
Skincare is a tightly crafted, character-driven thriller. Austin Peters‘ sunny yet bleak feature directorial debut follows a struggling aesthetician to the stars, named Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks), whose life turns upside down. Bad decisions and paranoia ensue when a competing business opens next door and new characters, such as a life coach played by Lewis Pullman, cross her path.
Peters, who’s shot an array of wonderful music videos for Orville Peck, gets a performance both intimate and intense from Banks. “She is fearless,” Peters told Immersive. “It’s what I said to her when I first met her on Zoom. Barbecue sauce all over her face in Wet Hot American Summer, 40-Year-Old Virgin, Barbara Bush in W., and The Hunger Games… All these different movies, she disappears into them. Totally fearless. I wanted to make a movie about someone losing their mind. She was really down to go there.”
Recently, Peters spoke with us about directing Skincare, his influences, and lessons from his collaborations with Orville Peck.
This felt like a fun throwback to movies like Bad Influence, Pacific Heights, and The Bedroom Window. Were any of those kinds of ‘90s thrillers on your mind?
That’s cool. I will definitely accept that compliment for sure. A lot of the movies that we were looking at from the ‘90s that I was really inspired by were Fargo and the Coen Brothers movies, To Die For, and the Bob Fosse movie, Star 80. They would sort of get progressively stranger. I don’t think I realized I was making a movie that people would identify with the ‘90s until much later. I will gladly, gladly accept that.
It’s a sunny thriller. How’d you want her point-of-view, as well as Los Angeles, to feel?
We definitely talked a lot about this idea of sunshine noir. There’s a couple of scenes in the movie where the sun is above everyone where it’s the absolute ugliest light to shoot. We wanted it to feel super photochemical. We explored shooting on film, but it just was not possible with the schedule that we had.
The DP, Chris Ripley, is an absolute genius and a mad scientist. He has an incredible career shooting commercials and videos. He took time off doing all of those things so we could really build the look of this movie. We knew it was going to be in LA and the light was going to be brutal sometimes. We knew that we had to lean into that.

Did you two have any photo references?
The thing we looked at a ton was Philip Lorca de Garcia. There’s this photo book called “Hustler,” which is sort of a study of all these sorts of hustlers on Santa Monica Boulevard that were sort of turning tricks. He would go take these large format portraits of them in the neighborhood that we shot.
We looked at the Wim Wenders movie, The American Friend. Even though that’s in Europe, we really loved the light pollution and color palette of that, because that feels very much like LA. There is this weird light pollution everywhere you look at nighttime.
We looked at the Todd Haynes movie, Safe, which was a huge, huge inspiration for the film and the way that sort of has this sickly FUJI Green running through the whole thing. We just geeked out about all that forever, talking about all these different films. Some probably seemed so far removed from what we ended up making, but it all just goes in the stew and comes out.
How did the character’s point-of-view and state of mind influence your technical choices?
I think that’s a great question because the first two thirds of the movie, you’re really in her head. You really want to feel her going nuts. So, we wanted to shoot all these POV shots of her, which are sort of slightly off-speed POV when she’s really losing it and feeling really paranoid. And then, there’s these other times where it’s more like Brian De Palma, POV steadicam thing going around the corner, like Body Double or something.
You go and shoot this movie about characters whose personal aesthetics don’t necessarily align with my own. The worlds that they live in don’t necessarily align with the sort of spaces that I prefer to shoot. We had to make a decision about making it true to that world and not giving up that character.
But then, how do we photograph it in such a way that if you’re flipping through the channels, you see this movie, and you get an idea of what kind of movie it is? Maybe it’s not Sex and the City or something else, which might feel aspirational or glamorous. Obviously, it is sort of glamorous in some ways, but we wanted to keep that grit. The movie was all about the dichotomy of beauty and grit. It informed all our visual decisions.

A good example of that beauty and grit is shooting around Jim Henson studios. The contrast is right there on the street in Hollywood. How’d you and your production designer land that spot?
They were really good to us. They let us use it almost as a little backlot for the movie where we got to use it as our own little studio. We were really in Hollywood making a tiny movie, which everybody said was not a smart move. They may have been right, but we did it anyway. I think it was an easy way for us to get into the feeling of the film.
The one time we were shooting and someone was playing at the Hollywood Bowl, our sound was just totally ruined. It might’ve been Pfish playing. We just couldn’t do anything and didn’t know what to do. Also, helicopters, police cars, and all that everyday. It was sort of a nightmare for the sound guys, but I hope that in the end, it all runs into the tapestry of the movie.
For an esthetician’s office, it looks authentic. How’d you and your production designer want to get that space to a place where it rang true for people in that line of work?
Well, I’m glad you felt that way. Production Designer, Liz Toonkel, is really amazing and talented. She got a stack yay high of architectural digests from 2013 and the five years leading up to then. So, we would go through and look at the styles. We looked at a book by – I’m blanking on her name – the big celebrity facialist. We would look at what her space looks like. You look at it now and it seems so far away. 2013 aesthetics have shifted so much, but we really wanted it to feel authentic and the place that these people would work and the shop.

How did you want Angel’s (Luis Gerardo Méndez) shop across the street to contrast?
That was meant to be what was new and young and different. We looked at the cover of the Miley Cyrus album, Bangerz, which was around that era. If you remember when they launched that campaign, everybody was like, “What is happening?” Now, we’re totally used to it, but at the time, when that first video came out, you’re like, “Miley Cyrus is doing what?” It was so shocking.
And so, the green wall and the pink neon and the flowers and stuff, it was all meant to feel very alien to her, very foreign and something that she just would not understand. It’s such an extreme departure from everything that she values. When people start going there, she just can’t understand and it just makes her spin out.
How’d you end up with The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love” for Luis’ home karaoke scene?
That was the first song that we cleared for the movie. Robert Smith was really generous to support our film. Once that happened we kind of thought, okay, if Robert Smith is giving us the go ahead, then we will finish this movie. It was originally meant to be something else, and we landed on that.
It’s such a strangely sad scene.
We always wanted to have this feeling that you could follow any of the characters out of a scene, be in their movie, and it would continue on that they had these deep inner lives. That scene is not from her perspective anymore. You jump in with him and sort of understand that maybe this guy is dealing with a lot more shit. Maybe he’s not even thinking about this movie and his movie is a different movie. That’s kind of how life is with people. You never know what people are going through, even though you might be projecting your own shit on them.
I’m a fan of your music video work with Orville Peck.
Oh, thank you.
What did you learn from all those shoots that maybe you applied to Skincare? Even with just your sense of pacing and timing?
Getting it done with limited resources and limited time. Chris Ripley, and everyone in the crew who’s kind of worked in that space in, there’s a certain level of, we know that we don’t have enough money. We know that we don’t have enough time.
Still, we’re going to make the most compelling image that we possibly can. Resourcefulness really manifested itself with the people I was working with. The rhythm and the timing is all just probably part of it. But like I said, we were also looking at Star 80, which is a very dark Bob Fosse movie, but it’s super dynamic and musical, so we always wanted to bring that to it.
You know, I love Bob Fosse, and I’ve still yet to see Star 80.
You should definitely watch it. It’s amazing. I should warn you, it was on the list of movies that I gave to my department heads if they wanted to watch for inspiration, and I even put a disclaimer next to it. I said, “Warning: this movie is very fucking dark, so be ready if you watch it.”
I’ll leave you with, I hope you and Orville Peck continue to collaborate.
I hope so. We were texting about it last night. He wrote a song for this movie, which is in the scene with Jordan (Lewis Pullman) and Hope at the bar. It’s the only song that’s not period correct. He’s on tour, but otherwise, we would definitely be trying to make a video with the cast for the movie for that song.
Well, I hope you both get to that down the line then.
Yeah, he came to visit the set, too. He’s my buddy. Making all those videos, by the way, really helped making the movie. I wouldn’t have been able to make this movie if I hadn’t done all the videos for [the album] Bronco, which were insane and underfunded for their ambition, but also committed.
Skincare is now playing in theaters.