When Coralie Fargeat made a ‘Star Wars’ fan film: “Such an amateur endeavour”
It can take years before an aspiring filmmaker actually gets the chance to make a movie, and Coralie Fargeat can certainly tell you that.
Despite her love of cinema, she didn’t make her feature film debut, Revenge, until 2017, when she was 41. Although Fargeat helmed her first released short, Le télégramme, in 2003, her journey to feature filmmaking evidently took a lot longer, and that’s sadly just how it goes. The film industry isn’t exactly the easiest to break into, but for the French director, perseverance paid off, because by 2024, she had found herself nominated as ‘Best Director’ at the Academy Awards with a movie that became a cultural phenomenon.
The Substance was one of the most popular body horror movies of recent years, and while it is rare for a film as gory and repulsive as this to do so well at a mainstream awards ceremony as well as be a hit with audiences, the Demi Moore vehicle felt like a turning point for the genre, blinking Fargeat’s appeal onto the radars of cinema lovers over the past few years.
However, precocious and ever creative, the director has actually been chipping away at her filmmaking career since she was a teenager, finding inspiration from a movie which was at its peak during her formative years, but that seems rather far removed from the work she makes now, and that’s Star Wars
Even though she was just one year old when the first film was released, she grew up with the franchise, so by the time she was 17, it had such a hold on her that she used it as the basis for her first cinematic project, La guerre des étoiles, which literally just translates to Star Wars.
It was a 15-minute short experimentation with both live-action and stop-motion imagery involving animated scenes of action figures, and while it’s clearly the work of someone who has never made a movie before, her passion for storytelling is undoubtedly present and shines through with vigour.
She excitedly recounted to Letterboxd about her efforts, “30 years ago, when I was 17 years old, I made a little Star Wars film. Using my family’s camcorder, I animated my toys frame by frame in stop motion, disguised my friends as Ewoks and Stormtroopers, and edited on a VHS video recorder (which was the top device at the time!).”
“It was such an amateur endeavour, but everything I loved about making films was already there… It was the place where I felt free, passionate and alive, and able to fully express myself. It’s after I made this little film that I knew that I wanted to be a director… Today, as I am nominated for ‘Best Director, I can’t help but remember this little film… Follow your dreams!” gushed Fargeat.
While Star Wars helped promote the world of mainstream blockbusters that would come to dominate Hollywood, this director’s version of it champions a much more subversive and DIY ethos, showing a boundary-pushing and experimental approach to filmmaking, which appears in spades in her later work. Where she might be considerably less accessible than a Star Wars movie, and even though it seems like her tastes have changed, her innate desire to create unconventionally remains aligned even as she ages into her talents.
