Suddenly you have Demi Moore saying silly things to a piece of silicone. So she’s that kind of actress, never complaining, always with you…

Horror is having a big moment. What is your take on the recent surge in popularity?

I think it’s fantastic. That’s good news. Especially if we still use practical effects. There have been some great new horror films in recent years.

So what’s it like being on the other end of this? When I saw it at TIFF it was packed and the crowd was rapturous… the film stuck with me ever since…

It’s really cool because it’s from a career point of view, it’s great because I’m getting phone calls for cool projects and we are talking about practical effects again, and not only about The Substance, but it is really cool in a world of AI. I think it’s important to have that flesh and feeling.

Long live the new flesh…

When I was working on The Substance, I was just trying to finish the day and to do our best as possible. Some days I was going back into my car and I was like, maybe it’s not good enough. I was a bit depressed, or we can do better. I was like, that’s the end of my career.

Sometimes you just feel down and tired and yeah, I guess the biggest contrast is that some days I was like on the parking lot that this is the end of my career and then we are BAFTA nominated and all the buzz and everything and the movie is doing crazy well. So that’s fantastic.

The Substance is now streaming.

Eric Green
Author

Eric Green has over 25 years of professional experience producing creative, marketing, and journalistic content. Born in Flushing, Queens and based in Los Angeles, Green has a catalog of hundreds of articles, stories, photographs, drawings, and more. He is the director of the celebrated 2014 Documentary, Beautiful Noise and the author of the novella Redyn, the graphic novel Bonk and Woof, and the novel, The Lost Year. Currently, he is hard at work on a book chronicling the lives of the greatest Character Actors.